Is Twitter the natural evolution of customer service? The immediacy and transparency of tweeted support is all the rage, with defined case studies (@ComcastCares, @JetBlue) and emerging software to enable and track it.
The software support is the more recent and intriguing development. CRM behemoth (more than 50,000 corporate customers) and SaaS superstar Salesforce.com released an add-on that automatically scans the Twitter-sphere (using some flavor of Twitter search). If tweets matching pre-defined keywords are located and for example, a support ticket is automatically opened in Salesforce and is routed for attention similar to a phone or email inquiry.
Co-Tweet (currently in beta) enables corporations to have multiple tweeters involved, but keeps tweets synced and organized across the enterprise. Early testers include Ford, Pepsi, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines. Advisors include members of the Twitter royal family @pistachio and @guykawasaki.
It’s clear that provision of customer service via Twitter is going to expand, at least in the short term. This scenario has clear (at least to me) pros and cons.

Consumer Benefits

1. Speed
Customer service on Twitter is defined by rapid response. Thousands of companies are actively eavesdropping on social media conversations, enabled by Radian6, Techrigy, Spiral16 and other software. Those that are choosing to engage the consumer are typically doing so by addressing concerns in real-time. No “an agent will respond to your request within 2 business days.”
2. Frictionless
In an effort to reduce costs, most medium and large companies have made getting help about as easy as booking a Michael Jackson concert tour in the Bible belt. Automated menus. Lengthy hold times. Outsourced staff. You’d think companies would WANT to know when their products have an issue, but that’s not the message they’re sending.
It’s different on Twitter. It’s hassle-free complaining. You bitch about something, and if the company is engaged, they tweet you back and try to help. It’s like being able to press “0″ for an operator without needing a phone.

Company Benefits

1. Cost
I haven’t seen any reporting on this yet, but I believe Twitter-based customer service is incredibly cost-effective on a per resolved issue basis. Why? Consumers have to get right to the point. No four minute preamble detailing that they were “with their Aunt Gert when they brought the product (may she rest in peace)”, and that the “weather was frightful that day. A real Nor’Easter.” Just 140 characters of complaint. In an era when call center efficiency is measured by the second, this is a meaningful advantage.
2. Translucency
The notion of “transparency” is a big one in social media circles, but I prefer Beth Harte’s more realistic use of “translucency” since companies will not and cannot be truly transparent. (Trust me, my first job was at McDonald’s and you don’t want full transparency re: the nature of Big Mac sauce).
As Tony Hsieh emphasized at his SXSW keynote, and I referenced in my post about Please and Thank You, there are two advantages to being publicly helpful. First, other people see you being helpful, and that improves overall brand perception. Second (and this is really big in a Twitter context), other people see your answers, so they don’t have to ask the same question.

Customer Drawbacks

1. The Great Unknown
Just about everyone knows Comcast is on Twitter. But is Sony (I’m actually having a TV problem right now)? Is Trek bicycles? Is the company that made the cork flooring in my laundry room that’s looking a little sketchy? Is Diet Dr. Pepper?
As a consumer, I know every brand has a phone number, a Web site, and an email address. Twitter engagement is still VERY circumstantial. I have to guess whether the brand I need to communicate with is involved. That’s inefficient, and a hassle.
2. Shouting from the Rooftops
Certain customer service issues (mainly those where the brand is clearly at fault) are ripe for Twitter enablement. But sometimes, the consumer shares the blame, and needs help for a problem that might be better handled in a quiet, 1:1 fashion. I’m thinking of the “I didn’t read the directions, and now my hair turned green” scenario. Do you want to tweet that to all of your followers?

Company Drawbacks

1. Lack of Account History
One of the most useful components of modern CRM systems is their ability to pull up complete account history during the call, email, or live chat. The agent knows what you’ve bought, when you’ve called before, whether or not you’re a kook, etc. On Twitter, the customer service representative has very little information (possibly not even your real name). That makes service provision tricky.
2. Ephemeral
The new software developments above may assist in this regard, but a big problem with Twitter customer service is lack of record-keeping, I can see Comcast agents printing out Twitter conversations via Twitter search in an effort to log number of contacts.
What do you think? Should all companies get involved with customer service on Twitter? Only certain industries? None?

Hell, I make my living as a social media consultant and trainer, so I’m certainly contributing to the boom.
But, let’s not forget that social media does not – and cannot – exist in a vacuum. It’s not as if your brand can overcome a litany of other deficiencies just because you’re engaging customers on Twitter, or blogging every day.
If your product or service is inadequate, social media won’t fix that, it will highlight it. And more importantly, if the way you treat your customers within the social media sphere is inherently different than how you treat them elsewhere, you’re playing with fire.

