Social Care Archives

Why Social Care is Increasingly Important

September 10, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social Care – or customer service on social media – is becoming increasingly popular, and the numbers show that it is equally important.

Today, roughly 1 in 3 online adults prefers to engage in Social Care with a brand than to reach out through conventional customer service channels (i.e. phone).

Conventional customer service is time consuming. For the brand, it is an expensive practice that we have learned to accept. For the customer, it can sometimes be difficult or a nuisance. In fact, 48% – nearly half – of consumers say that they will leave a company website if they do not receive proper assistance.

With these numbers in mind, it is hard to deny that Social Care is an important feature to include in your social media strategy. Below are a few of the reasons why Social Care is increasingly important to offer to your customers.

People Want It

In an age where critics point out that face-to-face communication is diminishing, there is no proof more clear than the preferences of consumers. Over one third of consumers would prefer to tweet a brand than to sit on the phone and wait for a call to be answered. What’s more, people want their issues addressed right away.

Studies show that a shocking 71% of consumers want their issues addressed within 5 minutes of reaching a company. When you are dealing with conventional forms of customer service, achieving those goals can become expensive. But it can be detrimental if a brand ignores it; 92% of consumers have left a brand because of poor customer service. Though it may seem like consumers prefer robots, they still want to be treated like a human. A respected customer is a happy customer.

It’s Good for Business

Here are the real reasons why Social Care is so important. When people get what they want, they spend more and stay loyal.

As noted above, nearly half of your site visitors will leave if they cannot get the information or assistance they are looking for. On they other hand, people who receive strong customer service on social media spend, on average, 21% more. That’s a major difference!

Customers who receive good social media service also recommend your brand to others. Over 70% of customers, in fact, will recommend a brand based on the good service they have received.

With a good Social Care program in place, everybody wins. A respected customer is a happy customer, and a happy customer is a loyal customer, and loyal customers keep us in business!

Do you engage in Social Care? How has it worked for you? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

3 Fatal Social Media Engagement Mistakes

August 14, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media engagement is at the heart of any good program, but a few seemingly harmless mistakes can mean severe repercussions.

Are you taking advantage of the huge benefits that accompany social media engagement? It is supremely important that you are. After all, engaging with your social audience is the key to any good campaign. People are reaching out to you, and want to hear back. But be careful, there are a few mistakes that brands make when it comes to social media engagement, and they could be very costly.

Below are three mistakes that are easy to make but very costly to your brand.

Watch Your Grammar!

If you’ve ever watched your Twitter feed populate, or read through SMS threads among friends, you might come to the conclusion that good spelling and proper grammar are dead. Far from it.

A recent study by Disruptive Communications found that – get ready – 42.5% of customers felt that poor spelling and grammar on social media would damage their perception of a brand. This issue was, quite surprisingly, the most damaging to a brand’s image, with content being all about sales coming in second with only 24.9% of consumers finding it the most damaging to a brand’s image.

Grammar and spelling are still very important, particularly when you are trying to portray a professional image and convince potential customers to choose your brand when conducting business. Pay attention to those commas, and make sure you have the appropriate spelling of there/they’re/their, because your audience certainly is.

Sometimes You Have to Let It Go

Arguing is never fun. Arguing on social media is never smart. So why would you do something that is sure to be a no-fun-no-smarts activity?

It is more likely than not that at some point there will be a past, present or future customer that takes issue with your brand on social media. What is the best course of action? Well, whatever you choose to do, don’t blow it up – that’s very bad for business.

You would be better off acknowledging a complaint and rectifying an issue – even if you feel as though you are in the right – than getting into a public argument with a customer. Imagine how that would be perceived by other customers. Would you do business with a company that appears to have a ‘customer is always wrong’ mentality? Probably not.

Address issues in a professional manner and cater to your clients’ needs. Taking the conversation offline might be the best move in cases like these. But, while you might love your brand, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by berating the people that make it possible for your brand to exist.

Respect Your Social Activity and Audience

Sure, social media is a little more lax and informal than conventional marketing or communications channels. The idea of incorporating social into your business is to create a personality for your brand with which users can engage. But it is important to remember that while social media may seem a little less formal, it is still a serious part of your business, and should be treated as such.

