Now that businesses are starting to embrace Twitter, there have been some fascinating examples of great customer service.  Ford Motor Company is helping customers find parts, solving problems with accessories, and escalating customer service requests.  Comcast appears to be the Gold Standard with their Comcast Cares account which is solving customer problems with equipment, answering questions about service features.  Bloggers are also helping companies by raving about great experiences.

Photo By CarrotCreative

Can we scale it?

• Be Prepared For A Flood – We all know Twitter is growing very rapidly, and as more people learn about great Twitter customer service, you can count on more requests for service.
• 24 Hours; 7 days – Companies that don’t have this staffed around the clock with clear processes and control will suffer as customers rush to the site.

Who will own it?

• Not the Social Media Team – The Social Media team often start this process and are stuck with owning it as it grows.  Good customer service over Twitter depends on fast responses to customer problems.  But, because the organization considers Twitter to be “social media” (read:  confusing), the responsibility for managing these usually falls to the team handling social media.
• Integrate into Customer Service - Ideally, customer service should own the process, staff for it, and tie metrics to it.  Ideally, this means 24 hours, 7 day a week coverage, a dedicated team of individuals, and clear metrics integrated with the rest of the customer service.

Can we handle the truth?

• Get Ready for Negativity – Every executive will tell you that they are ready and willing to hear what their customers have to say, until they actually hear it.  By committing your business to open customer service through Twitter, you are tying your name directly to negative customer feedback.
• Manage Your Brand – Tying your brand to both positive feedback and negative feedback can aggravate your Brand Managers.  The millions of dollars spent on advertising and promotion can be compromised by a  few snarky Tweets and a well-written blog.

It doesn’t surprise me that many major companies like Microsoft aren’t fully using their Twitter accounts.  Sure, it can be powerful, but if not managed correctly, 140 characters can destroy years of successful marketing.

Photo By Carrot Creative from Flickr

Facebook is so worried about Twitter that they are creating monetary incentives to keep people on Facebook to check their statuses.  Mashable provides great coverage, as always:

Facebook Credits seem to (be) Facebook’s baby steps into the world of virtual currency. Right now, users can only give credits to friends for sharing great posts or having a status people like. However, it isn’t a far stretch for credits to be the medium in which people pay for things on Facebook applications or even pay for things on other websites via Facebook Connect. Imagine connecting to Amazon and buying a new mouse with a couple thousand credits.

But seriously, will anyone buy these to give to their friends?  Facebook has struggled with monetization of gifts for friends, and this is no time for users, particularly in Facebook’s demographic, to be spending money frivolously.

Rather than paying for credits, which seems to be unrealistic, Facebook should study its data to find the best creators of content and provide them with free credits to get the virutal economy in information rolling.  Giving credits to the best content creators will allow them to “trickle-down” the credits to those they recognize as providing great content.

Great Content Recognizes Great Content

• We can safely assume that Facebook knows more about us than our actual friends do.  Facebook should mine their data to find the users who share the most links, that are most commented/liked, and that are re-shared with others.
• Users who can create good content are more fitted to recognize great content than users with money to burn.  Having good users recognize content increase the value to Facebook for that recognition.

Let Great Content Providers Trickle-Down the Facebook Wealth

• Selling Facebook Credits will put power in the hands of those with wealth; this conflicts with a basic principle of Social Media, let the users determine what is good content.
• Good content creators can give credits to other good creators who will then do the same continue to “spread the wealth”.  Sound like socialism?  Well, it’s actually more like the theory behind Trickle-Down economics.

Existing creators of good content rewarding others who can create good content will provide Facebook with much more relevant, and therefore more financially valuable, data.  By selling the credits, not only will the program look silly and likely fail, the data created by the program would not be as valuable as allowing the best users to highlight where others are doing the right thing.

We’ve all said something on the internet we wish we would could take back.  It could be a a rush to judgement, or even pure stupidity like this classic exchange between a Cisco Applicant and a Cisco Employee.

A prospective Cisco hire (@theconnor) tweeted:

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

A Cisco channel partner advocate responded with a tweet of their own

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

By Kevin Marks

Step 1 – Hit “Eject”, Disconnect!

Leave behind any internet capable device and physically Eject yourself to another location.  Take a walk, get a coffee, or go to your favorite store.  It doesn’t matter.  Right now you need your thoughts to be Disconnected from your emotions.  Preventing yourself from over-reacting to the situation can make what seems to be severe much more calm.

Step 2 – Redirect your Intellect

Now that your emotions have settled, you’re going to need to start thinking again.  But don’t rush back into email, Redirect your focus to sites that make you think.  Your mind should be nice and clear from Step 1, so here’s a to chance to get your Intellect working for you again.