@GreatDivide

That’s one of the concerns I have with some of the brands that are using Twitter well. Comcast, for example. Frank Eliason and his team have doubtlessly helped thousands of customers in a very real and tangible way through their @comcastcares Twitter-based customer service program. People that have interacted with Frank and Co in that channel invariably rave. But, does the customer experience elsewhere meet the same standard? Do customers that access Comcast customer service via phone or email also rave?
(I’m not a Comcast customer, so that’s a semi-rhetorical question. If you have some insights, please comment)
Are we inadvertently creating a Customer Chasm, where those who are socially media active are receiving preferential treatment compared to those who are not? And not just in customer service, but in customer acquisition too?
Papa John’s gives discounts for online pizza ordering to their Facebook friends. The aforementioned Gary Vaynerchuk sends out periodic free wine shipping offers via Twitter. I’m working on a project where a company would provide priority appointment setting opportunities to friends and followers.
Is that great marketing and killer customer service, or is it unfair?
Are we disproportionately rewarding customers just because they are using the newest technology? Are customers that interact with companies by telephone and email not cool enough to matter?
I think there’s three possible approaches:
1. Equality: We should be treating all customers equally and ensuring a consistent experience with the brand
2. Segmentation: We are purposefully providing social media active customers a different experience, one that’s optimized for their preferred method of brand engagement, the same way that some mobile phone customers get their bills via, and some get them via postal mail
3. Relationship Value: We are intentionally providing customers using social media an enhanced experience. By doing so we will create profitable relationships that generate a higher lifetime customer value than would be generated by customers not using social media
Which of those is the best justification for creating a social media divide among your customers?
(photo by mio_please)

At the recent Email Evolutions Conference, direct marketing legend Stan Rapp pointed out that the advertising on this year’s Super Bowl equalled approximately one third of the total amount spent on email marketing in the U.S. last year.
Think about it. Thirty minutes or so of commercials featuring babies, monkeys, snow globes, horses and other trickery hoping to garner new customers in an economy where consumers are at best disinterested in establishing new brand relationships. Contrast that with email (and social media) where you can communicate directly to people that have already expressed an interest.

Turn Your Budget Inside Out

In an economy like this, why are we still having conversations about the effectiveness of radio versus print? Why aren’t companies turning their marketing budgets inside out, and focusing the vast majority of their resources on taking care of their current customers?
Think about it. How relevant and timely could your email program be if you invested in it what it costs to make even a modest broadcast commercial? How many Comcast Cares – style social media brand ambassadors could you hire instead of the money you spend on Yellow Pages or print ads?
Are you doing everything you can to hold on to the customers you have? I’ll argue that if you’re spending even one dollar on outbound, acquisition efforts you are not.

Think Bottom Line, Not Top Line

This approach requires a complete overhaul of the notion of ROI, moving from a customers and dollars gained mindset to a customers retained and dollars protected perspective. And how many industries can truly expect top line growth in the next couple years? If you’re not one of them, why are you continuing to focus on filling the top of the funnel instead of sewing the bottom of the funnel shut with killer customer service, social media outreach, and improved operations?
Think about it.
(photo by Gaetan Lee)

This emboldened their parents, who then got into a variety of shoving matches with our parents. Police were called. Fans were ejected. And so on.
The core allegation was that our hockey association had paid the referees to ensure that our local boys would win the tournament. Their team ultimately won the game, and we went back to the kinder, gentler existence that is a requirement of life in a small ski town.
It became staggeringly clear to me that day that people care about 7 year-old hockey disproportionately. They were literally willing to fight over it as if it was an Olympic medal game. For us, it’s just fun for the kids.
And the same is true of social media, were a schism is developing between the true believers who view it with a purity of spirit, and the interlopers who see it as a business opportunity.

Social Media Fight Club

Debates are popping up like long lost relatives of lottery winners. Whether it’s okay to put links in a blog comment. Whether it’s permissible to tweet about your own blog posts. Whether you should send bulk messages via LinkedIn. Whether you should “friend” people on Facebook that you don’t really know that well.
This conversation about what’s right and what’s out-of-bounds is a natural and healthy byproduct of any growing phenomenon that touches hundreds of millions of people. There is no social media Czar (except maybe Brogan), and there are no “rules” (hat tip to Mack Collier for his post on that subject). Like sandlot football, the guidelines for acceptable behavior will be set by the participants themselves (for now). And that’s why dust-ups like Brogan’s K-Mart sponsored posts and every other element that isn’t obviously okay are so good for social media. They force us to confront the possibilities and begin to develop norms based on mutual accord. (Great post by Paul Chaney here on Daily Fix about the history of these controversies)

