Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - November 1st, 2011

Hi everyone, Back to the regulation five pieces of best practice this week, covering customer service, using Twitter for marketing, and what you can learn about social media from the US presiden...

Hi everyone,

Back to the regulation five pieces of best practice this week, covering customer service, using Twitter for marketing, and what you can learn about social media from the US presidential hopefuls.

On with the show!

Best practice tips on how to use social media for better customer service

Last week, we hosted our first annual Social Media for Customer Service Summit. It was a big success, and generated an awful lot of positive debate, whilst sharing a lot of best practice. Rohit Bhargava, who was involved as a moderator at the conference, wrote a piece on the key learnings from the show which has been published on Mashable. You can read it here.

Few short tips:

1. Don't allow any one team to own social media
2. Get top level buy-in through stories and data
3. Respond with empathy but defend your brand

What can you learn from the social media campaign's of the latest US presidential hopefuls

Erin Markowitz has written an illuminating piece for Inc.com assessing the social media credentials of the latest batch of Republican Presidential contenders. Starting with Herman Cain's 'successful' YouTube campaign, passing through an assessment of Twitter and Facebook followers for each candidate (Romney leads the field on Facebook, whilst Newt Gingrich is clear leader on Twitter), and ending with an in-depth assessment of the social media style of the different campaigns, it's worth a read.

A few choice quotes:

1. "The candidate who understands that [social media] is not just for promotion but also for organization and encouraging people to move to action, that will be the campaign that wins"
2. "74 percent of House of candidates with the greatest number of Facebook fans on their ballots won their contests, while in the Senate 81 percent of candidates with the most Facebook fans won seats"
3. "If it were just a numbers game, the republicans would appear to be struggling. Nine out of the 10 candidates have fewer than 200,000 followers, while Obama has about 10.9 million."

The guys at Social Media Examiner have come up with some short tips you can implement back at your business to get better at marketing over Twitter. There's nothing too revelatory if you've been to any of our conferences, but it's worth checking off which of these things you've done, and which are yet to work on. Few examples:

1. Use the search feature in a Twitter tool like HootSuite to watch for conversations about a problem your business can solve
2. After you find your targeted audience, don’t just tweet at them—tweet with them. Follow their conversations; add in your two cents from time to time.
   
3. 
   

For the full 17 pieces of advice, check out the article here.

Do Online/offline marketing integration easily - courtesy of Google

Our UK readers may be interested in this piece from New Media Age reporting on Google's trial of their Goggles functionality with UK advertisers. I've noticed a few ads around recently asking viewers to 'scan this ad with Google Goggles to XXXXXXXX' (usually get soem free stuff). Trouble is, I haven't got a Google Goggles app - and I would imagine the majority of people in this country wouldn't even know what the Goggles are.

However, it's a reflection of an increasingly fast-moving integration of online and offline marketing - through Goggles and the more popular alternative, QR codes.

And evidently corporates are convinced of their utility - participants in the Google trial include Buick, Disney and Diageo.

More here.

How can you beat the best social media campaign of 2010?

Last year, Isaiah Mustafa and Old Spice's 'Man you could smell like' campaign conquered all before it. It won a Cannes Lion Gran Prix and generated incredible amounts of traffic and interest in what was previously a staid and unsuccessful grooming product.

This year, the company wanted to do even better. Mashable have put together a detailed piece on exactly how they attempted to beat the 2010 campaign, and if you work in marketing through social media, it's a must read.

22 million YouTube views, 53,000 YouTube comments (finally, a stat on engagement!), and 68,000 new Facebook fans. P&G won't say whether they sold more Old Spice, but they certainly did engage more fans than 2010. For more info on how - and plans for 2012 - head here.

That's all for this week guys,

Nick

PS: If you're interested in gamification, we've recently released two free presentations - from Siemens and Recyclebank - on how the two organisations have incorporated game dynamics into their marketing strategies. You can access them both for free here.