Step 3 – Collect, before you Reflect

Listen or read as many points of view as possible before trying to make sense of them.  Collecting a variety of feedback helps you see all sides of the issue.  Don’t try to make sense of any one person’s words until you have a complete set of information.  No scientist would make a conclusion off of one data point, so just observe all the feedback then Reflect on what it all means.

Step 4 – Reconnect, but not Perfect

You have relaxed, prepared your mind, and thought about the issue.  It’s time to now Reconnect with your community.  However, fully understand that it is impossible to make everyone happy.  Don’t worry about Perfecting your response, once it feels 80% good, get it out there.

Step 5 – Correct and Neglect

You’ve put a lot of effort into understanding the situation and probably learned how your personality may have caused the problem.  Correct that flaw and you won’t have to go through this stress again.  Whether its ego, laziness to proofread, or bad taste in humor, you probably have received this type of negative feedback sometime before.

Here’s the key, you need to Neglect that this ever happened.  Put it behind you and move on.  If it’s on your mind, it will continue to impact your life.

In summary, a bad situation on the internet will happen to all of us.  What determines success is the ability to understand and address the situation so that you can prevent it from ever happening again.

I am constantly hearing from executives and leaders, “Okay, I get Facebook and Twitter…what’s next?” Even though most companies haven’t fully embraced the second growth of web development, smart managers are deploying Web 2.0 technologies with an eye on how to scale based on what might come next.

The easiest way to impress your manager is to answer, “The Semantic Web”.  Here’s an explanation from “Where is the web going?

Twitter Adds Semantic Human Meaning To Web Documents

Think of how your Tweets add to the description of documents you link.  People are posting pithy descriptions of web links specifically designed to attract others to the content.

What could possibly be better for the development of the semantic web than humans describing web pages?  Current semantic technologies ask the author of the document to describe it or try to derive meaning from existing descriptive data in the document.  With Twitter, we have a concise user description of a web page that means something to others.

Improve Twitter – Replace URL Shorteners With a “Link” Field

My favorite URL Shortener, bit.ly, uses 19 of 140 characters before you can add a description to the tweet.  However, if there were a “Link” field that follows the Tweet, we could increase the description (or meaning) by 15.7%.   Here’s an example:

Old Tweet -

New Tweet -

More characters = More Meaning

By adding the LINK field, we can free up 19 extra characters for me to add “co-workers, & family”.  This provides a better description of the document AND removes all the crazy looking characters that can intimidate novice users.

Photo by ChrisL_Ak

Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta write an ambiguous, bland, and wrong piece on Forbes.com about the need for CEOs to use Social Networking technologies.  Their seemingly decent argument cites Web 2.0 Evangelists (no one particular, just the “evangelists” in general) who apparently claim the following:

Web 2.0 evangelists, on the other hand, argue that social software can be used to boost productivity. They say it can facilitate an open-ended corporate culture that values transparency, collaboration and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction.

Of course all this is true, but two of the examples they use, Blendtec CEO’s “Will it Blend” series, and Zappo’s CEO Twitter Feed, feel like a simple marketing channel.

Simply put, CEOs make a lot of money because they are good at managing talented people.

Average CEO of an S&P 500 company was $10.5 million in 2008

Say whatever you want about executive pay…but CEOs have unique skills and are therefore highly compensated.  At $10.5 million a year, and assuming no sleep, that’s about $1,200 an hour.  Shareholders demand that CEOs should focus on what they do best…

CEOs Would Need to Spend Many Hours Building Social Media Skills

It takes a decent amount of experience to use this technology authentically without sounding artificial.  And, the only way to do this is “learning by doing”.  So, if anyone says, “It only takes a couple of seconds to Tweet”, remind them that the best Twitter users are ones that have practiced writing pithy updates.

Johnathan Schwartz is the rare example of a CEO who can do this, but I suspect there is some ghost-writing behind this blog.

The Best CEOs Hire People Who Are Smarter Than They Are

Find a social media expert, apparently they’re everywhere.  But hire them and have them communicate to you like any other functional leader in your organization.  Find a strategic thinker who can drive change at all levels of the organization to impact your business objectives.  Don’t have a CEO spend their valuable time learning Social Media skills when they are experts in the much rarer skills of Management.

Now that all your friends have stopped wondering whether or not they like the New Facebook Changes, we can study what this is doing for Facebook and it’s users.  First, here’s Jared W. Smith with a great summary of the changes:

The area where you enter status updates has been made into a more ambiguous “publisher” which will post status updates, notes, photos, and the like. …  A lot’s been made of a comparison to Twitter, but I think FriendFeed is a far more effective analogy because of the range of items you can share … Facebook was pretty straightforward to use because a status update was a status update, a photo post was a photo post, and the like. It’s all been melded together now…

Where’s the Real-Time Search?

