In the old world companies would wait for a customer to show up. It would be a one-to-one conversation where the company has the experts. Today, customers show up at anytime, well informed and publicly for everyone to see. As a company you still want to deliver great customer service by treating your clients with respect, quality and give them a great experience. A logical step is to bring social media into the contact center as a funnel for all conversations. How?

To integrate Social Media into your company, it must be part of the overall business strategy and supported by a business case. This business case will demonstrate without a doubt that the contact center is the place to house your social media. As with normal Customer Service contact there are some rules that apply to staff which are summarized in a social media policy that includes ways to deal with positive and negative messages, call it “crisis communication”, overall behavior and clear metrics.

Since social media is “happening out there”, there is a need to invest in a good social media monitoring software that will allow you to catch the posts/mentions about your company and its products. Through the social media monitoring you will be able to listen to the conversations, learn from it and finally respond to them. These tools must be in the hands of handpicked and well trained people who understand the lingo of social media and can act as team players to create the ultimate Customer Service experience.

Customer Service through social media is not a revolution but an evolution. If this is done well, this effort will lead to operational efficiencies, positive customer experience, valuable customer insights and improved business ROI.

Mic Adam is a social media policy creator and conversation manager at Vanguard Leadership. This article is writing under own name and responsibility.

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From Dutch research (June 2011 – ProtoCall One) Call Centers are not using social media to improve the customer experience, yet. The lack of awareness of both the tools and the use by the customers are pre-dominant. However, due to the large number of highly visible cases (where things have gone bad, unfortunately) Contact Centers are seeing the need to integrate social media into their portfolio and product mix.

How to get started? Effective listening to social media start with a few simple items:

• Invest in a good social media monitoring tool that integrates flawlessly into the current CRM and other internal communication systems.
• Finding and training the call center agents is a must. Unlike the traditional call center operational mode which is driven by scripts, social media is much more unstructured and unpredictable. This requires new skills to handle efficiently.
• Clear escalation and crisis communication scenario – as is the case in the normal call center handling, not all calls can/or will be answered by your call agent. Some messages require other people from the business to intervene. A clear chart of how and who deals with these messages is high priority.
• Finally, a clear social media policy is a must since many people will be speaking in name of the company. The policy needs to consist of both policy rules (for official reactions) and guidleines (to protect to employee’s and company’s reputation).

In this manner contact centers can get their arms around the multi-channel mix of customer contact and manage efficiently through one entry point the customer interaction and thus increasing the customer experience. In future posts I will delve further into each of these steps.

Mic Adam is a social media policy creator and conversation manager at Vanguard Leadership. This article is writing under own name and responsibility.

Twitter/LinkedIn

Today’s workshop provided insights on specific tools to use in a crisis management, how to react and what tactics to implement going forward.

First, what is a “crisis” in the online environment? Basically, a crisis needs the “Oh My God” aspect, while soliciting a sense of urgency and threat. Also, after a crisis, there has to be a change whether it is pre-determined as part of the crisis plan or an organic change. In both cases, companies need to communicate their strategy to their internal and external audience.

The first IABC speaker was Aurelie Valtat, from the EU Council, she stated that the organization where she currently works, never thought about a communication crisis; did not have a crisis plan, no fail culture, and no listening culture.  This is what happens in most organizations. Companies should embrace this new communication technology and use it to their advantage. They should listen and then act. Also, if problems appear, they should show flexibility and adapt. Social media becomes the problem and the solution.

An important question arose during her discussion: Should all employees engage and support the company online or should there be a social media team in place? Aurelie mentioned that the European Council does a great job at monitoring and analyzing online communications but they are understaffed as there is online one person whose responsibility is to engage and take measures in the SM environment. This is what most companies are confronting with, or if they have all of their employees engaging there should

The following presentation was given by Caroline Sapriel from CS&A. She oon how often companies lose sight of external relations and the impact of what is said by you and about you. Given her 20 years of experience in crisis management, Caroline stated that 50% of all crises are originated by management; 35% by employees, and only 15% have other causes. Therefore, companies should be in the business of preventing crises, and this can be achieved through the use of social media both internally and externally.