You might create your social channels and hit the ground running. But a lot of brands tend to neglect their social networks after a while, and that means neglecting customers. People are talking to you on social media and leaving them without a response, feeling alone and unimportant can be harmful to your brand’s image online.

Treat your social customers like you would any other – they are really no different.

Keep these three mistakes in mind and you will find success on social media much easier to achieve.

What other social media engagement mistakes can you think of? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Crisis Management on Social Media

August 9, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Crisis management on social media can help prevent devastating consequences to your brand.

Not everyone engages in crisis management on social media. Many brands choose to remain silent until an event has passed, and prefer to deal with it in a more conventional manner (e.g. press conferences).

While it may be a little nerve-racking to deal with a crisis in media as public, active and real-time as social networks, it can be a very valuable feature that should not be ignored.

Get a Handle on the Situation

The ability to monitor conversations on social media about your brand means that when a crisis does break, you will be able to know about it at the same time as everyone else. After all, social media is one of the first avenues people are using to spread the word nowadays.

Waiting until after the issue has evolved beyond your control can be far more detrimental than engaging at the outset of a crisis. Thus, you have a much better chance of quelling issues by taking control of it with an active, live audience.

Show People You Care

It might be for legal or PR reasons that you are not engaging with an angered audience on social media. But whatever it is, your brand stands to sustain far more damage when it does not engage.

People tend to think that when they are ignored by a brand on social media – particularly when they are speaking specifically to that brand’s social personality – it is because that brand does not care about the small, singular customer. That is not only an insult to the customer, but a bad representation of your brand to the customer base as a whole.

It is important to plan for crises on social media in order to know how to engage your audience when one does come up. (No brand is immune to these sorts of issues!) In this way, if a crisis should arise, you can have a legal department-approved approach to handling the issues.

This will show your audience that you care and will go a long way with them.

Social Equity of Crisis Management on Social Media

So where is there value added to your business? The Social Equity derived is both in the form of long-term value to your company and in terms of what your brand stands to lose without such a plan.

In the long run, your brand will have a carefully laid out strategy that can be applied to prevent issues from shooting beyond your control. With regards to what stands to be lost without such a strategy, think of crises you have witnessed in the past where brands did nothing to engage their audience.

In a recent case study about Nutella, we pointed out that the backlash which resulted from doing nothing to handle a crisis that broke out on social media meant some significant repercussions for the brand. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.

What other incidents can you think of where crisis management on social media has helped (or could have helped) a brand? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

5 Great Social Media Monitoring Tools

July 30, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media monitoring is important to managing your brand’s presence and reputation online.

Social media monitoring can be a powerful activity in your arsenal when it comes to reputation and brand management online. Being able to join in the conversation as it is taking place is invaluable, particularly when you can join in with conversation about not only your brand, but your competitors and your industry as well.

However, simply scouring the net for mentions of your brand and keywords is going to take quite a bit longer than you might have time for. Therefore, identifying high-quality social media monitoring tools is important to a successful listening strategy.

Of course, there are tools like Radian6 and Sysomos that can be cost-prohibitive, but the five social media monitoring tools below are inexpensive, efficient and will do a great job assisting you with your monitoring activities.

Yext

Yext is among the best tools for merchants, particularly local sellers.

There are not too many social media monitoring tools that allow users to listen in on conversation taking place on review sites and see how their brand is being perceived on both a local and global level. The ability to amalgamate all of your reviews, ratings and user comments is both time-saving and a fantastic advantage.

Reputation.com

Reputation management on social media is of ever-growing importance. Considering the trust people have in recommendations they read online, preventing any damage to your reputation is virtually invaluable.

Reputation.com is designed to help you manage your brand’s reputation across a number of channels on the web. One of the best features of this tool is the ability to find out what is being said and how your brand is being perceived on a local level.

Brandwatch

With a built-in spam filter, Brandwatch is among the more user-friendly social media monitoring tools around.

Users can put together a set of keywords, start a search on relevant networks, and the tool will automatically filter out results that are less than ideal so that you receive nothing more than the best, most relevant results for your searches.

Tweetbeep

Tweetbeep monitors the Twittersphere to pick up on conversations that are relevant to you and your brand.

