internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 9, 2008

Online Customer Engagement Findings

As a followup to yesterday’s post on online customer engagement, reader Sarah Woodbridge suggested taking a look at cScape’s report on Customer Engagement. The report is well worth a look (and it’s free!). They’ve been producing a report for 3 years so they have a bit of historical data as well.

Customer engagement is widely seen as a way of deepening and enriching a product or service offering and a method for gaining customer insight. – The cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2009

Here are some of the key findings:

Only 42% of organizations surveyed have a defined customer engagement strategy in place
41% of respondents said that deteriorating economic climate has resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement
There’s interest in creating relationships with customers to increase the long-term customer value and also to increase the value delivered to the customer.
Most organizations feel that sensitivity to price is a key customer behavior that will have to be addressed in the next 12 months (48%).
Email newsletters are the most likely tactic to improve customer engagement (59%).
Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and social networks (36%) will also be used to engage customers.
Very few companies (5%) have a strategy that uses mobile channels.
Lack of resources continues to be a barrier to successful customer engagement.
About a third of companies site problems with technology as a significant barrier to cultivating better customer engagement.

Technorati Tags: online customer engagement, customer-centric,brand, branding, internet marketing, brand management, brand strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 4, 2008

Top Tools for Business Twittering

Once 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: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

Sarah Worsham / Dec 3, 2008

Treat Social Networks like Online Dating

Now you may or may not have dated recently, but we all have had experience with someone who comes on too strongly or is self-centered. Let’s say you are at a bar and someone approaches you with the following:

I’m new in town. Can you give me directions to your place? I can drive us there in my hot new bmw.

Even delivered as a joke, statements like that will probably put you in a negative frame of mind towards deliverer. What if, instead, they said something like:

Hi. How are you doing today?

Polite and seems interested in someone other than themselves. The difference between two alternatives seems pretty obvious, but we see similar approaches in social networking (or even regular networking). Here’s some comments I’ve gotten on various social networking sites:

Great to see you here! I invite you to stop by my profile, sign my guestbook and check out my blogs! and while you’re there please add me to your list of friends 🙂 I look forward to networking with you.

I’m not trying to sell you anything, but here are my areas of expertise: ____, ____, ____

I don’t know about you, but those types of introductions are real turn offs. Information about yourself and your business should be in your profile. If someone wants more information about what you do, they’ll look it up. If you want to explore the network to find connections, don’t carpet bomb the place with what are essentially advertisements. Take a few minutes to find people who might make a good connection and leave a more personal comment asking about their business, blog or website. Read discussion posts, help people out and learn more about people from what they post. If you think of social networking like dating, by being more personable and polite, I think you’ll find much more effective contacts and not annoy everyone.

Do you have any social networking horror stories you’d like to share? Please do in the comments section below.

(photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy

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