One of the highlights of South By Southwest for me so far was the Customer Support in a 140 Character World panel with Caroline McCarthy (CNET), Frank Eliason (Comcast), Lois Townsend (HP), Toby Richards (Microsoft) and Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter). With a wide-ranging conversation tackling many different aspects of online customer support, I found it fascinating.

One of the most interesting lines for me came from Owyang, who said (forgive me if I’m a word or two off here):

“Responding to people on Twitter is encouraging them to yell at their friends when they need your support.”

Running scared

This is an issue I’ve run into several times with clients, especially those who want to maintain a divide between their traditional customer service channels and what they sometimes see as promotional online channels.

Companies have a (perhaps justified) fear that if people see them responding to online complaints, they’re going to take their complaints online first – publicly – before calling customer support. That leads to:

• More negative online chatter
• More work for online reps
• More potential for others to jump onboard with the complaint

Online reps are customer service reps

The flip side, though, as Jeremiah also pointed out, is that customers don’t care what department an online rep is in. As far as they’re concerned, the company rep is customer-facing so they expect a response to their concerns about that company.

Instead of trying to funnel everyone through your channels, how about helping them in the place they are already inhabiting? In the process, you can go a long way to addressing their issues before they become a support ticket number.

Frank Eliason mentioned that each day his team of 12 people at Comcast go through:

• 6,000-10,000 blog posts mentioning Comcast (although most are due to Comcast email addresses)
• 2,000 tweets
• 600-1,000 forum posts

All of this, with the aim of improving customer experiences.

What’s the ROI of ignoring the phone?

David Alston of Radian6 has a good way of referring to online customer engagement. He asks conference audiences who ask about the ROI of this kind of engagement, “what’s the ROI of you not picking up the phone?” After speaking to someone tonight who mentioned that her organization shuts down their online communication during big issues because their PR folks are scared of peoples’ reactions, I’d throw that question out to them too:

Have you considered how much you lose every time you ignore someone online?

Many companies know exactly how much revenue they generate from the average user. Those companies therefore know how much revenue they lose every time they drive a customer away by ignoring their pain points. Those same customers often volunteer information about those problems online proactively, yet the organization responds with unhelpful canned lines or doesn’t even respond at all.

Eliason also mentioned an obvious but salient point – sometimes you just need to agree to disagree with people. Transparency doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone – it means that you help those you can and explain honestly why you can’t help the others. That very act of explanation might not make people happy (and, yes, let’s be honest, it may upset some) but with the majority, it’s enough to know that someone is listening and acknowledging their concern.

So, there’s my take. I acknowledge that public-facing customer support is scary, for a variety of reasons. However, the potential repercussions of ignoring people, anywhere, is so large that to do so is irresponsible, both towards them and towards your company.

What do you think?

In January this year I put forward my thoughts on the social media marketing ecosystem in which we operate in 2010. It looked like this:

While this relatively complex model is great to help shape the thinking of organizations wrestling with a plethora of products, it’s also a little complex for organizations without those massive resources. These organizations, which comprise the majority of the market, just don’t have the staff, resources or time to deal with such a complex set of properties.

So, I went back to the drawing board – not to re-think the model, but to boil it down to one simple enough for the majority of people to digest. The result: a simplified model of the social media marketing ecosystem:

All of the complex dynamics within the original system are still accounted for within this simplified diagram, but the framework as a whole is much easier to digest.

In addition to earned, paid and owned media (summarized as “company website” and properties on other sites), this model has an additional sphere on top of Sean Corcoran’s framework, on top of which the original ecosystem model was developed – social networks. This raises the question – should Corcoran’s model have an additional row? What might it look like? (thanks to Joe Thornley for prompting this line of thinking)

It’s a tough call. For one thing, the “social media” row might look a lot like the other rows in many ways; borrowing aspects from owned and earned media in particular. For another, any definition of the role of social media is surely going to be controversial.

I’m a glutton for punishment though, so I put together a starting point – Corcoran’s model, revised with a new row for social media.:

Does social media deserve its own row here, or does its rapid evolution over the past few years simply mean it is intertwined among the other media types in today’s communications environment?

What do you think?

Yesterday I spoke with City News‘ Kris Reyes about the challenges businesses face in customer service in the age of social media. In Toronto we’ve seen numerous recent instances of “citizen journalism” highlighting problems at the TTC – a TwitPic of a TTC worker sleeping; a video of a bus driver’s unscheduled coffee break in the middle of a route and finally a perhaps ill-advised Facebook page set up by some TTC staff.

It’s a tough time to work in a customer-facing job. It just takes one slip-up and, if you’re unlucky, you can find yourself all over the news – online and offline. This is especially the case if you work for a publicly-funded organization.

