Monitoring is an essential part of any Internet or social media strategy. Even if people aren’t talking about your products or company, they’re probably having conversations that would be helpful — either for product development, customer service or marketing. Listening is a huge part of the value of social media and monitoring can help you keep up on the important conversations. Here are the essentials you should be monitoring:
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Nov
10
2010
Stop Negative Public Relations Before It Happens
Heard the latest example of a company receiving negative public relations via the web and social media? Alaska Airlines apparently gave a paying customer’s ticket away to someone on standby because that customer had to run to the bathroom to change her baby’s diaper. That customer service error led fully fledged public relations debacle: Alaska Airlines Hates Families After reaching a dead-end with the company, the couple turned to the Internet to air their complaints (which seem reasonable). All this negative PR could have been easily stopped before it happened, without any fancy technology or marketing — provide good customer service.
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Aug
24
2010
Social Media Must Align with Customer Service for Success
You may be doing a great job with social media for your company — creating great content, having conversations and really engaging with your customers. But, if your customer service doesn’t align with the expectations set by your social media interactions, your success will only be short term. Eventually customers will experience your customer service and if it doesn’t align with expectations built by social media, all your hard work will be for naught.
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Apr
22
2010
Using Twitter to Save Your Customer Service
Monitoring Twitter can save an otherwise negative customer service experience.
Recently I tried a 30 day trial of DimDim (webinar & conferencing software). During the 30 days, I was able to run through a webinar and was reasonably happy with the results, but a few people had technical problems that I had questions about. As the trial expired, I received several emails from a couple of people from the company reminding me to upgrade and asking if I had any questions. Sounds just fine right? Except I emailed a couple of them my questions and they never answered.
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Apr
06
2010
Using Negative Feedback to Improve Your Business
Yelp has been in a world of trouble lately. Several small businesses have filed lawsuits against them claiming that Yelp has unfair business practices – namely, soliciting paid accounts for favorable reviews and removing favorable reviews when a business declines. True or not, these allegations have tarnished the reputation of Yelp, whose entire business is built on the trustworthiness of its review system. They could have continued to play the PR war, but instead they decided to use the negative feedback to improve their business.
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Apr
01
2010
Is a Sense of Humor Good for Business?
It’s April 1st – April Fools Day. If you work in an office, keep an eye out for pranks. And if you browse the web, you’ll need to take everything with a huge grain of salt today. Many tech businesses (notably Google) jump right into the April Fools fun with sometimes subtle jokes across their online properties. While all in good fun, is having a sense of humor also good for business?
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Mar
08
2010
The Best Use of Social Media? Building Relationships
People don’t buy from companies. They buy from people. Somewhere along the purchasing decision a person is involved: either a friend or colleague that makes a recommendation or a good salesperson or helpful customer service or even a question answered on an online forum or network. Even online people may purchase from a company once without a human interaction, but it’s probably the person-to-person contact somewhere along the line that brings them back. People make a company what it is.
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Dec
04
2009
You Work Hard to Provide a Service – What Happens When It Goes Down?
You’ve worked really hard to provide a service that people depend on – they use it every day for a key personal or business task. They’ve built some sort of value on your service so now you’re part of their value chain. One day you have some sort of technical problems and your service goes down for a few hours. All those people who depend on your service are out in the cold. They’ve built something using your service, so now they’re putting their own customers out in the cold too. What happens?
Nov
25
2009
What We Hope For
As businesses, our goal is to provide something of value to our customers in return for payment (usually in cash). We’re very thankful and appreciative of our customers for purchasing from us – because we get to keep providing products and services. We take our income and in turn spend it on products and services from other businesses and so the economy works (for the most part). While we’re all in business to make money (and hopefully do something you’re passionate about), what we hope for is that we’re providing something that our customers value and are thankful for.
Nov
24
2009
Going Beyond Thankful to Appreciation
It may be a matter of semantics but to me being thankful is mostly an internal process whereas being appreciative involves letting those you’re thankful for know. Doing well in business is largely an equation made up of lots of little things (including some luck), but letting people know you’re thankful for their support goes a long way.
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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