While this is from 2009 it still tells an awesome story about how Social Media changed the face of Comcast. Sadly Comcast could never got to a point where the positive front end was igniting more change in the back end of the company. A pattern we see in many very early engaged companies who never actually introduced a comprehensive social media strategy and stood kind of still at the experimentation level.
Archive for the ‘Customer care’ Category
How can you build a trusted network without spending hours and hours each day? How is it possible that some high ranking executives from Billion Dollar companies spend time in the social web while somebody working in the trenches cannot? Why chose other executives with equally big organizations to not participate at all – still wondering why they are just not as successful? How can people out of the blue just raise up the trust ladder and grow an enormous follower-ship all of a sudden? Today it looks like this is just a random pattern with no structure and all coincidental. But it is absolutely not. In this PART 1 I will talk about some fundamentals of Social Media Time Management.
Social Media is NOT a technology play
I guess you all rationalized that Social Media projects are typically difficult to close and painful to execute if executives are not well aware of the impact of Social Media to their business. The single biggest problem is that most executives do not speak your language.
Getting your or your client’s executives to understand Social Media has become for many the single biggest obstacle. Even if you have a good story, they may not trust you – but they may trust the Social Media Academy. SMACAD is trusted by executives from ADP, Dell, Salesforcce.com, SAP and many others. Based on our own experience dealing with world class executives, we created this brand new executive program: “Social Media Business Essentials” for executives and top executive consultants http://bit.ly/smacadsmbe $395 incl. certificate Continue Reading →
My friend Bob Thompson wrote an intriguing post about the status of Social Media, which in turn sparked this post. Basically those companies who have a brilliant social media strategy don’t brag about it. And the reason is simple: Why should you share some of your most significant competitive advantages. As many of you know, I’m involved in several of those major strategy developments and can’t and won’t talk about it other than teaching how it is done.
Continue Reading →
11
OCT
Preparing for virtual events
Virtual events offer huge advantages over physical events
Here are a series of tips to consider when attending an event as exhibitor.
Conversations
In a way virtual events are no different than your day to day conversations in Twitter, Facebook or any of the other social networks and communities. The only difference – it happens during a few hours with people you may have usually no access to. Continue Reading →
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, lately Google Plus have rapidly evolved over the past few years. Online interaction took center stage and having a profile is only a commodity. LinkedIn developed into a different direction. groups degraded to cheap classified add boards, question and answers were basically replaced by the likes of Quora and Focus and the actual "conversation" circles all around spam.
You heard it a million times: "Engage your customer". And you didn't really – didn't you? Simply because it is very complex if you look at your team of 1,000 employees. Engagement is actually a pretty complex process when you look under the hood. Blasting out some email shots and posting a 50 feet declaration of love on time square isn't cheap but it wasn't complicated.
Now how would one engage a team of 1,000? Continue Reading →
This is no easy task. Once you look under the hood what you need – you will have a hard time to find one. There is currently one capable social media strategist for approximately 1,000 open positions.
The Social Media Director should be able to do the following:
1) Making a thorough assessment
Hopefully using some proven audit or assessment methods
Coming back with a well structured report
Being able to make a good social media swot analysis from the findings
2) Creating a social media strategy
Having the ability and comprehension to go cross departmental with it
Knowing about the impact of social media on the sales team and how to leverage social engagement techniques to generate better customer relationships
Understanding the impact of social media on product management and how to leverage it for product requirements gathering, alleviating product design risk before it goes to production and leveraging the helping hand of early adopters in the product launch phase
Realizing the enormous impact on the support team and how service can leverage social media to improve service quality, customer experience level and advocacy
Haven a similar understanding of how social media improves HR, logistics, procurement and obviously marketing.
3) Strategy Alignment
Responsibility to bring the social media strategy in perfect alignment with the overall corporate strategy and possibly coach the executive team to make necessary alignments in the corporate strategy.
4) Overseeing the social engagement plans from the various departments
As such the Social Media Director has to be able to easily connect across department levels and support all department in their respective engagement which all has to serve the overall social media and business strategy.
Each of the departments will want and need to do their own programs to improve customer advocacy and drive public engagement. The social media director will be very busy to support all the departments with a cohesive engagement plan development.
5) Strategy Execution
Managing the executing of the social media strategy and ensuring that a clearly defined goal will be achieved at the decided point in time.
Now – there are some cute job descriptions out there where the social media director is also the one who does the "tweeting, blogging and commenting" all in one person. And the rest of the team does business as usual? That will obviously be a big failure.
What are you 'gonna do' – if you can't get the people?
Don't make a compromise and hire some mediocre social media people who may do their best – but that is still not the best for your company. Take your own team through a thorough education. They may take a bit longer to understand all the social media permutations and effects – but they know your business, your customers, your company culture and so much more that a social media super star has to learn if they join your organization.
You may want to join our online business briefing Thursday this week
Axel
8
JUN
LinkedIn: Degraded
The question "How social are social media companies" are not new. And that LinkedIn kind of leads the less social companies isn't new either.
But this is just to sad to be funny:
"Dear valued member" – why not say "Hey – what's your face."
Or is your database so bad that you can't even pretend to be a bit social?
Now already the third question asks me to rate about my satisfaction of things that I'm not interested in. Can I just ignore it? No "You have to fill it out stupid – otherwise go away"
Now to the forth question "What information are you sharing on LinkedIn" – yes, LinkedIn is asking me what I have on their site. Hard to comment on this one without getting impolite.
Three more questions into it "Have you ever done a status update?" – Isn't it like asking your wife after 5 years marriage "Honey – did we have had a conversation?"
And on it goes. I thought social media was about knowing what's on top of your customers mind, knowing more and faster about what's going on…. Apparently not at LinkedIn
Result: Degraded as Web 1.0 software company.
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Dear valued member, Thank you for using LinkedIn. As one of our valued members we'd like to get your feedback on your experience with LinkedIn, and ask that you take a short survey which may take about 10 minutes to complete. Your opinions are very important to us and will help us improve our products and services to better serve your needs. As always your comments will be anonymous and aggregated with other responses. The deadline to participate is 15th, June 2011 or until we receive 400 qualified responses. Please click here to begin If you have any questions or feedback, please direct your responses to our Customer Support team. Warm Regards, |
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Dear Janet Robinson, New York Times CEO,
Today I was pointed to one of your articles on NYT and wanted to comment. But that was not possible, readers apparently can't comment. I liked what I read and so I wanted to at least tweet about it. I learned that I have to be registered to be 'allowed' to tweet the content. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised. There are businesses to pay people to tweet about them and here is a company struggling for growth and making it so hard to interact with. I wanted to connect with you to share my thoughts but couldn't find you anywhere in the social web.
Please understand – this is not a rant about New York Times, or you, or the print media industry. This is about helping your industry to not only survive but grow. I trust your 2011 Annual Report could read quite differently (see below).