I offered three tips for people and organizations to think about:

1. Organizations need to prepare their employees to work in this kind of environment. Existing employee guidelines may offer boundaries for employees, but they only kick-in after the fact. Employers need to provide their staff with the knowledge and understanding of how quickly these situations can arise, and how to avoid them.
2. Employees, meanwhile, need to remember that they now work in an environment where information is shared in real-time. That means you can make one mistake and seconds later evidence of that mistake can be online. This “always on” connectivity means you need to always be on, too.
3. The toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to customer advocacy. Cameras, video cameras and even Twitter aren’t going way any time soon. Instead of fighting a battle they can’t win by complaining about the use of smart phones by customers, organizations need to adjust and find a way to operate in this situation.

A few days ago I blogged my thoughts on the shape of the social media marketing ecosystem as we enter 2010. The key aspects of the system from my perspective were:

• The lines have truly blurred. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between different forms of communications, especially when considering the online space.
• Successful communications programs need to integrate owned, earned and paid media to achieve their goals.
• Two-way communication is increasing. Wherever you look, previously one-way information flows are becoming two-way. Mainstream media feed off social media while also driving it. Advertising drives attention but also content strategies.

The line between public relations, advertising or social media is artificial – the overlap between the disciplines is becoming greater and greater. While I doubt the disciplines will ever completely merge, the ‘Venn diagram’ of communications disciplines is moving closer to being a single circle at a rapid pace.

When we talk about integration and lines blurring, it’s easy to head down the thought path that you need to excel at everything. I’d argue it’s not that simple.

Public relations agencies (for example) don’t need to shift to pitch pure-play advertising accounts. However, agencies of all disciplines do need to hire or train people who can think media-agnostically when developing communications strategies. I’d argue they also need to be able to execute the integrated tactics that sit in the grey areas between disciplines. PR firms won’t suddenly start producing TV ads, but they may start to roll online advertising campaigns into their service portfolio.

As always, it comes back to:

• What are the objectives?
• Who are the key audiences?
• What are the key considerations?
• How do we best reach those audiences to accomplish the objectives, and how do we measure against that?

Is this new thinking? No. Is the urgency for a shift to integration increasing? Yes. It’s a long road to travel to build those skills-sets, but the need is pressing.

Instead of differentiating by marketing vertical, we may need to approach our strategy from a different perspective – whether we’re marketing our clients or our own agencies. To fail to do so raises the risk of fragmented, ineffective communications and sub-par results.

The question is, what form do those strategies take?

For years, the PR profession has struggled with effective measurement of its earned media activities.

The uncontrollable nature of earned media means that, for example, you can’t guarantee that your URL, your key messages or even the overall theme of your pitch will be included in a story. We balance that out with the increased credibility provided by editorial content, along with the relatively low cost of earned media compared to advertising (a full-page Globe and Mail ad can cost the equivalent of several months of public relations activity).

Using Search for Social Media Value

On Monday, Jason Falls wrote a thought-provoking piece on using search to prove social media’s value. In essence, his thought was that for your “owned media” properties, you could take the search terms for which your property ranks highly, determine what those keywords are worth per visitor and multiply that value  by the number of visitors using those keywords to determine the value of traffic coming to your site.

Now, a few points up-front:

• I have a huge amount of respect for Jason. As far back as 2007, I wrote about how much I liked his site and that admiration has only grown since then.
• Jason deserves kudos for pushing this conversation forward and searching for concrete ways to measure the value of social media. This kind of post is a good thing as it makes us think.
• Jason’s post acknowledges that this method isn’t the end game – it’s a work in progress – and that it compares apples to oranges.

With that said, after numerous conversations with folks around our office yesterday, I have some concerns with this method of measurement.

Essentially, Jason suggests using advertising equivalency value for social media.

Advertising Equivalency Value and MRRP

For a long time, the public relations industry resorted to measuring ad equivalency value which, simply put, was an attempt to estimate how much your editorial coverage would cost if it were ads instead of earned media. However, it had many drawbacks, for example:

• AEV compares apples to oranges – it takes one form of media and tries to equate it to another
• AEV ignores the credibility that third-party coverage of a story provides
• AEV ignores the tone of coverage – a smaller, highly positive story can be worth far more than a large negative story. In fact, it assumes value for stories which you may have actually been working to keep out of the media

Fortunately (for the Canadian industry, at least), the Canadian PR associations (CPRS, IABC, CCPRF) agreed that this was a problem and devised an alternative to AEV – the Media Relations Rating Points system.

