Unhappy customers turn to social media: survey
Customers who experience problems when conducting transactions online are sharing these experiences on social media sites; 13% this year compared with 8% in 2008.
This is one of the findings of a Tealeaf survey of online customer behaviour, and provides another reminder that online retailers need to focus on customer experience, especially as 74% of online adults said negative comments read online have an influence on whether they will do business with a company.
Why Facebook could be the next big news publisher
Facebook's growth, it seems, is limited only by the scope of Mark Zuckerberg's ambition. It began as a social networking site trying to keep up with MySpace, but Facebook is now circling its own orbit.
All that's stopping Facebook from becoming the pre-eminent news publisher for its 300m users is Zuckerberg's desire to do it.
The 10 commandments of social optimisation (#SOCOP)
What is social optimisation? For me, it’s about how you structure your business in a way that increases engagement and participation.
Social optimisation (‘SOCOP’) is broader than social ‘media’ optimisation (optimising your presence on third party sites) and bigger than social ‘search’ optimisation (boosting your universal search results). I think of it as an umbrella term that combines both of the above strategies, and then some. It covers the wider businesses issues like customer service, usability and organisational structure.
While there remains a lot of hype in the social space we are starting to hear about some excellent results from companies that have embraced their communities, wherever they choose to hang out. We believe that a user-centric, community-focused business is one that will go a long way, assuming that a few other basics are put in place (such as competitive pricing and amazing service).
So to help you to see the light, I have defined 10 commandments that should help you to plan and structure your business for a more sociable future...
Where should you spend your online budget?
The amount spent advertising online has finally exceeded that amount spent on TV promotions. So, if you're planning to dedicate more marketing money to the web platform, where should you spend that cash?
People are spending more online, both shoppers and advertisers. That means your customers are on the web but it also means your competitors have upped their game.
So you probably plan to increase the amount you spend, but where should you spend that cash? Should you boost your email marketing or ramp up your paid ads?
Don’t blame social media for bad behaviour
One of the questions I often get asked by journalists, who know I’m interested in the psychology of technology, is how social media like Facebook and Twitter change the way we communicate. Being journalists, they usually want me to say that we can no longer interact properly with each other thanks to technology.
I know some brain researchers have made some scary claims about social media but all the evidence I have seen suggests that it is just another way of keeping in touch.
Q&A: Barry Fenning - a Twitter case study for SMEs
LCN marketing director Barry Fenning last month started a couple of Twitter accounts for his company, to see if it could help boost sales at the 29-person strong business.
I talked to him to find out how social media can help make a difference to small businesses.
Why 'quality not quantity' matters online
Too often online marketing is characterised by quantity rather than quality. There's a pervasive idea that quality is too hard but sheer volume will have the same effect.
Let me give you a shining example of what I mean. I was recently browsing a forum when I found, without a doubt, the dumbest attempt at marketing I've seen in a while.
10 badass social media visualisations
When it comes to social media you might be busy trying to separate the opportunity from the bullshit, such are the interstellar levels of hype and associated jargon that are plaguing this space.
Nevertheless, I for one believe that a solid social media strategy can make a real difference to your business, helping you to drive engagement in order to boost customer satisfaction, retention, and profits. But that's not to say it will be easy: there's a lot to figure out and each company has different needs (and challenges to overcome).
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I thought I'd aggregate a few of the social media visualisations I've spotted in the past few weeks to help you make some mental leaps of faith, or use in your internal pitches, or otherwise determine that it's all a bunch of hot air, as you see fit.
Caveat: some of these are more badass than others!
Social media ROI: is it worth waiting for?
Last week I published an article called ‘The 27 varieties of tweet used by retailers’ to show the breadth of topics covered on Twitter by retail firms. It also allowed me to answer the ‘but what will we tweet about?’ question sometimes posed by Twitter newcomers.
To be clear, my position on social media is that it is helpful to businesses of all shapes and sizes, and that it can improve lots of key business metrics (sales, but more importantly profits, retention, customer satisfaction, etc).
Read that back: it can help all businesses, of all shapes and sizes. The trouble is that is going to be harder for the larger companies to implement social media, compared to smaller, more agile businesses. And is this effort likely to pay off? It's rather hard to say for sure... there's definitely a gamble involved here, and a real need to avoid the hype and bandwagon jumping that surrounds the social media space.
Peter Cutler left a comment on my ’27 tweets’ post that raises this precise issue: "This is good. But where's the ROI? And time is money. So where's the Return On Investment?"
Where indeed?
Does social media kill communication skills?
I can understand why fear pervades the social space. Some psychologists have argued that social networking will contribute to the death of emotional intelligence. I don’t share this paranoia. Email didn't kill the conversation, so why should social networking?
In my opinion, the medium through which you communicate does not destroy your inter-personal skills, it merely reflects and amplifies them. Here's my take on why social media can have a positive effect on our communication skills.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
