We all know that customer service is a costly part of any business. Currently, most companies still operate call centers, translating to a cost per phone call of around 35$. Unfortunately, email support doesn’t lessen this, due to duplication of inquiries.

However, in light of these current customer service shortcomings, social media is offering businesses a new way to interact with customers, and a new way to respond to customer questions and complaints.

One such example of this is the site called Get Satisfaction , a site that according to Business Week is “part online forum, part FAQ, and part social network”. To put it simply, the site works by allowing anyone to ask a question, submit an idea or complaint, or discuss a particular product or company. All of these components are then listed on a public “Satisfaction page” for everyone to see, comment on, and rate.

As a result, users are creating “Satisfaction” pages for companies and products. Instead of customers calling traditional call centers for questions and complaints, they are going elsewhere to ask questions, discuss, and share solutions.

The benefit to businesses is that the site’s “rating system” aggregates users with similiar concerns. No more duplication of inquires – a company can more easily prioritize questions that need addressing, common complaints, and have insight into the product developments that most customers want. Additionally, call center traffic can be greatly reduced from customers offering free troubleshooting to other customers.

It’s an amazing phenomena, and companies like Apple and Air Canada have become involved in the conversations taking place. I have a weird feeling that customer service is about to be transformed…

The “Big news out of Hollywood” late last week, when MySpace TV announced that a new Internet-only television show will debut in November, got the info right, but the big picture wrong.

First the info: Called “Quarterlife”, the show is about a 20-something with a blog that shares the life stories of friends worldwide, and the pain that can cause. You can watch the trailer here (with exciting subtitles in Greek even!)

This is a neat idea, and the producers are Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who did My So-Called Life and thirtysomething for ABC. That’s big news. The 8-minute episodes are likely to get some attention given these producers and the nice alignment between the content and the medium it’s being delivered on.

Now the big picture: If you go to Quarterlife.com right now, you can watch the trailer you see above (without the Greek subtitles). But once the shows debut, the site will be transformed into “a social networking site for creative people.” If they’ve built this site well, this could be the real legacy of Quarterlife over the long-term: a site to replace MySpace as the creative social networking space. MySpace is creaking and a bit ugly, but replacing them is hard.

As I said last week in my post “Why Zooped Sucks”, any MySpace replacement needs a way to push a lot of people into a site very fast or it won’t take off. Maybe that’s what Quarterlife the show will do for Quarterlife.com. If the show takes off, the site will take off (again, if it’s built well), and we might just have our first credible MySpace threat in a while. Ironically, hosted on MySpace TV.

Watch for the first reviews of the Quarterlife site itself. That could be the real news out of all this.

Technorati Tags: social media , myspace , social networking , quarterlife , zooped

In working for a social media agency, I get asked a lot of questions from those who are getting their feet wet with free blogging services like WordPress, or Blogger.

Most of these are the simple questions like, “How do I embed a You Tube video?” or “How do I insert a picture”. In case you are new to blogging – these are easy questions, with easy answers.

So in light of this, I decided to just sum up some Wordpress basics in a document to help those of you out there that may be in the beginning stages of blogging. (It is based off Wordpress since that is what I use on a regular basis, but can also be applied to other blogging platforms.)

You can download the Wordpress Basics here.

Hope it helps. There is nothing more exhilarating than pressing “publish” for the first time.

About a month ago, we got a comment on this site asking us if we’d reviewed Zooped.com yet. I’m pretty confident that the post came from someone who works at Zooped trying to get coverage, but as a soical media agency, we decided it was our duty to try it out anyway. As you can tell from the title of this post, it’s not a positive review.

What the folks at Zooped are trying to do is converge a lot of interesting social networking ideas into one place. While that’s an attractive idea on the surface it’s one that, I believe, is doomed to fail. (Read “The Origin of Brands” on Google Books by Al & Laura Reis to learn why.)

On Zooped, you can put up your profile, upload and listen to music, post info about your business, post videos, play games or add them to your blog, or read the news. Of course, that’s the problem. Zooped isn’t the best place to do any of these things, so putting them all in one place doesn’t make it any better.

Like a number of other social networking sites trying to make a go of it, Zooped faces a classic chicken/egg proposition. Social network’s value is in size. When I first signed up, Zooped had only about 7,000 users. As of today, a month later, they have 12,351. Good growth from a percentage standpoint, but infinitesimally small compared to the big networks. Until they get users, they can’t really be interesting. Until they’re really interesting, they can’t get users. Tough place to be.

