Customer service on social media platforms: a UK benchmark study
A recent study conducted at New York University for Conversocial, revealed that nearly 90% of consumers, if confronted with unanswered customer complaints on a company’s social media site, would be either somewhat less likely or far less likely to do business with that company in the future.
More in the slide deck below:
Twitter: how people use it
From Twitter 2012: The Freshest Statistics on the King of Microblogging Services @ infographicslab.com:
Tactic: friendly expert. Case: Ernst & Young Belgium’s @ey_lifebelgium
In my book The Conversity Model I lay out a number of consumer value tactics that work, even in a business-to-business environment. One of them is the friendly expert.
According to its Wikipedia definition, an expert is
someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill, whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.
The interesting thing about this definition is the fact that the authority and status of an expert are not abstract or inherent. They are assigned by the expert’s peers or by other people who look up to them.
Your presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (or even better, your business blog) can help you to establish a reputation as a trusted source or even as an adviser. The ‘friendly’ aspect of things is to be found in the sharing. Friendly experts use rss feeds, news readers and book marketing tools to aggregate information relevant to the industry and to anticipate upcoming trends. They also trust their audience by sharing best practice and showcasing their expertise.
A great and fairly recent example is the @ey_lifebelgium Twitter account. Ernst & Young Belgium obviously has a regular Twitter account, @EY_Belgium. But @ey_lifebelgium is different: Ernst & Young hands the keys to this Twitter account to one of their experts every few weeks. Currently it's Renate Degrave's turn, who is Senior Manager Sustainability.
But why would anyone need an expert to look up to? In his book ‘Influence’, Robert B. Cialdini explains:
When feeling overwhelmed by a complicated and consequential choice, we still want a fully considered, point-by-point analysis of it – an analysis that we may not be able to achieve except, ironically enough, through a shortcut: reliance on an expert.
Even if you are in b2b (in fact, especially if you are in b2b), this tactic is more powerful than you might think. In ‘Get Content, Get Customers’, content marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi comments:
You begin as a source of information and continue as a source of products and services. It is neither necessary nor desirable for you to attempt to sell prospects who don’t want to be sold. Instead, your thought leadership in print and on-line should position your company as the obvious source of solutions.
One such company is Blendtec, a company that sells professional and home blenders. Blendtec is famous for its series of ‘Will It Blend’ videos, posted on YouTube and shared by millions. In these videos, Blendtec uses a variant of the friendly expert: the demo-guy. And not just any guy: the man who tries to blend anything from marbles to an iPhone is no one less than Blendtec’s founder, Tom Dickson! The Blendtec series of 117 videos (so far) had collected a total of 188,213,699 views on YouTube. The most popular one with 13,600,160 views is where Tom blends an iPad:
Pinterest: the ultimate guide
From The Ultimate Guide To Pinterest by 9010 Group's Michael Litman:
I was always collecting images on theweb in folders on the desktop of mycomputer, but it wasn’t a very goodsystem for remembering where thingscame from or who made them. We wanted to create a place where youcan go to upload or collect things on theweb and simply organize it the way youwant to.
Evan Sharp, Pinterest Co-Founder and Designer
Key take-outs for Pinterest
- Pinterest is a visual content curation platform with a ton more to boot
- It’s a huge traffic driver for brands, retail, travel, charities, news & more
- Build your brand out of its specific sector by sharing interesting and relevant content, creating engagement
- Ensure that the visual content on your site is ‘pinnable’
- Videos hosted on Vimeo currently can’t be pinned, but YouTube works
- Use collaborative boards as ways of bringing people together internally or for client projects
- Add your products (with their prices) to drive awareness and social currency
- You don’t have to follow everyone, just their boards which interest you the most
- Add buttons and sharing functionality to your browser / shop / website / blog
- It can get madly addictive. Enjoy the ride
More about Pinterest (stats, facts and demographics, getting started, What are people pinning? Which brands are using it?, etc) in the slide deck embedded below:
Frictionless sharing: here to stay?
At the F8 developers conference in 2011 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would launch new services that allow "real-time serendipity in a friction-less environment". One of the first frictionless Facebook apps was the Guardian's, but over the past few months over 50 others were added.
Frictionless sharing is now used to describe apps that "bring life to your Timeline" to express who you are: a runner (e.g. RunKeeper), a foodie (e.g. Foodspotting), a traveler (e.g. TripAdvisor), a music fan (e.g. Spotify), a movie buff (e.g. Rotten Tomatoes) and more.
From Quantifying Future Trends In Online Sharing, a study released by digital agency Beyond Social Media Week:
Frictionless sharing is here to stay, but it will need to get much, much better. Ultimately, just about everything we do in a day will have the capacity to be shared online, but with accuracy and without needing to activly think about it.
How can businesses benefit from Pinterest?