We Determine Right and Wrong Together

This cycle repeats. Spam email wasn’t always evil. We mutually determined it was so, and then the government reinforced it. Domain names were once free, and squatting was okay. Then we all decided that was bad policy. Ridiculous, animated envelope graphics were once de rigeur on Web sites, until their utter pointlessness was deemed too much to bear.
Even before these conventions were established, the very nature of the Web as a viable commercial enterprise was debated vociferously. Sprung from military and educational facilities, the early Web was not for business, as I was reminded by with a series of angry emails when I bought the first banner ad on www.inc.com in 1994.
Ultimately, the business viability of the Web overran the anti-advertising purists, and I believe the same thing will happen with social media.
There are two social media camps. The first group (The Indirects) believe social media and its underlying principles of authenticity and helpfulness are a transit corridor for brand loyalty and success. The second group (The Directs) believe social media is the new SEO, a way to convey messages and generate business directly.
Would I prefer that all elements of social media be above-board and free of link spammers, Twitter egoists and others trying to game the system? Absolutely. But ultimately I believe The Directs will win because they treat social media like a business. If you believe dollars are at stake, you’ll continue to push the boundaries. They will play harder, and they’ll keep at it until the whistle blows.
Do you agree?

While it’s true that optimal social media requires the cooperation of multiple disciplines, that’s not the way the business of marketing works. When new tactics emerge, the purveyors of the historic methods circle, dodge, and proclaim that their experience best positions them to manufacture this new elixir. It happened with radio. It happened with Web sites. It happened (and is still ongoing) with regard to SEO and email. Social media is the new battleground.
The four combatants each have reasonable claims to social media ownership.
Advertising
Because social media often requires making stuff, and can impact overall brand perception, advertising should be in charge of social media. The rising importance of video within social media also favors advertising types.
Digital
Because social media is (at least for now) an online construct, the Internet marketing agencies should be in the driver’s seat. Plus, social media has major SEO implications in some cases, and most SEO is still handled by digital specialists.
Public Relations
Because social media is ultimately about conversations, and is non-linear, public relations is best equipped to manage social media efforts. Especially so given the demise of traditional journalism, the importance of blogger relations, and the blurring of the lines between customer and reporter.
Client
Because social media is ideally an extension and manifestation of the brand’s operations and culture, and requires near-constant vigilance and engagement, the client is best able to oversee social media. Comcast is a good example of this philosophy.
There is also a surge of social media firms like Brains on Fire and Crayon. While there is a place for these specialists, they won’t be the norm. There is too much at stake this time, and advertising is just now recovering from the industry-wide hubris that caused them to largely miss the digital wave, giving rise to hundreds of digital agencies. They won’t repeat that blunder.
The outcome of this struggle hinges on a single factor. Will social media become viewed as a tactical or strategic component? Of course, it will be both in practice, but in 2009 our shared understanding of what social media is and how it works will swell considerably. And within that accepted norm will be placement of social media in the strategic (advertising), or tactical (digital) bucket.
As I’ve written here before, I’m a proponent of social media strategy and elevating the conversation beyond whether Wikipedia or Knol is a better platform. I very much hope the social media “industry” tilts in that direction. If it does, public relations is best able to lead the social media charge. They straddle the line between strategic and tactical currently, they are hungry to take on the social media assignment, and their background in content creation and conversation is well-suited.
No question that public relations has a long way to go before they have social media conquered. At present, way too many clumsy blogger pitches and not enough digital savvy. But I think they can and will get there. In the social media tug-of-war, I’m pulling on the rope of PR.
How about you?
(photo by futureshape)

I use a 7-step Social Media Strategy Worksheet to create a framework that governs what the initiative aims to accomplish. (You can download the Social Media Strategy Workshop as a PDF here, and use it as much as you like, with attribution).
Step One: Describe the Business
Sounds basic, but if you can’t describe the precise value proposition of the brand in a sentence (without a bunch of mission statement crap-ola), you need to figure that out first.
Step Two: Business Goal
Trying to do too much in social media muddles your message and confuses your fans. You can focus on one goal for a while, and then change objectives later, but don’t try to tackle multiple goals simultaneously. There are only 3 realistic business goals for a social media effort. So pick one of these.

• Brand Ethusiasm. Turning customers into fans, driving repeat purchases.
• Sales. Using social media to create first-time customers or to introduce your brand.
• Loyalty. Decreasing customer churn, improving customer service.

