Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Apathy!

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After the massive anticlimax of the UK’s AV vote on Thursday, Tweetminister published this research, hilariously titled “proportional representation” haha, showing that very few people on Twitter really cared one way or the other, preffering instead to talk about the Royal Wedding & Britains Got Talent?

What does this tell us about social media? Something fundamental & pretty obvious…even with  lots of content & a team of experts who know how to use Twitter to get that content out there, if the topic doesn’t connect with the audience then it ain’t gonna get talked about.

Politics it seems is not an interesting topic, & it seems the old adage is still true…”you can’t polish a turd”.

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Twitter Customer Care Channel: Eurostar

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Eurostar, British Rail Class 373 at St Pancras...

Image via Wikipedia

I recently travelled to Paris to consult with a client on best practice use of social media for reputation & SERPs management, & decided to travel by Eurostar for the first time. The experience started out well with a much smoother checkin than the usual mess at Birmingham Airport. One of the big sells of Eurostar for me was the chance to get some work done in much more pleasant & relaxed environment, so I was disappointed to find out there wasn’t any WiFi on the train & amazed to find there were no power sockets to charge the laptop, it’s an electric train after all!

Things got worse when a fault with the radio on our train meant a 30min delay while the engineer tried to fix the problem, eventually resulting in us changing trains, followed by another 30min delay while the food from the original train was transferred to the new train – only to find once we got going that there wasn’t any food available because the mircowave on the new train wasn’t working – perhaps for the best anyway.

Twitter Customer Complaints

Still had 3G to fall back on, for a short while before we hit the chunnel anyway, so I thought I’d tweet the experience & see if Eurostars customer service teams were monitoring the tweet channel for moaning people like me. They came back to me with a reply within the hour, they were open & asked for more information about the problems we’d been having.

Clearly the Customer Care service at Eurostar is running a monitoring service, at least bewteen the hours of 9-5, & I’d #Eurostar to make it nice & easy for them to pick me up in the stream. The Customer Care representative replying to me was responsive & gave me some good information relating to my gripes (upgrade plans for the trains on WiFi & power sockets) & they gave me an email address for their Travel Care team (who they said they’d spoken to) & asked if I could email my ticket info & they’d pick the case up directly with me.

@Eurostar Customer Care Channel

Great Customer Care service, right? I’d give it a 7/10, because although it was all very responsive, it was also very public. As you can see from the screen shots below, the back & forth dialogue we had about my moaning turned one short tweet from me into a nice big conversation describing in full detail the list of problems we encountered on the journey to Paris. Of course the Customer Care channel needs to publically broadcast service updates as well as send out crisis information where lots of people are affected (like French strikes, or the recent train breakdown), but individual problems are best delt with 121. In my opinion a more effective way of dealing with this kind of problem is to direct message the customer with a ref ID, telephone number or email address & take the conversation offline as soon as possible. Yes you need to respond via the same channel, but really all I’m looking for is some attention & for someone to help out with my problem – I don’t need to have a public conversation about it & it’s not in the brands best interest to do this, either for brand reputation or search engine results.

Eurostar Customer Care Twitter

All the customer wants is for someone to listen & address the problem. You need to pick up & respond to complaints quickly, then take them out of the stream & importantly resolve the problem offline. If you can do this more often than not the customer will come back online at some point & praise the brand for putting things right – without airing the dirty laundry in public. See my experience with TNT from summer 2010 as a good example.

The meeting in Paris went well, but unfortunately for me I got food poisoning (karma for causing a fuss on the journey out?) so the return journey wasn’t a great experience either. No delays this time, but an overflowing toilet behind my seat wasn’t what I needed really. Ah well sh@t happens I guess!

Eurostar Customer Care Twitter

I do have to say that as an alternative to flying the Eurostar experience wasn’t at all bad, it was certainly cheaper than flying & without the delays would have taken about the same time, taking into account the lengthy checkin at most international airports. The Eurostar is also around 10 times greener than flying, so you can feel a bit better about it as well, just charge your laptop before you get on the train & don’t expect to get online before 2012!
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Social Media Marketing for a luxury brands?

