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Vrije Universiteit Brussel Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management
Executive Master in Marketing and Advertising
Customer as marketer: friend or enemy?
Paper by Davy Warnez
Promoted by Christian Blümelhuber
November 2010
Customer as marketer: friend or enemy?
by Davy Warnez
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Sir Winston Churchill
Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1
Social media as enabler of voice of the customer .................................................................................. 2
Customer as marketer ......................................................................................................................... 2
Impact customer as marketer on sales funnel .................................................................................... 4
Customer as friend or enemy .............................................................................................................. 6
Getting started with social media ........................................................................................................... 9
People – what are your customers ready for? .................................................................................... 9
Objectives – decide what you want to accomplish ........................................................................... 10
Listening ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Talking ........................................................................................................................................... 11
Energizing ...................................................................................................................................... 16
Supporting ..................................................................................................................................... 18
Embracing ...................................................................................................................................... 20
Strategy – plan for how relationships with customers will change .................................................. 21
Technology – decide which social technologies to use ..................................................................... 22
Measuring the impact of social media on customer equity .................................................................. 23
Impact of social media on Customer Equity ...................................................................................... 23
ROI is a business metric, not a media metric .................................................................................... 24
How social media can help to rebuild trust in the financial industry .................................................... 27
It all start with listening and open communication .......................................................................... 27
Customer service as differentiator .................................................................................................... 28
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 32
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................... 33
Annexes ................................................................................................................................................. 35
1
Introduction
ocial media has altered the face of the digital space over the last five years. Customers now spend more time on social networking sites,
surfing reviews, watching videos, and writing or reading blogs than any other activity on the internet1 . Word of mouth is not a new concept, but what happens when this is taken to another level? What happens when word of mouth goes world of mouth?
This is the subject of this paper: what is the impact of social media on the customer as marketer. It is written for companies who want to engage in social media, but do not know how or where to start.
This paper is not an explanation of what social media is.
In the first chapter, Social media as enabler of voice of the customer, we discuss if a customer can be a marketer and define what the customer as friend or enemy stands for.
In the second chapter, Getting started with social media, we go through Forrester’s POST (People – Objectives – Strategy – Technology) methodology of how to get started with social media.
Once started with social, you have to be able to measure the ROI. That is the content of the third chapter, Measuring the impact of social media on customer equity.
In the last chapter, How social media can help to rebuild trust in the financial industry, we have a look at what social media could mean for the financial industry, an industry heavily impacted by the economic crisis and the industry for which public trust has sunk to historic lows. Is there a role to play for social media in a for customers not so sexy and by the crisis heavily impacted sector?
1 According to Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.net, social media has now overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the internet
S
Research methodology ‐ latest industry and academic research has been used, as well as primary data from interviews with industry experts. Interviews took place during August‐September 2010. For more information on used industry and academic research: see Bibliography; for more information on interviews: see Annex I
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
Wayne Gretzky
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Social media as enabler of voice of the customer
f Facebook was a country it would be the third largetst country in the world behind only China and India, on YouTube 24h of movies are
uploaded every minute, … It is difficult not being confronted with the exponential growth and impact of social media (from mass mobilizations e.g. protest in Iran to individual artists freed from constraints of social class e.g. the UK’s singer Susan Boyle); there is even a movie about Facebook now playing in the cinemas. Should your company catch this social media train? Before giving an answer to this, let us start with the beginning: the customer as marketer and/or friend/enemy and how this affects the traditional view on the sales funnel.
Customer as marketer According to a Nielsen2 Global Online Customer Survey of over 25k internet customers from 50 countries, despite an ever‐expanding array of advertising platforms and sources, customers around the world still place their highest levels of trust in other customers. Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. Brand websites is the most trusted form of advertiser‐led advertising (see figure 1). Although the survey is targeted to an online population, it gives a clear indication of the importance of word of mouth – and thus the importance of the customer ‐ in the decision process of other customers.
TO WHAT EXTENT DO YOU TRUST FOLLOWING FORM OF ADVERTISING? % Recommendations from customers 90%Customer opinions posted online 70%Brand websites 70%Editorial content (eg newspaper article) 69%Brand sponsorships 64%Television 62%Newspaper 61%Magazines 59%Billboards/outdoor advertising 55%Radio 55%E‐mail I signed up for 54%Ads before movies 52%Search engine ads 41%Online video ads 37%Online banner ads 33%Text ads on mobile phones 24%Figure 1: Trust in Advertising, Nielsen
2 Nielsen (2009), Trust in Advertising
I Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost‐effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to the marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite customer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.