MRRP is a tailored system in which coverage is rated on a variety of criteria, determined at the outset of the program according to the program’s objectives. It’s not perfect by any means (it still measures outputs rather than outcomes) but it does mean that the (literally) hated ad equivalency value is a thing of the past for many of us.

I think Jason’s suggested approach suffers from the same shortcomings as AEV does with mainstream media. While I give him great credit for pushing the discussion on this forward, I think to adopt this kind of approach would be to fail to learn from the lessons the PR industry experienced over the past few years.

I would hate to see social media fall into the same measurement trap as PR did in the past.

Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran recently posted an insightful breakdown of some of the differences between owned media, paid media and earned media. Given the ongoing convergence I’m seeing between different communications disciplines which I’m seeing on a daily basis, this got me thinking.

The thought process ultimately led me to sketch out my take on the social media marketing ecosystem in which corporations operate – shown below.

This is my take on the ecosystem within which the new wave of hybrid marketing agencies like ours need to operate as we enter 2010.

This is pretty complex, so I’ve broken it down into different system elements below. Note though, that the different elements work best when we succeed in breaking out of communications silos and integrating our communications strategies.

A few notes up-front

• As complex as this image is, it’s still a drastic over-simplification. There are many more linkages than are displayed; I’ve simplified to the graphic is still readable.
• The importance of each social network will vary depending on the organizational context – target markets; objectives, etc.
• The ecosystem is constantly changing. A few months down the line, the big four social networks may have changed.
• There are many, many other social networks, forums and other sites not directly shown here. They’re grouped into “Other” but may in fact play a significant role in your activities, depending on your company.
• This ecosystem is externally-focused. A similar system doubtless exists for corporations’ internal communications.
• MSM stands for “mainstream media.”
• Each of the different elements can both act as a focal point and/or support other tactics, depending on how they are used within an integrated strategy.
• The following sections each filter certain elements from the overall ecosystem above, to provide a simpler view of the owned, paid and earned elements of the system.

Corporate Social Media Ecosystem (Owned Media)

Key elements of the ideal corporate social media ecosystem:

• Hub and spoke: Adopts a ‘hub and spoke’ system centred around a corporate social media hub, whose form will depend on the organization.
• Tiered hub and spoke: Each social network may have its own hub and spoke system, if necessary. For example, you may have a primary corporate page on Facebook supported by several applications and product-specific pages.
• Integrated: The hub is as integrated into the corporate website as possible.
• Fewer Microsites: Todd Defren and Maggie Fox both make compelling cases for companies to stop and think before investing in microsites. I agree. They may have their place in this ecosystem, but shifting to a social network or building on top of your flexible social media hub may make more sense.
• Mobile is ubiquitous: I considered including mobile as a separate component in the ecosystem, but decided against it. The web is becoming device-agnostic. Companies need to consider mobile content and applications as part of every aspect of their corporate web presence.
• Inter-linking: The social media hub links to all external corporate social media properties and profiles.
• SEO-powered: Search engine optimization (driven, in part, by social media activities) helps to drive traffic to the corporate website, social media hub and external social media properties and profiles. This goes for both the corporate site and separate properties. SEO could fall into any of these buckets, but for the sake of simplicity I’ve included it in this part of the breakdown.
• Two-way flow: The information flow around social media elements is (depending on the organizational context, of course) two way.

Corporate Mainstream Media Ecosystem (Earned Media)

Key elements of the mainstream media portion of the ecosystem:

• On and offline: Mainstream media exist both online and offline (many are both). Either way, they can drive significant traffic within the social media marketing ecosystem.
• Two-way: Ideally, the information flow with mainstream media is two-way in two ways:
  • Earned media drives quality traffic to your properties; your properties can generate stories within the mainstream media (both positive and negative)
  • One of your goals should be a constructive dialogue with mainstream media which enables you to achieve your goals while making the journalists’ lives easier.
• Multi-destination: Earned media coverage will primarily drive traffic to your corporate site in the short term. However, earned media coverage can raise broader awareness, thus driving traffic to your external properties and social media profiles (especially over time within a sustained media relations program).

Corporate Advertising Ecosystem (Paid Media)

Features of the corporate advertising ecosystem:

• Social and non-social: Advertising takes place both within social media sites, but also within other online properties (search engines are a prominent example, as is CPM/CPC advertising on mainstream sites).
• Interwoven: While paid online media stands alone within the social media marketing ecosystem (represented here by “SEM,” it is also interwoven throughout many other elements.
• Multi-destination: Much of your advertising may drive traffic to your corporate website. However, advertising can also support your social media efforts by raising awareness and driving people to your social media profiles and properties.
• Multi-faceted: “Ads” within many social networks can mean many things. Facebook, for example, your advertising activities might extend beyond regular Facebook ads and into “appvertisements.”