Philippe Borremans from Van Marcke mentioned how few brands actually started analyzing their social media activity and emphasized the importance of monitoring your brand online. Companies must understand the fact that online “will” create offline “action”, but in order to make this happen organizations must take on a continuous process of preparing and training in the social media environment for a good online relationship. He also shared some insightful basic rules of integrating SM into your crisis plan and what actions to take in preventing irreparable damage

BASIC RULES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA CRISIS MANAGEMENT

The event continued with a presentation by Philip Weiss of ZN on “Riots and Revolutions”. He stated that the organizations currently using social media prominently and with the most advantages are nonprofit organizations. NGOs are referred to as “The New Establishment” as they use social media because of its impact and cost-efficiency. In this context ZN’s Philip Weiss gave the example of Greenpeace portraying VW as Darth Vader and calling on Volkswagen to give our planet a chance, through an online Rebel Manifesto (http://www.vwdarkside.com/).

IBM’s Yves Van Seters and Ketchum Pleon’s Andrada Morar closed the workshop with a very interesting case study on a real-time crisis communication exercise. Particularly from a social media communication strategy, if you say something on social media make sure you do it afterwards, because if you don’t it most certainly backfires.

In the end, Caroline Sapriel, summed up the conversation of how these crises should be managed: “The only way to put out social media fire is with social media water” (Ramon DeLeon, Managing Partner for Domino Chicago).

The event entitled Social Media and Crisis Management was organized by IABC Brussels and ZN, and took place at the IBM Forum, on October 25. Find all Links to Presentations Below:

Philip Weiss : http://prezi.com/zcw9ik39w1v9/riots-and-revolutions-the-age-of-the-hypercrisis/

Caroline Sapriel: http://199.91.152.174/r5r85rld2jog/w9y86wfha35zoxu/CSIntro251011.ppt.pdf

Philippe Borremans : http://www.mediafire.com/?xd2y5xih1czda35

The second challenge is that not everything that is mentioned on social media has a neutral or negative sentiment.  Many people give us recommendations or speak well about us but we are not listening for it.

Just take a look at this review section for this hotel!

This is a huge marketing opportunity left untouched.  As a former marketing manager, I was constantly looking for customer testimonials and god knows how difficult it was to get them in writing.  On Social Media they are thrown at us and what are we doing with that?  Nada?  Are marketers lazy or just ignorant?

So why not use your Social Media Monitoring solution to hunt for positive mentions; contact these people to ask whether you can use the content for marketing or other purposes; place them on your websites, brochures, and collateral.

I would love to hear your reactions on this post.

Mic Adam is a social media policy creator and conversation manager at Vanguard Leadership.  This article is writing under own name and responsibility.

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Job Description:

• New opportunities and new customers identification:
• Proactive identification of new sales opportunities in social media monitoring, social media research and market research.
• A drive to convert leads into sales via estimating potential and prioritizing activities vs. opportunities.
• Representing Attentio at trade exhibitions, events and conferences.
• Sales:
  • Gaining a clear understanding of customers’ businesses and requirements.
  • Ability to conduct product and services demonstrations, ensuring that the company’s services match the identified clients needs.
  • Developing and delivering compelling proposals to customers.
  • Respond to RFIs and RFPs.
  • Making regular sales reporting and forecast.
• Team coordination:
• • Coordinating the activity of sales executives.

Profile:

• 3-6 years of experience in the market research or marketing industry.
• Master degree.
• Knowledge about market research methods and application.
• Excellent sales and negotiation skills.
• Strong business development skills with proven success.
• High level of pro-activity.
• Active listening and critical thinking skills.
• Fluent in French and English.
• Entrepreneurial mindset,  self-motivated, committed and flexible.
• Creative writing skills in English is a plus.

Offer:

Attentio offers the successful applicant the possibility to learn and develop professionally in a young, fun and multilingual team of experts and to work for the world’s largest brands while designing projects that shape their marketing decisions.

How to apply:

Please send your application to Isabelle Balboa (isabelle@attentio.com).