The Zooped folks may have had a chance if they opened their walled fortress under the social graph, or social network portability, concept. But again, I’m supposed to re-enter all my friends, convince them to join this space, etc. etc. Yet I see no compelling reason to offer them for their trouble. Oh, and want to have your blog on your profile? Start a new one on Zooped. They won’t let you import your existing blog via RSS. How dumb is that?

Most annoying, Zooped absence of real networking has opened it up to the spammers. Of the six emails from “friends” I’ve gotten, four have been Nigeria Scams, and two have offered to date me (no doubt as step one before they begin the Nigeria scam of their own). Each time, Zooped sends me an annoying email that says I have note from my friend, but no hit as to the content of that note or who it is from, and no link to it. While I understand the lack of a link is probably a security measure, it makes signing in a major pain.

I’m not being critical of the programming folks at Zooped. They may, or may not, have built a great platform. But their business decisions, mixed with the natural difficulty of starting a social networking site, make Zooped a non-starter.

In social media marketing, there isn’t a time when transparency isn’t a consideration. Companies are continually questioning, “How close is too close?”, or “What information should we disclose to our customers?”.

One such company that we can learn a lot from in the area of transparency is Chordiant, a developer of “customer experience” software for many global known brands in the areas of healthcare, banking, and insurance (to name a few).

In the writing of our upcoming book, I interviewed Greg Biggers, Chordiant’s Director of Product Strategy and one of the key players in the implementation of Chordiant Mesh Community, a wiki designed to increase collaboration between Chordiant and its customers.

Though our conversation spanned many topics and lasted over an hour, I’ve compiled some of the highlights of our conversation on the topic of transparency in the following (approx. 4 minute) podcast.

Lately I admit that I’ve been on a rampage covering and critiquing companies that have needed some work with their social media tactics. First Wal-Mart, then Delta. I admit- I’ve been a little out of control.

So I’m glad to say this Monday morning that I saw a social media execution and thought, “hmmm – good job”. So I’m giving one of my first ever “hmm good job” awards to GM Europe, who have employed the “GM Social Media Newsroom” (This award comes with the disclaimer that I can take it back for any reason at any time.)

To put it simply, the site is a new online resource blog for the company’s press releases and media resources that is further extended with the tools of social media. Let me break down a little of why I think this concept works:

1. It uses existing tools. Wal-mart, and now more recently Warner Brothers (which I may discuss at a later time), have tried to make social media from scratch, instead of using existing tools or networks. The result is a heavily branded mess. GM Europe instead opted to implement a low cost blog platform Serendipity. They used Flickr and YouTube to stream in pictures and videos for sharing, they made it possible to share news with any social bookmarking site possible. To enter social media, a company doesn’t have to completely reinvent the wheel, but become a part of the conversation through existing social media technologies.

2. It lets GM become a source. The tagline of the blog is “Product news and downloads for the online reporter” and the site clearly displays the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, which allows users to use, adapt and share any of the site’s content. The site does an amazing thing – it welcomes comments and conversation while allowing users to take any of it and republish. It clearly understands that the destination of the conversations will likely be covered elsewhere, and allows the tools to do so.

3. It crosses social media with traditional media. The newsroom is a tool that effectively crosses traditional media with social media. In an interview with Keith Childs, (the mind behind the social media newsroom) stated: “The lines between news producer and news consumer are blurring. One thing is very clear; our news is republished, commented on, shared, tagged and so on.” As a result of this, GM has made this site a resource that is as much for social media as it is for traditional. It is a successful example of how a company can bridge the old with the new.

4. It has potential. As Keith Childs stated in regards to the social media newsroom: “It’s definitely the first stage”. I couldn’t agree more. This is surely the first, safe step for GM, opening the door for for developments and perhaps a riskier execution. In fact the social media newsroom template by Shift Communication shows even further how this concept could be developed.

What do you think about this execution? Do you think this is something that will take off? Do you see any room for social media newsrooms to expand?

One of the questions I get asked the most – and it’s the right question – is “How do you get companies ready to roll out a social media campaign?” This question seems to come from people who have seen corporations either tarred by or scared of how social media has been “used against” them.

I was talking to someone just yesterday about this sort of thing, and he’d worked for two companies where bloggers in particular have beaten up on them hard. I thought his comment that, “Our PR firm had no clue what to do about it either” was telling on a lot of levels. (And another reason why you shouldn’t charge a PR firm with your social media planning, but that’s my bias…)

Here are a couple thoughts about how you get a company to roll out a social media campaign.