Seth Godin
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Word of mouth is not a new concept (e.g. water cooler conversations, readers' letters sent to newspapers, …), but due to social media it is taken to another level: word of mouth has become world of mouth. Indeed, by enabling people to share and interact with each other, social media enables ‘content’ to become more democratized than ever before3 . But has every customer the same impact?
Influencers have always existed but on digital channels they have a stronger voice than ever. Making or breaking a brand can happen in many ways, online social influencers can play a huge role in it. Augie Ray4 identified three types of influencers who have value (and pose risks) for your brand and marketing efforts, and each must be engaged in a different manner (see figure 2). Social Broadcasters (e.g. Oprah Winfrey) are appealing because of their large followings, but they tend to
assist more with awareness than with preference. Mass Influencers is a new category of influencer created thanks to the scale afforded customers by social media tools. Finally, the vast majority of social media participants are Potential Influencers, people who have modest networks rich with trust.
Figure 2: Pyramid of Peer Influence, Forrester Research
These mass influencers are by Ray and Bernoff5 further divided into Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens:
• Mass Connectors – have personal connections with large numbers of people in social venues such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn,… and they post frequently about products and services in these environments. Are motivated by the drive to know and associate with others.
• Mass Mavens – people with knowledge and insights to share. Social applications have given them a way to exert mass influence, distributing their wisdom and opinions to large numbers via their blogs, on forums, on in reviews on ratings sites. Are motivated by the desire to collect and distribute facts, insights and opinions.
These mass influencers are according to Ray and Bernoff in the US good for about 16% of the population, but they are responsible for 80% of the brand impressions in online social settings.
3 Drury, Glen (2008), Social media: Should marketers engage and how can it be done effectively?, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practices, Vol.9 No3 pg 274‐277 4 Ray, Augie (2010), Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid ‐ Marketers Must Leverage The Three Tiers Of Online Peer Influence 5 Ray, Augie & Bernoff, Josh (2010), Peer Influence Analysis
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The sender of the message is only one of McKinsey’s6 4 elements for calculating what they call word‐of‐mouth equity: an index of a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the customer’s decision to purchase:
1. what is said ‐ the content of a message must address important product or service features if it is to influence customer decision
2. who sends the message ‐ the receiver must trust the sender and believe that he or she really knows the product or service in question
3. why the message is sent – the customer’s own experiences with a product or service is more powerful than e.g. hearsay
4. environment where word of mouth circulates ‐ trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities
McKinsey calculated that a high‐impact recommendation – from a trusted friend conveying a relevant message for example – is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low impact recommendation.
The customer can be considered as a marketer in charge of the advertising channel trusted the most by its fellow customers; not every customer has the same impact and reach via word of mouth communication.
Impact customer as marketer on sales funnel Social media has unlocked the voice of the customer. The different technologies that made spreading of User Generated Content more easily can be categorized in different ways. Constantinidis & Fountain7 identified 5 categories:
1. Blogs ‐ online journals often combined with Podcasts 2. Social networks ‐ applications allowing users to build personal websites accessible to other
users for exchange of personal content and communication 3. Communities ‐ websites organizing and sharing particular types of content 4. Forums/bulletin boards ‐ sites for exchanging ideas and information usually around special
interests 5. Content aggregators ‐ applications allowing users to fully customize the web content they
wish to access. These sites make use of a technique known as Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (RSS)
Whereas marketing with traditional media like newspapers, television, … was about delivering a message to as many people (eyeballs) as possible, marketing with social media is about building a relationship and conversation with your (potential) customers. What will be the impact of this on the traditional concept of the sales funnel?
6 Bughin, Jacques & Doogan, Jonathan & Vetvik, Ole Jørgen (2010), A new way to measure word‐of‐mouth marketing, McKinsey Quarterly 7 Constantinidis, Efthymios & Fountain, Stephan (2008), Web 2.0: Conceptual Foundations and Marketing Issues, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, Vol.9 No3 pg 231‐244
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The metaphor of a ‘funnel8 ’ is about customers starting with a number of potential brands in mind (the wide end of the funnel), marketing is then directed at them as they methodically reduce that number and move through the funnel, and at the end they emerge with the one brand they chose to purchase.
