In our recent Customer Experience Series, Mashabledove deep into the mysterious alchemy of customer service. Those who own their own business will tell you: Getting (and keeping) customers is not easy. There are so many different factors that must work together perfectly within a company to ensure that fans of your brand stay happy.

Whether its making sure that your ecommerce platform doesn’t drive your users crazy or organizing your social media to build your community, forethought is key to a premium customer experience. These articles will give you comprehensive knowledge of many facets of digital customer service, with expert advice from community managers, CEOs and web designers.

Here’s a roundup of all of our articles, brought together into this handy guide. – The Ultimate Digital Customer Service Guide by Lauren Hockinson

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of April 21, 2012… [Read more...]

The number of companies not doing anything with social media gets smaller and smaller by the day, but that doesn’t mean that business has social media figured out.

Despite the increasing comfort that many companies and marketers have with social media, questions still linger about efficacy and ROI.

Andrea Fishman, VP of global strategy and partner at interactive agency BGT Partners, however, believes that some of the challenges companies face in using social media is based on the fact that they’re applying the AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action) model. According to Fishman, “The problem is that the AIDA model tends to be linear in fashion.”

Instead, she suggests, companies can use social media to shorten the buying cycle by defocusing on this linear process and applying social media in more thoughtful ways:

…stop thinking of how to apply social media to your current channels. Instead, take a step back and assess all they ways your audience may be impacted by social media – and develop new content, offers, and experiences that take advantage of the disruption. Use the two-way nature of social media to engage in conversations that accelerate the buying cycle. Create “social only” offers that take advantage of the immediacy of the Internet. Use sentiment and activity data to spot trends sooner – and apply that knowledge to your product pricing and promotional strategies.

These are all good suggestions, and many companies are increasingly realizing that social media works best when it’s not kept in a silo. As the second screen phenomenon shows us, consumers are increasingly interacting with brands and content across multiple channels, often at the same time. So to get the most out of each channel, it pays to look at how the channels can work together.

But can social media, properly applied, really accelerate the buying cycle? Perhaps. But this, in my opinion, is a red herring. The challenge with social media, as with most channels, is not creating attractive new content, offers and experiences that can entice consumers to take some action. That’s often quite easy if you’re willing to bend over backwards. Instead, the challenge is to drive meaningful action in a way that’s profitable and sensible over the long haul. – Can social media accelerate the buying cycle? by Patricio Robles

Within days of Facebook’s official launch of Timeline for brands, social strategists and brand marketers turned their Facebook strategies upside down and came up with a flurry of ways to attract more fans. Consumer brands like Red Bull, Old Spice, and Ford led the charge with innovative campaigns that incorporate everything from intricate scavenger hunts to elaborate milestones that date back over a century.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Timeline for Brands: The Complete Guide 

But what about the rest of us? What techniques are other marketers employing to take advantage of Timeline, without having to reinvent their entire Facebook strategy? Here are some practical Timeline marketing examples that didn’t require the marketing team to start from scratch or hire a team of consultants.

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Think Big Picture, Not Large Image

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On a personal Timeline, the cover image may simply be a big image — an emblem of the person’s life. But on a business page, it’s an opportunity for fan engagement. Sporting goods company Jackson Kayak is a good example. Fans submitted their best action shots, which are then uploaded into a photo album where fans vote by liking their favorite. The image with the most likes becomes the featured cover, but the company is the real winner because all of the tagging, sharing, and liking improve its EdgeRank.

 

Mall of America’s Digital Brand Manager, Lisa Grimm, has an entirely different Timeline cover, which she affectionately refers to as, “another layer of fun.” The company’s cover image includes a QR code that leads to free giveaways and a contest entry form. It also allows the retail giant to track important data like form and e-mail submissions. – How to Use Facebook Timeline Without Reworking Your Brand Strategy by Joe Chernov

As our lives increasingly move to the digital realm – whether it’s what we read, what we watch, photos that once sat in frames now uploaded to a server farm somewhere in the rural United States, or even the 140-character thoughts we share with the world ­­– comes the very reconstitution of our identities online. A German artist named Tobias Leingruber recently took this concept to its logical extreme when he produced physical identification cards based on Facebook profiles (this attempt at satire was executed so well that Facebook sent Leingruber a cease-and-desist letter three days later).

Between the lines of Leingruber’s satire, though, is a very real, emerging concept. What Leingruber hit on is something I refer to as social currency. Social currency essentially refers to the idea that every person has an online identity formed through participation in social networks, websites, digital communities, and online transactions. Our everyday activities — web searches, status updates, ‘likes’, tweets, and comments — they all leave a trail of data behind which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway.

Today, however, these fragmented bits and bytes collectively form who we are, our very essence, and are increasingly being used as a powerful form of authentication on the Web. Previously intangible aspects such as trustworthiness and reliability can now be measured and tracked. Although this presents disturbing implications for online privacy – as the recent controversial trend of companies requesting job seekers’ Facebook login credentials demonstrated – it also means that as users of the Internet we are more accountable than ever before. – How Social Currency Is Driving Identity, Trust and New Industries by Markus Barnikel

Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of April 14, 2012… [Read more...]

Targeted leads produce the highest conversion rates, but does it even matter for the publisher if they’re getting paid per click? Many publishers genuinely want their PPC merchants to succeed, but they simply won’t drive results without getting some form of payment each time a sale is made. In this Future of Publishing episode, Oliver Roup looks at affiliate marketing and how you as a publisher can make money from it.

Highlights:

• Market toward people you know…
• That are within your product’s niche…
• Write good copy!

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