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Are social media channels the right place for luxury brands to connect with their audiences? I’ve been working with a luxury kitchen brand for a while now, planning their launch into the UK market, & not unsurprisingly the question of social media marketing for luxury brands has reared its head more than once in the boardroom. Many of my clients in 2010 have shown a real desire to learn more about the opportunities social media channels offer for deeper & more meaningful connections with consumers, but I’d be lying if I said that when it comes to the crunch there isn’t a reluctance to commit budgets away from traditional marketing methods. It’s our job of course to make the case for effective Social Media ROI, & 2011 looks like the year we’ll get the chance to prove these strategies.

Social Media Marketing strategy

Social media channels offer the chance to create instant connections with consumers. By offering quality engaging content, like the exclusive behind the scenes access to the world of elite cooking we’re able to offer through our client, we can offer something of real value and interest to our target communities online. At the same time we’re introducing a real 360 degree experience of what the lifestyle brand is all about. Add into the mix, relationships with the world of high fashion & high end design & the opportunities we’ve got through these partnerships allow us to create content of real interest to our target audience, as well as incentives to share this content among their own peer groups. We’re combining streaming video, blog & chat room technology to offer customers exclusive access to content in a way that’s most relevant & natural for them, through their established online social networks.

Social Sharing is key

By creating online personas through established social media channels like Twitter & Facebook we’re giving consumers quick & easy access to the brand & an opportunity to experience the brand personality first hand. Consumers discovering new products through their own peer communities online reflect on the relevance of brands & product purchases through social media. Consumers are also increasingly sharing their thoughts & experiences within their own social networks, & this has a huge impact on influencing perception among peer groups. The value of peer to peer recommendation in the purchase decision process is well known & well documented!

Social Media, push & pull

Social media channels will also help natural search optimisation for your brand. Effective use of social media, & properly optimised content will have a significant effect on brand positioning on page 1 of the search engine results page, pretty important when your in-market customer Google’s ‘Luxury Kitchen Design’. Pushing quality content out through social media is an effective way of exposing the brand personality across a large peer network, but good search optimisation will create a pull effect when these consumers eventually come into market. Not forgetting of course, that social media channels like Twitter, Youtube & Flickr are search engines in their own right, where consumers can search for content on the topics & trends important to them. When these topics relate to luxury design, we want our content to be at the forefront.

Social Commerce, where to next?

Social Commerce is of course the final step. By connecting social media interactions to online commerce tools & offline lead generators we’re closing the loop to take advantage of the increase in purchase conversion rates created by social sharing features & consumer product recommendations, such is the power of peer to peer recommendation!

We’ve seen the landscape in the luxury market start to shift during the past year, there’s no question digital channels & social media marketing in particular will continue to change how luxury brands connect with customers.  Luxury brands will continue to utilise social media, ecommerce & increasingly mobile applications, to connect with consumers, promote peer to peer dialogue & ultimately convert sales.

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TNT using Social Media for Customer Service on Apple contract

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Social Media: Listen to your customers!

No business gets it right 100% of the time, but when things do go wrong, the most important thing is: how will you respond to put things right? This can make all the difference to the future reputation of your brand & the likelihood of getting repeat business.

Community Management: what’s going on?

My work with brands like TNT, has a strong element of Community Management at its core. This involves  monitoring the social media landscape using a combination of automated keyword software, & the old fashioned MK1 human eyeball. We work closely with the Customer Service department as well as the Press Office, Sales & Marketing to understand the campaigns & events likely to drive the online discussion topics relevant to the brand.

Online Customer Service via social media

In the case of a recent global delivery contract for iPhone 4 & iPad managed by TNT on behalf of their customer we were able to track & report on topics and trends developing in online forums on an hour by hour basis.

These online conversations were invaluable early warning tools indicating pressure on digital infrastructures & Customer Service Contact Centres we saw a few days later.  Crucially, our social media monitoring allowed us to plan the social media & staffing resource TNT needed to effectively service their customers.  In addition, our mutual collaboration with the marcomms team gave TNT insight allowing them to future plan areas of their online PR, online reputatation management (ORM), and business continuity & social media crisis management.

Alongside directly engaging with customers, we were able to plan marketing and PR messages in the run up to TNT’s peak delivery period (a 48 hour period spread across several continents), & to push these messages out through the social media networks & forums to promote positive messages, pre-empt negative inquiries & address customers directly with help and advice.