Figure 3: Traditional Sales Funnel, Forrester Research
Clo Willaerts, Business Unit Manager Conversity.be, sees a change going on from the industrial way of marketing (funnel vision) towards a ‘new humanist’ way of marketing where the customer is again in the center:
“Social media is a key enabler which builds bridges/relations among customers and between the customers and the company: there is a two way conversation possible between all participants. Terms like ‘consumers’ and ‘user’ are still terms referring to the one‐way conversation where the company was in charge and forced its will on the customer. Companies should make customer‐centricity a true value evident in their tactics in practice, not just an empty shell in their mission statement.”
That customers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products – is described by McKinsey9 in their report Consumer decision journey. According to them, it is not a funnel but a more circular journey, with four primary phases representing potential battlegrounds where marketers can win or lose (see figure 4).
Figure 4: The Consumer decision journey, McKinsey
8 A funnel implies that everything what goes in, must at the end come out – which is not the case here. 9 Court, David & Elzinga, Dave & Mulder, Susan & Vetvik, Ole Jørgen (2009), Consumer decision journey, McKinsey Quarterly
Between the classical sales funnel vision and McKinsey’s consumer decision journey vision, there are 3 main differences:
1. The number of brands under consideration during the active evaluation phase may now actually expand rather than narrow as customers seek information and shop a category ‐ The fragmenting of media and the proliferation of products have actually made customers to reduce the number of brands they consider at the outset. Faced with plenty of choices and communications, customers tend to fall back on the limited set of brands that have made it through the wilderness of messages. Brand awareness matters: brands in the initial consideration set can be up to three times more likely to be purchased eventually than brands that aren’t in it.
2. Outreach of customers to marketers has become dramatically more important than marketers’ outreach to customers ‐ Marketing used to be driven by companies; ‘pushed’ on customers through traditional advertising, direct marketing, sponsorships, and other channels. In today’s decision journey, customer‐driven marketing is increasingly important as customers seize control of the process and actively ‘pull’ information helpful to them. Traditional marketing remains important, but the change in the way customers make decisions means that marketers must move aggressively beyond purely push‐style communication and learn to influence customer‐driven touch points, such as word‐of‐mouth and Internet information sites.
3. Buying is not the end point but input for the next decision journey ‐ When customers reach a decision at the moment of purchase, the marketer’s work has just begun: the post purchase experience shapes their opinion for every subsequent decision in the category, so the journey is an ongoing cycle.
Keep in mind that no amount of marketing hype will ever save a bad product, regardless of the medium, social or otherwise ‐ everything starts with good products.
Social media has an important impact on the classical view of the sales funnel: social media is about 2‐way communication leveraging relationships and networks. It does not replace existing marketing techniques, it complements other online and offline marketing initiatives.
Customer as friend or enemy Under the assumption that companies want to receive money and make profit in order to increase the value of the company, what would be your definition of a customer as friend? Profitable customer? Happy customer? And vice versa how would you define the customer as enemy? Unprofitable customer? Customer complaining?
The fact that a customer wants to pay you in exchange for your product or service is a good thing, however that doesn't automatically make that customer a friend: a profitable customer on the short term is not necessarily a profitable customer on the long term (e.g. value destroyers). A customer complaining is not by definition negative: the customer is giving you the opportunity to remedy the situation immediately (and hopefully the customer will go away happy). But what is the definition than of a customer as friend or enemy?
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Patrick Willemarck, founder Brandialog, states that a customer by definition wants to be your friend and that by not helping him or worse, by ignoring him, he or she could become an enemy:
“Customers expect that companies help them. If you are willing to help your customers, you will become or stay their friend. If you ignore customers than you will probably make enemies. Most companies would probably never intentionally ignore customers. They would not turn their back on them at the counter, ignore their phone or delete e‐mails from them. But customer conversations are also happening online now, and ignoring the impact and influence of social media is similar to ignoring customers. These customers are praising products, asking questions, expressing issues, offering suggestions, expressing needs to fulfill – all in the various social media channels. Choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. Ignoring these conversations will probably make you some enemies.”