Pinterest.com is a social photo sharing website where users can create and manage theme-based image collections that look a lot like mood boards or digital scrapbooks. Many of the images refer to Etsy classifieds for handmade or vintage items, or are Instagram pictures (taken with a smartphone app that allows you to apply a vintage effect to the pictures you take).
The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting."
Techcrunch.com recently reported that an estimated 97% of Pinterest users are women.
From All You Wanted To Know About Pinterest @ pagetrafficbuzz.com:
As a business owner/webmaster you can get a lot of traffic to your site from the social platform. [...] You must add your website to your Pinterest profile. Additionally, you must link your site to Pinterest too. There is a Pinterest-provided code that you can paste on to your website to create a “follow me on Pinterest” button leading straight to your Pinterest profile and your boards. There is also a code offered by Pinterest where you can add a little ‘Pin It’ button next to all your product images, making it easier for people to share them. The more mentions you get, the more traffic to your site.
One last tip: the Pinterest Gifts section is, particularly on a day like today, very popular with people looking for last-minute gift inspiration. To have your pin included, you include the price (in U.S. dollars) in your tags and your product will be pulled into the gifts section.
What’s so sexy about infographics?
Infograph, or infographic is short for ‘information graphics’ – graphic (and often visually striking) representations of complex information, data or knowledge. An early but brilliant example of a modern-day infograph is the music video that Norwegian band Röyksopp had made in 2002 for their song Remind Me. It featured a day in the life of a woman working in London’s Square Mile, solely through the use of infographs; these included labelled close-ups of everyday objects, product lifecycles, schematic diagrams, charts, etc. and was generally illustrated in a simple isometric visual style.
In his excellent essay This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic writer Reif Larsen warns against the overuse of meaningless infographics:
Despite the great pleasures of the infogasm, it is evident that now, more than ever, we must be cautious with our information design. Visuals are easy to make, but they are also easy to fake, and their allure can turn them into potentially dangerous pieces of evidence. [...] We need more excellent surveys like Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language to help us celebrate quality, shun mediocrity, and articulate the criteria for how infographics can remain luminous and profound. Beyond just disposable feel-good fodder for the Twittersphere, data visualization is the emblematic medium of our times, and the natural evolution of its form might be the greatest predictor of what is to come.
Pew: People are mostly kind in social media
A nationally representative phone survey of American adults conducted by PewInternet (.pdf) found that the overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites is a very positive one. Adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters.
At the same time, some 49% of social media using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally. And 26% said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey.
Social media KPIs: NPS, ARPU, CPA and the others
Do not arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without first setting measurable kpis (Key Performance Indicators). Define how you will measure success by selecting one primary and one secondary kpi. According to Jim Sterne in ‘Social Media Metrics’: ‘Social media kpis are, by necessity, a little fuzzier’. But even if you first have to work with a ‘best of breed’ home recipe of mainly free, publicly available and often imperfect sources, it is definitely worth the effort in the long run. Sterne continues: ‘You can’t control the conversation but you can guide the conversation. You can influence the conversation. You can have an impact on the conversation. That’s the whole reason for tracking and measuring it.’
For your reference: Deloitte takes it up a notch by connecting social media efforts to known business KPIs like NPS, PR Value, ARPU, Media Reach/Impact, Media Spend, CPA and Churn. Click to enlarge.
Brand advocates: what makes them tick?
‘Evangelism marketing’ as a loyalty tactic is often seen as an advanced form of word of mouth marketing. With evangelism marketing, the idea is not to ask people to relay a marketing message, but to make the customers so happy with a product that they will spontaneously try to convince others to buy it and use it.
Guy Kawasaki – the former chief evangelist at Apple Computers – calls this practice ‘customer religion’: customers become passionate about the product and become ambassadors, or advocates, for the brand. In contrast to word of mouth communicators, evangelists work independently. In his books ‘The Art of the Start’ and ‘How to Drive Your Competition Crazy’, Kawasaki states that the driving force behind evangelism marketing is the fact that individuals ‘simply want to make the world a better place’. He calls it ‘customer religion’ because these individuals do what they do out of pure belief, not for money or ‘goodies’. Since evangelists are free agents, it is harder for companies to first identify and then influence these evangelists.
In May 2011, BzzAgent.com conducted an in-depth study with Dr. Kathleen Ferris-Costa at the University of Rhode Island, College of Business Administration.
The study found that brand advocates are 83% more likely to share information about a product than typical web users, and 50% more likely to influence a purchase. Advocates enjoy solving problems and helping others make better purchase decisions. They are 75% more likely to share a great product experience and three times more likely to share product opinions with someone they don’t know.
Brand advocates:
- are more than 2.5x more likely to use social media to expand their social circles.
- are prolific content creators - they write and share more than 2x as many online communications about brands.
- genuinely enjoy sharing product information and are always looking for new things to share