Twitter Engagement

The majority of our customer service conversations for TNT were handled through Twitter. By picking up conversations that were already taking place through Tweets, we were able to engage with the customer using the channel chosen by them.

Twitter works wonderfully well for customers in this situation. They send a message in their own time, get a reply directly, and see an instant audit trail for their customers service inquiry as it progresses.

It’s also good news for TNT too, removing strain on the customer service call centres, TNT’s website parcel tracking website & with a very real potential to remove operating overhead from traditional telephone infrastructure

 

Twitter Customer Service

 

Positive customer feedback = good search engine results!

It really does go to show that all customers really want is to be treated like people. If there’s a problem, fine, as long as you acknowledge me, deal with the issue one to one and show that you’re sorting it out, 99% of the time I won’t hold a grudge.

In fact, done right, customer service issues can be turned into an opportunity to positively influence brand perception – a chance to shine, to show you really do care!

As the hours passed and the customer engagements were managed, we were able to track the change of topics, trends and sentiment through page one of Google’s search results & online forums. What started as an uneasy scepticism, & in some cases an excited or outraged cry for help, quickly evolved into a cautious relief & final acknowledgement for the brand of a job well done.

Great news for the people whose issues were sorted & great to have a bunch of satisfied customers, especially when the search engines were singing praise for the brand on excellent customer service & delivery through Twitter.  Straight from the horses’ mouth!

Social Media for Customer Service

Social Media Monitoring

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If you do nothing else with social media this year, make sure you implement a Social Media Monitoring service. It’s your job as a marketer to understand what’s interesting & important to your audience, and the chances are your customers are already online talking about the issues that relate to your sector. It’s your job to understand how this relates to your brand!

Understanding what’s going on across the social landscape is the first step towards understanding the opportunities to engage with your audience through these new channels, & it doesn’t have to be complicated.

I’ve run social media monitoring and landscape reviews for several brands including Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance, TNT & Lufthansa, to understand the opportunities & implications of deploying social media tactics for these companies, building a business case for Social Media Marketing Engagement Plans along the way.

The first step is understanding what your audience is up to in the Social Media space. Proper analysis of Search Engine activity is a good place to start, & sound knowledge of the Search Terms your audience is using means the intelligence is based on real understanding of the topics & trends important to the customer, the cornerstone of all good marketing!

Once we’ve highlighted the key Search Terms we can start drilling into the Social Media channels. There are a number of Social Media Monitoring software tools out there designed to measure social media activity, and with intelligent use of these tools we can build a pretty good picture of the themes running through the social media landscape impacting on your sector.

Like any analytics software, in the right hands, it can revolutionise your understanding, but all the same data is not the same as intelligence. That’s why you need a team of Social Media Specialists, to add the real value to the data reports the software tools produce. What’s measured empirically is backed up with desk research, & most importantly married up with your business objectives, to define the opportunities & risks to the brand offered through Social Media.

The final report should be a combination of empirical data, analysing audience behaviours, competitor activity & the trending topics running through the Social Media landscape. This is followed by a balanced assessment of the strategic opportunities for the brand to engage through Social Media channels to achieve its marketing objectives. The report should cover Social Media Campaign opportunities, as well as possible Crisis Planning & Risk Management strategies.

Social media platforms can be a relevant communication medium across a number of business departments, from Marketing & PR to Customer Service Teams, New Business & HR, & you can focus in on these opportunities depending on your business priorities. This could include obvious areas like maximising digital marketing efforts & customer brand engagement, as well as reducing marketing overhead & engaging with prospects to drive sales leads, to less obvious uses like using social channels to augment traditional customer service channels, internal corporate communications & raising brand engagement amongst employees through social.

Ultimately, investing in a Social Media Landscape review is about driving an understanding of the social space as the first essential step to creating a roadmap for your brand to engage in these channels. It’s about providing a strategic focus to Social Media activity that can be clearly linked back to your business & marketing objectives, & the needs of your customers. This investment has provided brands like Lufthansa, TNT and Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance with a business case to open the debate with senior management around investment, & return on this investment through strategic use of Social Media Marketing techniques.