Web Business by Ken Burbary

Three Tips for Better Social Business

We’re in the era of building the infrastructure necessary for social business to succeed. Eventually it will bring benefits and rewards to both brands and consumers alike. However, there are some steps brands can take now to ensure they don’t confuse consumers as they evolve from social media to social business. One important perspective that can get lost in the buzz over social marketing, social crm, or social innovation initiatives is arguably, the most important one: the customer perspective.

Here are some tips to ensure you’re making sure customers are informed and aware of what your social business initiatives WILL and WILL NOT do for them.

Tell Your Brand’s Social Business Story

There are many departments and groups within a company. It’s now common for each of them to have social initiatives of their own, albeit they may be independent of one another, in a silo away from the rest of the organization. Do these provide value to the customer? Sure, but how does an individual really know about everything a company is doing in social that they may benefit from?

Companies have long published directories to help customers get in touch to the department they need via phone. In digital, they produce sitemaps on their websites for the same purpose. What can they do to help people understand their fragmented landscape of social outposts? Tell their social business story! This will educate consumers, raise awareness of their efforts, and remove any confusion over where/what/when their social business initiatives are.

An example of a brand that is telling their social business story well is Dell. Just visit the ‘”Dell in Social Media” section of dell.com and you’re able to learn everything about Dell’s social business activities, with links and descriptions to their social outposts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Slideshare, Xing), their communities for owners and clubs, or even Dell’s official global social media policy.

Share Service and Support Expectations

Many companies are realizing the benefit of social technologies for customer support and developing formal social business initiatives for doing so. It can be a great benefit, and provide better/faster/cheaper service to customers under the right circumstances. However, it’s easier said than done. Especially when consumer expectations are rapidly moving closer to instant gratification.

Social platforms never sleep. They don’t turn off (usually). They are constantly moving forward, with a seemingly infinite stream of activity, discussion and sharing. That preconditions consumer expectations when dealing with a formal brand presence via social, into near real-time resolutions of customer problems. And when a brand cannot live up to such a high standard, it sets the stage for a negative customer experience.

Brands can avoid this by setting expectations for service and response times up front. For example, if you’re supporting customers via Twitter, define hours of operation. The Microsoft Xbox and the Bank of America customer support teams have done a terrific job of this, providing support hours directly in the Twitter profile description, as well as the background image for their profile page.

Curate Conversations About Your Brand

Consumer trust is has evolved. Consumers are actively seeking “people like me”, to understand their opinions, preferences and perspectives on brands, products and services. Brands all have a story, and tell that story through branded content through paid and owned media. What can brands do to help provide consumers with what “people like them” are saying about the brand? Curate conversations that meet the consumer need and make it easily accessible for them to consumer and digest.

Ford recently launched the new, redesigned Explorer SUV. While they have been curating consumer reaction and conversation about their products for awhile now, I point you to the Explorer home page as an example of a brand curating content that matters. Visit the Ford Explorer Buzz page to see the curated results of reactions from media sites, blogs, forums, etc… about the new product.

Social 2011 Recap, the Radian6 User Conference

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and participating in Social 2011, the first ever Radian6 User Conference. I’m happy to report it was a smashing success, on many levels. Don’t jump to conclusions, this wasn’t an analyst / data geek event. While social listening platforms like Radian6 are certainly used by these roles, this conference targeted marketing executives, strategists, brand managers and community managers as well. It was a terrific blend of practical know-how, detail combined with strategy and insights for operationalizing social business. Radian6 spent time announcing some big news, and launching new products that enable putting social business to work more easily. The event also included stellar keynotes from Mitch Joel and Paul Greenberg in particular, along with informative and entertaining panels (the panel I was on about ROI turned into some heated debate) through the day. To give you an idea how active and enthusiastic the crowd was, in the 2 days that the event spanned, there were over 15,000 mentions on Twitter using the #social2011 hashtag.

The main highlights of course centered around product news about the Radian6 platform. Let’s take a quick look at them and the impact they will have.

Insights Platform – Radian6 launched a full blown insights engine. It extracts more relevant meaning from the mountains of social data that are harvested via social listening. Instead of being limited  to knowing share of voice or total volume(s) of relevant conversation, one can now easily (with a click or two) drill-down into the data on a relevant topic and get much more granular, to answer very specific questions about sub-topics, themes, etc… on a given bit of conversation. I’d never do it justice in a paragraph or two, so take a look at the product overview video found here, as it will surely impress.