With all the recent talk about Twitter threatening Google (unlikely, Google has massive amounts of personal data) why didn’t Facebook include a Real-Time Search like Twitter?  For example, this weekend I wanted see which friends were at the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) but couldn’t.  So I went through hundreds of updates trying to find out.

Facebook is Forcing  Friend Categorization

The seemingly intentional omission of real-time search suggests that Facebook’s strategy is to solve for real-time search by forcing Friend Categorization.   I found myself wanting to organize friends into a “tech” friend group because those would be the most likely attendees of SXSW.

Friend Tagging/Categorizing is Insanely Valuable to Facebook

Facebook benefits if users are labeling, tagging, and categorizing their network.  Most of us aren’t self-aware enough to properly label ourselves, so having our network label us (anonymously) provides a hyper-accurate categorization of who we are.

Search is probably coming…but not until we’re all labeled

It’s easy for Facebook to implement real-time search and it is valuable to users.  Facebook is intentionally waiting to roll it out until we’ve all done our job helping Facebook categorize ourselves.   As a user…I don’t know if I’ll ever spend the time to organize everyone.  As a strategist, I congratulate you Facebook.  Great move.

Mashable’s wonderful update on new Facebook explains many of the changes, including a link to the most relevant changes for social media marketers.  In the Opportunities section, they highlight these 4 points:

Opportunities

1. Stronger Interaction with Fans
Because the Wall tab will become the focus, Pages will feel much more active and dynamic than ever before. This will encourage more participation and interaction between brands and their Fans.

2. Increased Virality
Content posted on the new Wall will also show up in Fans’ News Feeds more often. This means that posting updates to your Page is much more viral and has the potential to drive significant traffic to your Page.

3. More Ways to Communicate

The Status Update will provide a powerful way for Pages to share short interesting blurbs with Fans in a way that is less obtrusive than an Update delivered to their inboxes. Brands that use Twitter can sync their accounts so that selected Tweets will automatically post to Facebook as Status Updates.

4. Specific Landing Page for Non-Fans

The Wall tab will be the point of entry for all Fans when they visit a Page (with the idea that they’ll first be exposed to the newest content). When it comes to non-fans, Page admins will be able to choose which tab they’d like to use as the landing page. This means that if a Page has a new application or custom content that they’d like to promote, they can set this as the point of entry for all new visitors to the Page.

But seriously…how many brands are you a fan of?  Probably your company and a few others to make former high school classmates think you’re cooler now than when you were 16.

Don’t recycle Twitter Content

The biggest implication is in Mashable Opportunity #3, More Ways to Communicate.  Specifically, “a powerful way for Pages to share short interesting blurbs with Fans”.  However, don’t take the lazy way out and recycle your Twitter messages; your fans are interested in you so give them more interesting stuff than what you are spamming to the legions on Twitter.

Create short URLs from your domain

If you are providing links to content you host, don’t bog your URL down in a mess of directories.  Additionally, if you have to use a URL shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com avoid the random letters and make it your own.  Simple is key, for example, a post from CareerBuilder.com offering advice for job seekers should read like this

“Tips to make your resume stand out to recruiters – careerbuilder.com/resumetips”

Provide “How-To”, not “Buy Me”

No one wants to see an advertisement in their news feed, that’s why facebook puts their ads on the side.  Make your updates a source of information to help your fans make a purchase decision.  Sorry Skittles, not much you can do here…however Guitar Center, pay attention.  A great Guitar Center status update would read something like the following:

“How do guitar strings affect the sound of your music? – http://bit.ly/GuitarStrings“

I’ve seen a couple tweets pop up from managers recognizing employees for a great job. Rochelle Grayson started some thoughts back in May of last year, that I thought should be built upon.

First and Foremost, It SHOULD NEVER replace the handwritten note made famous by Jack Welch, but for quick “atta-boys” or “atta-girls”, it can go a long way

1 – Quick – 140 characters, bam.  It’s a perfect medium for quick recognition for a job well done.  I’ve seen so many managers get nervous and hesitate to properly recognize their employees…but this is a overwhelmingly easy way to give quick feedback.

2 – Public – I would love for my followers to see that I did a great job at “making a coherent argument for an idea in a meeting…”   A simple @benphoster, and I’m working nights to come up with better arguments.

3 – New - As of right now…no one is doing this.  Show your team that you’re one of those “forward-thinking” manager types that they’ve been hearing so much about.  Set up a #tag for your team to allow the group to publicly see the motivation.

BUT NEVER LET IT REPLACE A HANDWRITTEN NOTE!