1. Expect resistance. For our upcoming book on social media marketing, we interviewed a company that is doing great stuff with customer collaboration, mostly through wikis. It’s shaved 65% of the time off their product development cycle! The guy in charge noted that getting permission for this new collaborative workflow was hard enough, but he was really surprised how often he had to resell the transparency idea. “Are we really going to say that?” people would ask. “Yes, we are,” he’d have to answer, over and over. Whether you go 100% transparent or not, social media marketing is often disruptive technology and, as such, it scares people. Prepare for it.
2. Analyze your climate. How much is your company ready for in terms of social media? If you read Naked Conversations (and you should) or Cluetrain Manifesto (and you should), they talk a lot about transparency and authenticity. And that’s absolutely the goal. But some corporations are so far from that ideal that it’s not realistic to expect them to suddenly have an epiphany and start taking down the walls. Perhaps getting them in the game is a good first start. I suspect that’s what’s happening at Delta with their blog. At this point, it’s not a great blog. But they’ve got their toe in the water. I would bet that getting them that far along wasn’t easy internally. (Right, Jacob?) If the folks working on this at Delta can navigate along for a couple months with no major turbulence (airplane metaphor!), perhaps they’ll be able to start saying interesting things. Sometimes getting started is a big win. Get started.
3. Consider the toolbox. One of the biggest mistakes I see is when people think that “social media marketing” means they’ve got to start a blog and start sharing all their foibles in public. You can do that. It can be a powerful and great thing. But social media is a much, much deeper toolbox. What can you do with customer support? What can you do in product development? What conversations are already taking place that you can simply go participate in? What branded applications can you introduce for download? This is why social media marketing is so different. It’s not advertising, it’s not PR, it’s not SEO. It’s a different skillset, and you have to look it at that way.
4. Be honest about your brand. The best social media marketing leverages your brand. It does not change your brand. In an earlier post, we talked about how Wal-Mart screwed up again with their Facebook app for back to school. Wal-Mart’s mistake was trying to use a Facebook app to convince people they should associate Wal-Mart with “style.” But Target owns “style.” Wal-Mart owns “price.” I suspect their ad agency or PR firm tried to use this new tool to drive a branding objective. That’s a mistake. The best social media campaigns further cement your brand position. They don’t create new brand positions for you. Use other tools to try to do that. (And good luck with it, by the way…)
5. Talk on your customers’ terms. In traditional marketing and advertising and PR, we are trained to think about what we want to say and the best, most creative way to say it. We then find the place to put that message and hope people accept it. Social media is different. Figure out what conversations are already occurring and where. Figure out what’s being said and what your organization can add to that conversation. If you sell shoes, maybe you can add value to a running conversation. If you sell ham, maybe you can add conversation to a “what’s for dinner” conversation. Either way, you’ll have the most success if you start with what the customer group you covet cares about and then add real value, not marketing fluff.

These are the first five steps I advise clients to consider as they look at a social media marketing campaign. There are others, but I start with these to make it clear that we’re not talking about an ad campaign or a PR campaign or an SEO campaign. We’re talking about something fundamentally different.

I then balance that scary “this is different” concept with two points:

• There are a lot of ways to get started in this space and in getting started, you will learn something and move your company forward.
• Choosing not to participate in social media won’t stop social media from engaging about your brand. If you know people are talking about you, wouldn’t you want to be part of the conversation?

In that vain, what steps would you add? Perhaps we can make this a dynamic list with your input. Leave your comments…

With competition in the healthcare industry ever increasing, more and more hospitals are responding by stepping up their marketing efforts. As a result, many of these hospitals undergo intensive re-branding processes and ad campaigns in order to differentiate themselves from competition and to overall increase market share.

When executed properly, the right campaign with the right media placement can yield results and place a hospital at top-of-mind. However, I can’t help but to think that the majority of these efforts get lost in the mix. Caring. Quality. Compassion. These are all great messages that many hospitals are conveying – but there is an obvious need for a stronger differentiator.

Because of this, I can’t help but to think that for hospitals willing to take the risk – social media could become this differentiator. After all, blogs, social networks, and other social media tools could provide new ways for hospitals to extend and grow relationships with their patients.

The Mayo Clinic is one such hospital willing to take the risk. By partnering with CarePages, they are attempting to tie their patients into this social network of patients struggling with long term illnesses. This opens a new space for patients to share their struggle, discuss it with others, and a place for friends and family to be updated or share encouraging words. But more than any of its applications, it’s an extension of the support the clinic currently gives, it is a reflection that the hospital cares about the physical and emotional healing of its patients.