Step Three: Where Is the Audience Cyclically?
Huge segments of your customers and prospects have wholly different relationships with your brand. Some have never heard of you. Others are raving fans. Which are you trying to reach in this program? You need to be specific here because what your target audience already knows about you dictates what you can credibly have a conversation about in social media. Pick no more than two of these:

• Awareness. They’ve maybe heard of you, vaguely.
• Interest. They’ve heard of you and maybe have visited a Web site. No purchases.
• Action. They’ve made a single purchase.
• Advocacy. They are fans of the brand. Frequent purchases, tell their friends, etc.

Step 4: How Does the Audience Use Social Media?
Rolling out a social media program that features a customer photo contest is going to fail spectacularly if your audience isn’t prone to content creation. Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, determine how your audience behaves within social media. You may have to guess on this one a bit, but better yet how about surveying your customers via email and ASKING THEM how they use social media? Pick one or two from among these: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators
Step 5: The One Thing
To be successful in social media, you need to distill your brand into the one thing that’s truly interesting, and in most cases it’s not product related. Figure out your one thing, and bring it to life in social media. Social media may be word of mouth on steroids (says Gary Vaynerchuk), but if you don’t give people something intriguing to talk about, they’ll never open their mouths.
Step 6: How Will You Humanize the Brand
Why do consumers love social media? Because it puts them on a more equal footing with brands that have been historically shrouded, impersonal and aloof. If your social media strategy doesn’t put a literal or figurative face on your brand in one or many ways, you’re missing the point.
Step 7: How Will You Measure Success?
Pick three metrics that matter to your company, and measure them consistently and well. Ideally, establish a baseline before your social media program starts. If your business goal is loyalty, you can measure true ROI by focusing on churn metrics. For brand enthusiasm, you can focus on repeat purchases. If you want to get more granular, there are dozens of potential success metrics like share of voice in social media, blog posts and tweets, comments, fans/friends in your social media outposts, etc. I’ll leave those details for another post or experts like KD Paine, but please pick only 3 success metrics. Nobody wants a 27-item results report or dashboard.

Successful social media programs cannot be just a digital yellow pages ad for the company. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of these efforts on Facebook and Twitter recently, where the company sets up shop in social media, but just continues sending one-way promotional messages like they always have in old media. This won’t work, and why would it?
Caution, paradox ahead

To really make social media work for your company, your message cannot be ABOUT your company. Unless you’re one of the very few companies that already has a natural community of raving fans (apple, nike etc) people don’t care about your company enough per se to get involved with you online in a meaningful way.
Instead, you have to find the ONE THING in your company that is truly defining and interesting, and build your social media program around that. It could be something operational. Perhaps your customer service program. How people use your product in unique ways. Anything, as long as it isn’t “we’re a good company that makes a good product”
Fiskars used the fact that scrapbookers were crazy about their scissors as their ONE THING when they launched the Fiskateers program with the help of Brains on Fire, and now it’s a definitive social media case study.
For most people, when they think Zappos they don’t necessarily think shoes anymore, they think customer service. That’s their ONE THING and they beat that drum continuously.
A campaign I worked on with Mighty Interactive for Exide Batteries focused on NASCAR fans and Exide’s status as the official battery of NASCAR, not the fact that they make a great car battery.
It’s probably under your nose

Finding the one thing often requires really spending time with the brand and getting a feel for its operations and culture. Agencies can uncover the one thing better than clients can, because for the clients the one thing appears to be no big deal. It’s just routine.
Here’s an example that pre-dates social media by about 15 years. When I was an intern at an agency in Phoenix I worked on communications for car audio maker Rockford Fosgate. We wanted to devise a campaign that was different from most car audio gear, which typically focuses on testosterone, loudness, and detailed specs.
On a factory tour, we came upon a huge guy with a long black ponytail, a white apron, and a giant rubber mallet that looked like something out of “Cooking with the Hell’s Angels.” Standing at the end of the assembly line, he grabbed every amplifier off of the line as it came down, and beat it as hard as he could with the rubber mallet about 9 times. After the thrashing, he hooked the amp up to a testing station and made sure it still worked.
We asked the client tour guide about it, and he said it was indeed a daily occurrence, part of Rockford Fosgate’s quality assurance program.
A campaign was born.
We convinced the company to let us use the actual guy in the campaign, and we created a series of print ads and media outreaches using the “If We Can’t Wail It, We Fail It” tagline, with explanatory copy.
It’s too bad social media wasn’t around then, because we really could have put some legs on that effort. YouTube video. Guest wailers. Twitter campaign. I’m stoked just thinking about it. (Rockford Fosgate if you still wail it, please steal this idea).
What seems boring to you inside your company might seem fascinating to your customers. It could be your ONE THING. And without it, your social media effort will never take flight.
Do you have examples of the ONE THING? Leave a comment with the brand and their one thing, won’t you?
(photo by Qole Pejorian)