Make sense?

Together these different elements combine to form the more complex (yet still simplified) ecosystem displayed at the top of this post.

This is clearly far from complete. I’m curious as to your thoughts – let me know what you think in the comments and let’s refine this together.

A few weeks ago, I received a request to review Social Media Marketing For Dummies (affiliate link) from a publicist at publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. To be honest I was dubious about the book, but name of the author – Shiv Singh, Vice President and Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish – caught my eye, so I agreed to take a look.

Bottom line up front: I was pleasantly surprised. How surprised? Well, my copy is now dog-eared and I made plenty of notes as I went through – something I didn’t expect to do.

The Good

• Excellent overview: Singh presents an excellent overview of influencer theory, key social media trends and integrating social media marketing (or social influencer marketing, as Singh repeatedly calls it) into the marketing funnel.
• Strong on integration: One of my sticking points in general is the integration of traditional and new media tactics. Throughout, Singh goes to pains to hammer on the importance of integrating the various marketing disciplines to ensure success. His points around integrating social media into the corporate website ring especially true to me.
• Good principles: Social Media Marketing For Dummies outlines four “rules for the game”:
  • Be authentic
  • Operate on a quid pro quo basis – give back to customers
  • Give participants equal status
  • Let go of the campaign – participants will control much of your program
• Simple, practical tips: One of the hallmarks of the “For Dummies” series, Singh’s text is chock full of useful pointers.
• Pragmatic on measurement: While the section on measurement itself is brief and somewhat vague (but hey, there are entire books on measurement so what do you expect), I enjoyed Singh’s perspective – that while measuring social media itself is pretty easy, tying it to business objectives can be the real challenge. Still, there are plenty of general tips and pointers to useful tools.
• Well targeted: While I’ve mentioned the entry-level targeting of some books as a negative in previous reviews, it’s largely because I had expected them to be slightly more advanced. When it comes to a “For Dummies” book you should know what you’re getting, and in this case you do. One note, however: while the book does cover social media marketing from several perspectives, it is primarily written from an advertising perspective.
• Easy to read: From start to finish, Social Media Marketing For Dummies is an easy read. Written in plain language and well structured, it’s a book you can speed through from start to finish, or consume in easy-to-digest sections depending on your need.

The Not So Good

• Already out-of-date in parts: One of the problems with providing such specific tips is that some will become out-of-date quickly. The YouTube tips, for example, state that videos on the site are limited to five minutes in length and 100Mb in size, whereas the limit was raised from 1Gb to 2Gb this July.
• Occasionally weak case studies: People familiar with the social media scene may be puzzled by some of the choices for case studies. The much maligned Skittles website, for example, is cited as a good example of a brand engaging in social media, while other examples are declared successes with little supporting rationale.
• Weak on public relations: While Singh does tip his hat to the public relations profession (with some complimentary words), the section on PR is brief, with no discussion of the potential for PR to play a leading role when it comes to social media.

The Takeaways

Singh leads the reader through a simple, logical flow:

1. Getting social with your marketing – big-picture basics including fundamentals in influence marketing, the marketing funnel and social media principles.
2. Practicing SIM in the social web – preparatory steps such as developing your firm’s social media voice, identifying influencers and reaching people through the major social networks.
3. Old marketing is new again with SIM – how to work traditional marketing tactics, including your web presence, advertising, mobile and employee communications, into your social media efforts

The book is well summarized by one of the last chapters, which outlines ten best practices to follow in social media:

1. Open up your brand to your consumers, and let them evolve it
2. Develop a [social media] voice without silencing other voices that support your brand
3. Respond to everything, even if it means you’re up all night
4. Think beyond the obvious and use [social media] to evolve your business
5. Focus not just on social media but on social influencers
6. Structure your marketing department for this social world
7. Take your organization with you, from the CEO to the field representative
8. Conduct many small tests frequently and build on each one
9. Capture every single piece of data that you can
10. Make mistakes, but make every effort to correct them as well

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, I was very surprised by Social Media Marketing For Dummies. While this book has its flaws – an overly strong focus on advertising and weak case studies among them – and it’s clearly focused on an entry level, I still found it to be a rewarding read. I took way more away from reading the book than I expected – especially when it came to marketing-focused online tools. I would recommend Social Media Marketing For Dummies to any marketers who are new to the space and looking for practical tips rather than the theoretical overview provided by most other books.

A tweet from Eden Spodek caught my eye the other day:

“Am I in the minority in thinking consultants should disclose when tweeting about clients?”