If implemented correctly, social media applications such as this could impact a hospital in a big way. Patients could become more deeply rooted and deeply connected to each other and to the hospital. The advertising message of “Caring” or “Compassion” would be further reinforced.

Unfortunately, I realize that social media in most of the healthcare industry will face large barriers in implementation. Hospitals are typically slow-adopters. Laws like HIPAA surrounding the disclosure of information have made many hospitals reluctant to delve into uncharted territory.

So while it will be a long time coming for the rest, those who are willing to take the plunge first like the Mayo Clinic will surely reap the benefits of this implementation.

I can’t count on two hands how many times I’ve heard “What’s the point of Twitter?”. In fact, I can also remember a time when I’ve felt this way too. The primary questions are, “How is it different than instant messenger?, or in the words of one family member, “Why would anybody want to know when I’m cutting my grass?”.

So from the outside I completely understand why Twitter appears pointless. I understand that it is hard to believe why somebody would care about my 140 character postings through the day, inspired at random times about completely random things.

However, in the personal realm, I have seen how Twitter has the potential to grow relationships in a much different way than other social media. While blogs and social networks allow users to create neatly packaged profiles or eloquently written posts, Twitter is focused on created an ongoing broadcast of it’s users “day to day” or “minute by minute”. As a result, these seemingly insignificant posts can collectively form a user’s identity and strengthen a social network. For instance, by following a few of Jim’s “twitter’s” I can see he’s a professional who is clearly interested in social media, he went tubing on Falls Lake this weekend, and that he still pulls for Duke even when they lose. This translates in the marketing realm as a new way for businesses to integrate updates, news, promotions and events into a medium that is valuable and entertaining for its followers.

What further differentiates Twitter from instant messenger and what makes it particularly interesting in social media marketing is that it is entirely broadcast in nature. A thought is opened up for all who want to follow. Responses are entirely optional. Tweets are far-reaching and sometimes out of context. And as a result, the reach of topics is expanded and audiences can connect on a wide variety of levels. The result is a less-intrusive way for marketers to convey a message.

If you are still having trouble understanding the applications of Twitter – start by integrating it into your daily routine by installing Twitbin or Twitterific to keep updated. The more you use Twitter, the more the applications and uses will begin to emerge.

I have an odd sense of humor. I find tripping funny. If you take a spill in front of me, I will have to finish laughing before I help you up. Have a piece of toilet paper on your shoe? I might not be able to conjure the words to tell you.

Perhaps I’m easily amused (and a little too into social media) , but I started rolling when I saw Delta’s blog , the company’s formal attempt to “reach out to customers” and “start conversations”.

The comments are what really throw the whole thing over the edge for me. From the first post there are 29 responses, mostly which look like they are written from their own employees. Here’s a sampling of my favorite:

” What a great idea. It’s going to be nice to be able to communicate with the best domestic airline in the sky’s today! Hopefully, you’ll be able to have meat communications and not just use the blog as a marketing tool, but a true communications medium just like some of the most-read blogs out there do.”

“This is why I love working for this airline. I hope that our customers leave meaningful feedback. And please don’t hesitate to accentuate the positive. GO DELTA!”

Is this for real?! Who really says “best domestic airline?”, and why would someone encourage readers to not be afraid to “accentuate the positive?”.

Perhaps an airline that is slightly scared of social media.

After all, that is the only reason I can come up with for Delta writing a post that announces a Delta iMix on iTunes. I still can’t understand why anybody in their right mind would be excited about a boarding music playlist, and why there weren’t any responses that recommended Delta to get better music. And for the post “What’s up with JFK in a good way?! , I can’t be the only person who thinks that there is nothing elite about “JFK’s elite area”? (shown right)

Why is this? Perhaps because the site limits viewers to logging in with user names and passwords to post comments. I’m still waiting on my commenting access so I can tell them what’s on my mind. After this post, I’m not sure I’ll ever receive it.

However, as much as I take humor in this, the reality is that if the blog’s positive employee feedback is the only feedback, and the posts don’t really address real concerns, Delta will ultimately fall flat on its face. So here’s your Friday tip: If you are writing or starting a blog – don’t be scared of negative feedback to the point it limits your discussions. Instead, expect and anticipate this feedback. Write posts that may shake things up a bit. In the long run this will increase your company’s value and credibility.