Comedy is a major pillar of cultural capital. Something that people can really relate to and since then Fosters have rolled an excellent campaign which brought back Steve Coogan’s alter ego Alan Partridge and they have also sponsored comedy awards and festivals, which has massively increased brand awareness in a very busy market.

As Scott Thomson from Naked explains “we always try to kick off our investigations into any industry sector by gauging what the social and cultural capital for brands are. Namely, what’s being talked about, what kind of language is being used, how are things exchanged and valued for both online and offline audiences. The kinds of services offered by our partners such as Attentio are great support for our analysis in these areas”

It’s great to see the data being put to such good use and how by “structured listening” major brands will make major investments in how and who they communicate to. Case study is attached and more content from the campaign can be viewed here

Fosters and Naked case study

The buzz around Kenneth Cole initially doesn’t mention anything to do with a dumb CEO or a Egypt. Predictably this changes in the last week and buzz around Kenneth Cole is now around Egypt and the lack of sensitivity shown by the CEO. We used the topic “dumb” to describe him (this is for fun), but the words are those used to describe a less than intelligent approach to the world.

This should be monitored for the next months to see what other language people use. The evaluation should be a factor of how much people talk about it and what kind of language they use, also who they share with. However, as fashion brands like Benetton and Hilfiger see the situation what should they do? In my opinion they are best off leaving this alone (it’s too sensitive), but I am convinced that opportunities will arise in a “real time marketing” world were companies can capitalise on the stupidity of their competitors – this will come by listening carefully, evaluating quickly and deploying within days — messages, offers, new content, taking the higher ground etc. But – have brands yet to build flexible systems to be this dynamic?

The founder Colin Sanders is well known to Attentio, he was an early advisor and we have partnered on projects before. We have had conversations often on how we see the emergence of social media as a tool for intelligence and found there were many complementary pieces between their market research dashboard and the Attentio Brand Dashboard. So, after the usual dialogue and negotiation we are now all in the same team, in fact they have already relocated to our HQ in the heart of Brussels. Colin will be responsible for the next generation of products. With that in mind, we are now working on the next version that will bring more insights from social media immediately to users and a great new price point!

Welcome to Colin, the team and their clients, we look forward to working together!

So, why would companies listen to social media?

- There’s an amount of content that people can connect to – likes, forum posts about their brand, bloggers that love them or loathe them, recommendations i.e. find your community and point your customers in that direction. This will help you enhance your product and services and if you are doing it well, the community will help you out.

- You can measure what people say about you – is it positive or negative, is the buzz increasing or decreasing and what themes are driving the conversations about your brand. From this companies can build KPIs and trust me they are starting to do this.

- There is more market research using social media “natively”, asking a question directly to social media and getting an answer by finding relevant discussions or just asking bloggers or twitter users questions. But by listening you can actually improve traditional market research too. If you want great questions, find out what people are actually saying today and structure better questionnaires or focus groups – lets face it people are still going to use “traditional” approaches for a while.

- Customer care – this will likely be the biggest area of growth in this area. Once connected more efficiently to CRM it will enable companies to have a better profile of their customers and when they say something that needs a response companies will have a better idea on what to answer (even who to answer to). Systems are increasingly enabling companies to log when they speak with people in social media and measure the impact of this outreach, expect more companies to use these tools in future.

Why do you listen to social media?

What kind of information can we find in the Social Media? Which brands are most discussed? Which topics are most popular around each brand in different regions?

The buzz is the main form of alternative marketing in the market of fashion brands, it is based on the word of mouth to spread and make it through the bloggers, establishing itself as a communication and prescription tool.

We analyzed retailers such as ZARA, H&M, Mango, Benetton and Promod during a period starting with July until August this year, with focus on the UK, Spain and France user generated conversations. The buzz around fashion brands comes mainly from social media channels (blogs, forums, Facebook and Twitter), gathering 95% of the total number of articles about the brands. The remaining 5% are articles originated in online mainstream media, visible in the graph below. The main sources of content are blogs and forums 58% and 25% respectively.

Another point of interest is what the users say when discussing the retailers’ brands online. The topics with the highest volumes in relation to all brands are “price” and “online sales”, but the analysis can be performed also per brand and per market.