This free tool allows users to insert keywords related to their brands, competitors and their industry and receive notifications when conversations using those keywords start up on Twitter. This is great when you need to focus on other priorities and only need to be alerted when a conversation is happening.

Put simply, “Tweetbeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter.”

BrandsEye

There are dozens of reports that can be generated using BrandsEye, including whether or not a marketing campaign was effective and where conversations are coming from most.

The reporting capabilities with BrandsEye are the real gem with this tool. Some great data can be gathered and analyzed to optimize future social media and online marketing campaigns for your brand.

Incorporating one or more of these tools will certainly boost the effectiveness and value of your social media monitoring activities. Try them out and tell us what you think of them in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Crisis Management [INFOGRAPHIC]

July 29, 2013/by Corey Padveen

What are some of the most important steps to take when it comes to social media crisis management?

We always hope that there is never a need for social media crisis management when it comes to our brand. After all, we never like the idea of something going wrong and finding our brand at the center of a negative discussion. However, these things happen and they are usually (one would hope) out of our control when they do.

When crisis does strike and our brand is left with a flurry of negative conversation to deal with, it is important that there is a strategy in place. Simply ‘playing it by ear’ is not going to work in such cases. Without a strategy, before you know it, the issue will be far beyond any controllable level, and you will have to simply hope that the repercussions are not too detrimental.

In the infographic below from Tatu Digital, a few simple but important steps are highlighted. Whenever it comes to social media crisis management, this checklist should be observed, as it might be the key to keeping your brand above water.

Take a look at the data and let us know which step you think is most important when it comes to handling a crisis on social media. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Case Study: Honda

July 18, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Find out what Honda did in order to engage their audience with an innovative Twitter and Vine campaign!

There are a few topics that generate more engagement than most. Sometimes it is food, other times it might be the weather. But one thing that is sure to generate conversation is when you ask a group of people to vent their frustration with a certain issue.

For Honda, that issue was old cars. The car company asked fans to share why they want a new car on Twitter with the hashtag #WantNewCar.

What did these fans get? Personalized Vine video responses from real Honda employees, live and in person. This opens the door to a lot of potential fun, and humanizes a brand as large as Honda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PJze9Ly-1Wo

The campaign caught on and the results were great for Honda. So what can marketers learn from this Twitter and Vine campaign?

Be Innovative

No, Honda is not the first brand to use Vine in a social media campaign. However, there have not been many, and this is one of the more unique uses of the video app to date.

Every time you create a campaign, think of a new use for an old tool. It’s qualities like this that make a campaign exciting and encourage users to participate.

Expand Your Reach

If Honda had simply relied on getting the message out by tweeting about it, they likely would not have seen the same level of participation and success that they did.

Using Twitter, incorporating Vine and creating a simple, fun and short YouTube video to promote the campaign really helped it succeed. Streamline the process and your campaign by reaching as broad an audience as possible. This is often a trait of successful campaigns using social media, as it certainly should be.

Engage Your Audience

By reaching out to their fans and followers and encouraging them to participate in the campaign, Honda made a marketing campaign seem like a fun little project.

Find a way to involve your audience and you stand to find a lot more success. Think of a stand-up comedian. The one that stands on stage and tells knock-knock jokes might get a few laughs, but when a comedian engages the audience, asks questions, and even (on occasion) pokes a little fun, people tend to appreciate the performance quite a bit more.

Personalize Your Campaign

And how can you really get the most out of engaging your audience? Personalize the campaign for those that are loyal enough to engage back!

Honda chose to create personalized responses using video to respond to the participants. Even a gesture as simple as personalized thanks, or acknowledging your fans will go a very long way. People like to be noticed; that’s one of the driving forces behind the success of social media. Keep that in mind when putting together a campaign.

Honda did an excellent job both in the planning and execution phases of this campaign. It was well thought out and the results make that clear.

What is the most innovative campaign using social media have you create or been a part of? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Care

June 14, 2013/by Corey Padveen

The concept of Social Care – customer service through social media – is growing in popularity, and the benefits it has to your business can be significant.

Today, one-third of online adults prefer to engage with a brand on social media compared to conventional forms of customer service (i.e. phone). That is a significant number. Ignoring it can mean two things: a loss of competitive advantage in your market and an increased likelihood of finding your customers dissatisfied with your customer service.

