Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Archives for News & Notes

News & Notes

/

Online Customer Engagement

marketingdaisybushCustomer engagement is the interaction of customers with each other, a company or a brand.  Online customer engagement often combines all three of those at once, enabled the ability of customers to connect with each other and share opinions much more easily and to more people than before the Internet.  You’ll often hear marketers speak of the importance of online customer engagement, but why is it important and what does it mean exactly?

Due to the development of blogging software, forums, boards, chat, Twitter, etc. customers can very easily post opinions about your company and products in places where others can see and respond to them.  This means that is much easier for customers to connect and share information about you than ever before.  People are also much more likely to listen to feedback from their peers over marketing information from a company.

These same technologies make it much easier for companies to see what their customers are saying and to respond to it.  Think of the feedback as free market research and the Internet gives you the opportunity to interact directly with the market research panel.

Online customer engagement is happening whether companies participate or not and without participation customers are shaping company’s brand reputations.

(photo by daisybush @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

/

When Business, Design and Technology Cross Paths…

1676_futurtech_logo1_1I attended the FuturTech conference today at the University of Michigan, which is put on jointly by the Ross School of Business, the School of Information, and the College of Engineering. You don’t often get business, design and tech people all in the same room. I’ve heard all of the topics before, but they were good sparks for some interesting conversations.  Here’s some thoughts from the conference:

  • Expect most of the mobile apps of the future to be developed for the browser instead of for a particular mobile OS
  • In a group of 35 people, only 2 had a phone that was older than a year (may be due to the new types of phones that have been released lately – like iphone)
  • Should see more use of the phone for commerce and transactions in the US (this is fairly commonplace in Europe/Asia)
  • Enterprises are trying to shift from need to know to need to share because they have large investments in their human capital which is aging/retiring.
  • Using social media in Enterprise is not a technology thing, it’s a culture thing (need to get community buy-in and encourage participation).
  • Be careful what metrics you use to measure participation or you could get the wrong type of content.
  • It’s easier to start with “frictionless participation” – content such as commenting, tagging, etc.
  • IT (Information Technology) satisfaction is highly correlated with employee satisfaction.  If employees find doing their job to be technologically easy, they are more satisfied.
  • In measuring participation in social media, look towards number of conversations.  They’ll be less than “hits” or visits but more meaningful because they engage the “right” people.
  • A lot of marketing decisions are based on what can be measured (what we know how to measure) and what has been done before (to measure against as a baseline).
  • What you say online sticks around.  This can be positive because one helpful conversation can be useful to others for months/years after due to search.
  • There are a lot of great interface design ideas (HCI) that are shown at conferences, but not as many ideas about how to monetize them.
  • When designing, think about the experience you are trying to convey (within your constraints).

/

Top Tools for Business Twittering

toolsbategaOnce you’ve decided to use Twitter for your business, using the right tools can make the entire experience much easier and more rewarding.  Here are some of the top tools that I use.  If you have others, please share them in the comments.  Since Twittering is exploding in use, I expect more tools to be developed and to add to this list in the future.

  • TweetDeck – Businesses typically have a lot of followers on Twitter (or should) and usually have a large number of people they are following (following people who follow you is a good way to connect).  This can mean a large number of updates which can be difficult to scan through for the important content.  TweetDeck makes it easy to monitor groups of Twitterers, keywords, and get a quick keyword cloud for what’s hot.  For more info, see our review of TweetDeck.
  • TweetScan – TweetScan lets you set up searches for keywords so you can monitor what is being said about your company, products, and in your industry.  Monitor those searches through email, rss or on their website.
  • TwitScoop – similar to TweetScan, TwitScoop lets you search for various keywords, but also gives you some graphs to see when the keywords have been popular over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  While, TwitScoop does not have rss or email capabilities like TweetScan, you can get a nice visual representation of trending for a keyword so I consider them complementary tools.
  • TwitterFeed – If you’re actively participating in the online community, you are sharing links to content other than your own – probably on many different social networks.  Twitterfeed allows you to automate Twittering about those links from any social network that has a rss feed.  Right now we’re using Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and our delicious posts.
  • Twellow – Twitter is a wide open frontier and it can be difficult to find people who you should be following in your industry.  Twellow gives you a listing of Twitterers divided up by industry and subject area.  You should consider adding your own business Twitter username if it isn’t already there.
  • SocialToo – Following everyone who follows you can get tiring.  SocialToo automates that process, send a direct message to each person you follow, and also gives you the ability to send surveys out through Twitter.

(pic by batega @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,