Now, I’ve written about disclosure plenty of times in the past, but given the recent introduction of disclosure rules by the FTC down in the US (check out Louis Gray’s fun post… is it just a matter of time until we have them in Canada?) and the growth of promotional postings on Twitter, it’s worth revisiting – especially in light of the new contributor function within Twitter.

From my perspective, I don’t think it matters if you’re being paid to talk about a client, if you’re just doing it yourself or even if you’re writing about a client’s competitor (a risky task). Either way, trust and relationships you’ve developed online are at play.

Here are seven reasons I think you should take those extra few keystrokes to disclose your client relationships:

1. Undisclosed posts can be revealed – nothing is secret on the web.
2. Social media is all about trust (it’s why Technorati did so well for so long (authority rankings) and why Google is doing well now). Failing to disclose your bias can contribute to losing trust.
3. Most clients (Kanye excepted) won’t thank you for stirring-up controversy.
4. Every string of characters you post can either build or damage your reputation. Which would you prefer?
5. Your reputation is worth more than eight keystrokes – “(client)”.
6. The benefit you’ll get from better conversions may be negated by the people who complain about you – to regulators, to the media or to others online (and those groups may overlap).
7. Content exists online over a long period time thanks to Google (all the more so if Twitter fixes its ridiculous two-week search limit). If rules around disclosure get tightened down the line, you’re better off safe than sorry.

Opinions often vary on this – what’s your take?

(Image credit: margolove on Flickr)

SocialScope, the BlackBerry app billing itself as “a mobile inbox for your social networks,” has released a new version (v0.9.5.81-0) of its beta application.

The primary changes in the new version:

• Foursquare integration (now alongside Twitter, Facebook, Flickr)
• Twitter lists

If you aren’t aware, Foursquare is a location-based social network combining geographic context with gaming elements. I’m fascinated with it thanks to its myriad marketing opportunities, but unfortunately there’s no way to use it on a BlackBerry right now aside from a less-than-satisfying mobile site (there’s an app in closed beta testing right now, but I haven’t received an invite yet).

The new SocialScope app almost negates the need for a stand-alone Foursquare app entirely. Using the Foursquare API, the app accesses your BlackBerry’s GPS functionality to determine your location (no news on how it works on older models) and lets you check-in to places quickly and easily.

(Note the built-in typo in the standard “off the grid” messages)

While SocialScope has supported creating groups of users in the app itself for a while, the latest update also supports Twitter lists, allowing you to display your pre-created lists, add to existing lists or create new lists from scratch.

SocialScope has already won its place as my BlackBerry Twitter app of choice due to its user-friendly interface and easy integration of other social networks, but this easily cements its spot.

I’ve long railed against the widespread growth of so-called “social media experts” – in particular, the people who believe that a Twitter account is enough to qualify you to offer advice to companies on how to adopt social media.

Now, Business Week has stepped-in on the topic, with a piece entitled “Beware Social Media Snake Oil“:

“The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment.”

I read the piece expecting to come away with a bunch of misconceptions which I would end up refuting. On the contrary, however, I think the piece pretty much hits the mark on the areas of concern (with the exception of the strangely vague graphic (right) which offers no substance to its claims). In particular:

• Article: “Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos.”
• My take: One size doesn’t fit all. Rigid approaches won’t work – just as with any communications strategy, each organization needs to tailor its approach to fit its culture, is objectives and its own context.”
   
• Article: “”If something’s got 20 million hits on YouTube, that’s a good thing,” he says. “But what if half the comments are negative? I don’t think anyone’s got a long-term case study yet.”"
• My take: You can’t measure success by views, friends or visits. Each of those may be lovely, but I can’t pay my rent with YouTube views. Do people convert? Do they move further down your funnel? Do less people call your support line? Again, as with other communications, you need to tie back to an organizational goal.
   
• Article: “Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment.”
• My take: Trust and commitment are important outcomes. However, they’re not unmeasurable. Customer loyalty is, in many companies, highly measurable. The key in taking a baseline of your target metrics at the outset of programs (social media or other communications) so you can benchmark against that baseline.
   
• Article: “The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media’s practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results.”
• My take: Measurement is critical. My most satisfying client relationships have all incorporated rigorous measurement, and changes to programs based on that measurement.Ensuring a focus on this is a two-way street: communicators (or other stakeholders in social media implementation) need to commit to measuring on an ongoing basis. Meanwhile, companies need to insist on solid measurement throughout.
   

All in all, I think the piece is a worthwhile read – not because everyone working with social media tools is bad, but because stories like this can help to weed-out those who are, indeed, selling snake oil.

What do you think?