Social Care is a tactic that has been adopted by several international brands and it is a trend that is catching on with medium and small businesses as well. In addition to offering your customers a new avenue through which to engage with your brand, it also adds value to your business.

Social Equity from Social Care

There are two principle returns from Social Care that generate Social Equity for your business. First, there is the added value for your customers’ experience with your brand that maintains satisfaction and gives you a competitive advantage over competitors that are not offering the service. Second, Social Care is far more cost-effective than conventional forms of customer service.

First, let’s look at how Social Care gives your company an edge over your competitors. As noted above, not many small or medium sized businesses are offering Social Care at the moment despite the major proportion of online adults that prefer this method of customer service. This is not to say that Social Care should replace your current customer service options; it should be added to the mix to offer both clients, prospects and leads a means of reaching out to your company at any time, from any place, without having to worry about whether or not someone will be on the other end of the line right away, or leave them waiting for what seems like an eternity.

The convenience that comes with the option of Social Care adds value to the customer experience. 39% of consumers avoid further business with a brand after a bad customer experience. You can reduce the number of these occurrences by providing alternative means of reaching out to your brand, particularly one as simple as a tweet. Clients and leads can send their message and go about their day, allowing your Social Care team to read, review and respond to these messages in an efficient and timely manner.

The second area from which Social Equity is generated is in the cost-efficiency of such a program. One representative with a sufficient amount of knowledge can handle a significant amount of social inquiries in a much timelier fashion than one that must respond to clients over the phone.

When a customer is sitting on the phone waiting for a representative, it behooves the company to have that call answered as quickly as possible. In order to do that, more representatives are required. On social, however, clients can send in their inquiry, as explained above, and a single representative can handle hundreds of issues daily (theoretically, of course). This system is both a money-saver in the short- and long-run.

Social Care is a new phenomenon, but it is one that has tremendous potential to increase the value of your business.

Does your brand engage in some form of Social Care? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

5 Tips for Dealing with Customer Complaints on Social Media

June 11, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There are certain ways to go about dealing with customer complaints on social media.

All customer complaints are not the same, but there are certain features that are true to every one, and certain best practices that should always be adopted when dealing with customer complaints on social media.

The most important thing to note when it comes these complaints is that under no circumstances should any customer complaint go ignored on social networks. In addition to this one universal rule, there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to dealing with customer complaints on social media.

Always Be Courteous

A 2011 survey on Customer Rage conducted at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University found that 90% of complaining customers want one thing above all else: to be treated with dignity. Yet, only 40% said that this is the kind of treatment that they received.

At Zendesk, the philosophy is to treat a complaining customer as you would treat (or, at least, hopefully treat) your grandmother. Kindness goes a long way, because for a lot of complaining customers, they simply want to vent.

Respond Quickly

If I am a dissatisfied customer and I send you a tweet and hear nothing for days I might be tempted to take my efforts to the next level. The same survey mentioned above also found that 88% of people who had a negative experience with a brand chose to deal with their issue by telling their friends about it. In the age of social media, “friends” could mean tens of thousands. So act fast to help your customers or things could get way out of hand.

Be Knowledgable

Have you ever called a customer service line and found yourself waiting on hold every time you ask a question because your service representative doesn’t know the answer? It’s frustrating. Having answers to customer questions and complaints (both on and off social media) is your most powerful weapon, and you should always have an answer locked and loaded when an issue arises.

Be Proactive

The answers and solutions your customers are looking for should be readily available in as many places as possible. If an issue comes up once, you should always assume it will come up again and prepare for it the next time it does.

The faster you can resolve someone’s issue the happier they will be, and a proactive approach to customer service is going to help you do just that.

Use Your Experience

While this is not a method for dealing with a customer complaint directly, it is a means of using these situations for the benefit of your company. Customer complaints are a great way of figuring out where your product or service needs work. It is your product, so for you, it is perfect. For others, that might not be the case.

Adapting your product or service to the requests and complaints of customers is a great way of making your product more user-friendly, and it is going to make your job of customer service a lot easier down the road.

How do you deal with customer complaints on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!