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Archive for April, 2011

 A Smarter Way to Protect Your Company’s Reputation

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

From Bnet.com
By Christopher Elliott

You probably already know the value of managing your company’s reputation.

But just in case you don’t, here are a few points to ponder:

* BP’s handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is a classic case of a company in dire need of a managed reputation. Yeah, it tried buying adwords on Google after the incident, but it was too little, too late. By then, BP’s name had already become a punchline, and it will probably always be synonymous with a disastrous gusher, linked forever like Exxon and Valdez.
* Remember United Breaks Guitars, the video I showed you last week? That rep management slip-up reportedly cost it $185 million. Had it managed the crisis better, it might have lost far less.
* Last month, a video of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe made the rounds online. You’d think someone as Internet-savvy as Parsons would try to avert the damage with a sophisticated rep management campaign. Instead, he suggested his critics were clueless, even after calls for a boycott against the domain name registration company. “GoDaddy lost customers after that,” says Kent Lewis, president of Anvil Media. “I was on an email list of Internet pundits, where the major discussion was who offered the best alternative to GoDaddy for hosting. They all left.”

Saving money and face are great reasons to manage your reputation, of course. But experts say that’s not good enough.

Customers Demand It

Do it for your customers.

“Reputation management, and reputation management firms, are largely tasked with disaster cleanup,” says Scott McAndrew of the digital marketing firm Terralever. “They come in when things are bad, and, in many cases, use tactics that hide what’s bad, and try to court what’s good.”

But rep management like that is the rough equivalent of treating the symptom without looking for a cure. It’s crisis PR plus.

How Protecting Your Reputation Improves Customer Service, and Vice Versa

“Even the best reputation management can’t hide a business that is truly lousy in customer service and their are simply too many other choices out there then to buy from a business that does not value you,” says Marc Karasu, founder of the customer-service site MeasuredUp.

Reputation management can drive better customer service, though.

Instead of rebranding themselves whenever there’s a reputation problem, companies should try to use the tools of rep management to determine where customer service problems are — and fix them.

Yesterday, I covered one company’s bold plan to embrace the bad reviews it gets. What if negative reviews could be incorporated into a more comprehensive reputation management program?

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 Covering Your Bases with an Integrated Approach to Social Media Marketing and Customer Service

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

From Gigcoin.com

Whether your business is prepared to handle customer service questions via your social networking sites or not, the day will come probably sooner than later—when people will start reaching out to you there—expecting timely responses. If you haven’t started to integrate social media and customer service you might be surprised to learn that for the most part you already have the tools you need right at your disposal. You may just need to be thinking about using them a little differently.

Heidi Cohen writes in the post, How to Integrate Customer Service into Social Media Marketing, “Social media has changed customer service from being a support function to being an extension of marketing. In the social media ecosystem, customers want to know that you’re listening and responding.”

Heidi identifies 12 Ways that Social Media Enhances Customer Service and extends your marketing efforts:

1. Gives business a human face
2. Listens to what customers are saying
3. Proactively engages with prospects and customers
4. Provides additional product-related content
5. Answers product-related questions
6. Supplies alternative contact channel
7. Gives customers a channel to talk to each other
8. Shares customer feedback
9. Celebrates your customers
10. Shows customers behind the scenes
11. Makes special offers
12. Create new purchase options

Tools for Listening and Responding
How are businesses going about listening and responding? Through recent conversations with representatives from over twenty businesses, Twitter and Facebook were mentioned repeatedly as reliable tools for both listening and responding. Other tools referred to included LinkedIn groups, blog comments, community forums, Google alerts, Social Mention, BackType and Disqus. Several businesses were using dedicated social CRM products–Nimble, Get Satisfaction and MeasuredUp.

Types of Problems and Queries
Businesses are also finding that the types of problems and queries being made through social media runs a wide spectrum from broken web links, service requests, pricing and location questions, customer feedback, general FAQ about services to dissatisfied customers who don’t know where else to turn to communicate with the company and are looking for an immediate response.

Importance of Responses
Listening and responding is one part of the equation but certainly not the whole picture. Businesses need to have processes in place for everyone who speaks on behalf of the brand–even the CEO! Take for example the recent fiasco with Kenneth Cole on Twitter where he used the #Cairo hashtag that had been employed by Twitter users to denote discussion of current events in Egypt to advertise Cole’s spring collection. Not only was the tweet considered insensitive and in extremely poor taste, “it also went against an unofficial but generally observed policy for the use of hashtags on Twitter. The site’s help center page about hashtags notes that they should be used only on Tweets relevant to the topic.” Business leaders and their company representatives should make sure they know the difference between acceptable and unacceptable communications because everything today is not only public but also permanent. What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.

Human Resources
Businesses are finding too that they need to have dedicated resources to staff their social media presences to field questions and comments. Here’s how businesses are approaching staffing solutions:

Jon Stein, CEO of Betterment.com, says “Everyone in our office, all the way up to the CEO, is monitoring our social media channels. Its that important because if someone posts a message on our Facebook wall and we don’t respond–we not only miss an opportunity with that customer, but we also send an implicit message to all of our customers that we are not responsive to their needs.”

Michelle Judd at Ergotron says, “Right now we have two people from our Technical services team monitoring the forum and three people monitoring Twitter. One person monitors Facebook, although we have seen very few customer questions through Facebook. Our CSRs manage email, chat and phone calls.”

Lindsey Olsen at Evil Controllers says, “We have one person logged on Facebook at all times during the day ready to respond, as well as another person monitoring Twitter at all times as well. Both specialists spend the entirety of their day focusing on response, and reaching out via social media.”

Stephanie Bullis at Grasshopper.com says, “We have a social media coordinator that monitors all our social platforms and alerts the appropriate people within the company when action needs to be taken in reaching out to specific customers.”

Community Managers

An important new job function at businesses too is the role of the Community Manager. According to GetSatisfaction the Community Manager is a “jack of all trades and master of many…the only way to accurately reflect their contribution would be to understand that they work at the very edge of your organization, the place where the line between company and customer is blurriest and their job is to understand, manage and stimulate the collective passions of your customers in a way that creates value for both company and customer.” Marc Karasu, CEO at MeasuredUp says “Businesses should consider a blended approach to digital customer service and online reputation management.” Jon Ferrara, CEO at Nimble says, “With the advent of social media, the way we communicate with each other has changed, yet business needs stay the same. Now more than ever before, community managers are driving business success—traditional relationship building models need to expand to include social channels.”

Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group describes the Community Manager as the backbone of customer service in today’s modern online marketplace. He says, “As the Community Manager role continues to grow into a key piece of the customer experience lifecycle, remember to approach this space with humility and patience to teach internal stakeholders the value of the role.”

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