Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Four Tips on How To Loose Market Share Online
I am yet to bump into a business that sets up shop but goes out of its way to ensure the reception area is unmanned 24/7. I’m not quite sure how many are like me, but if I walk in and find no one to serve me, I’ll probably go and not come back. Of course ATM lobbies don’t count. For consumer-facing businesses, spending time and money planning and putting together a great reception is a no-brainer because we have no problem seeing the relationship between the brick and mortar storefront and our ability to compete and grow. So why do so many businesses ignore the online storefront they put so much money into designing, building and marketing?
TweetThe Mobile Imperative in Social CRM
It should have become increasingly difficult to overlook mobile services when deploying enterprise applications for customer facing brands. But it appears not. I still don’t see much integration between Social CRM platforms and text messaging although I do see mobile apps showing up and mobile-friendly platforms like Lithium Mobile. In Africa, apps and mobile-friendly solutions may be important but text-message-driven implementations would be key.
TweetSocial Experiments: 3 Thoughts On Dipping Your Toes Into The Deep.
Starting a new project can be daunting. The scale of the project is not always what is most daunting but the scale of management’s expectations, or even your own. Social networks have become the foreign lands every brand feels the need to setup an embassy. But how much investment is needed? How do we measure this new thing? Does it have an ROI? What if it fails? These questions, and more, keep many brand profiles on social networks at the experimentation stage for long periods of time. So the young chap who spends inordinately long hours of Facebook gets the job of setting up and managing the profiles and is then left to his devices.
TweetBe Increasingly Accessible or Increasingly Irrelevant
Speaking at a conference in Switzerland in September of 2000, Doc Searls commented that “The most important market place in the history of civilization is designed to value the man on the street. The individual human being.” See the speech here.
In our approach to Social CRM, are we thinking of customers as individual human beings. Are we showing them how much we value them or are we using social technology to treat them like targets? It may be important to determine this early because whilst talking to human beings is normal, talking to targets is just plain weird.
TweetWhy Brands Should Put Their Money Where Their Mouth’s Are.
I heard this statement recently. “The first level of care is showing interest“. Ergo the first step for a business providing online customer care is to show interest in its customers. The very first way a brand can show interest in its customers is by showing interest in the ideas it’s customers are talking about. What does this look like? Responding to comments on your blog, responding to tweets, providing input on industry discussion lists, reaching out to grieved clients via email…get the picture? But that’s only the beginning.
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