That customers want to be helped and if ignored they could turn into an enemy became reality for T‐Mobile in the Netherlands10 : their customer support service kept the son of the Dutch cabaretier Youp van ‘t Hek waiting for months without providing a clear answer nor solution for the replacement of his mobile phone. When Youp van ‘t Hek called himself to the contact center he was treated in the same (unhelpful) way. It was only after he ventilated his frustration on Twitter – which, in contrast to his call to the contact center, could be seen by all his followers on Twitter ‐ that his son’s problem was immediately solved. Unfortunately for T‐Mobile, it didn’t end with providing a solution…
Buzzcapture11 analyzed this incident and came to following conclusions: first weeks after the incident there was a 19% rise in negative sentiment on the internet about T‐Mobile resulting in an estimated reputation damage on social media of €100k‐€150k (as message was taken up by radio and television, reputation damage will be much higher). Or how one not resolved issue with one customer can bring the bad customer experience with the T‐Mobile customer support service department under national attention and have a direct negative impact on a company’s reputation.
That this consumer empowerment is not only reserved for ‘famous’ people is proven by Dave Caroll. His song ‘United Breaks Guitars’ has been viewed on YouTube12 by millions of people who are reminded of Dave Caroll’s bad customer experience with United Airlines’ luggage handling and complaints department.
These examples confirm the impact of mass influencers and more in general that via social media everyone can (more) easily spread good or bad publicity about your company to a much bigger audience than before. The case of Youp van ‘t Hek reminds us also of the need for a consistent cross channel customer experience: social media is not a separate channel, social media has to be integrated in your channel strategy in order to reach your company’s objective(s). If e.g. customer service is one of your company’s objectives and the resolution time of problems one of your KPI’s, than this KPI should not only be applicable to social media but to all channels. Social media should not be a gadget, but an integral part of your strategy.
10 Marketingtribune.nl (2010), Youp van ‘t Hek brengt T‐Mobile reputatieschade van een ton 11 Buzzcapture (2010), T‐Mobile en Youp van ‘t Hek, Buzzreport October 2010 12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
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But are friends not supposed to be able to forgive your faults and be there for you not in good times but also in bad times?
Peppers & Rogers13 state that for improving the value of your business, you have to earn the trust of your customers:
“If you concentrate on earning the trust of customers, you’ll almost guarantee that they come back to you more often, refer their friends to you, and generally create a great deal of future value for your business. If customers perceive that you are acting in their interests as well as your own, then they will be more likely to be loyal longer and to buy more products from you. So earning customer trust is a straightforward way to improve your value as a business.”
That is also my definition of the customer as friend: friendship is between two parties who trust each other and are helping each other to achieve their goals. Friends are there to provide support when times are tough, you can rely on them to celebrate special moments. Friendship is a combination of three crucial elements that all have to be present in order to speak of a true friend:
1. Two parties – just as in social media, friendship is a two‐way street 2. Trust ‐ trust is both an emotional and logical act: emotionally you expose your vulnerabilities
to people (not hiding them, being honest) and you believe they will not take advantage of your openness; logically you believe people will behave in a predictable manner based on previous behavior
3. Helping each other to achieve each other’s goals – friends can work together on creating a win‐win situation; before you can start working on creating a win‐win situation you have to know each other’s goals
Customers are by definition your friend. When one of these conditions is not fulfilled, than customers can become enemies. The customer as friend or enemy is hence different from a good or bad customer, profitable or unprofitable, happy or unhappy one.
Knowing the impact of word‐of‐mouth on the customer’s sales decision process and considering the (growing) impact of social media for broadcasting the voice of the customer, it is even more important than before to keep your customers as friends: people that trust you and help you to achieve your goals (and vice versa). The question if companies should start with social media is for me not relevant: your customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, your industry and your competitors right now in social media, with or without you. Therefore, in the next chapter, we will take a closer look on how – as a company ‐ you can start with social media.
13 Peppers, Don & Martha, Rogers (2008), Rules to Break and Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short‐Termism, pg 92‐93
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Getting started with social media
xecutives are going about social strategy backwards: picking technologies like blogs or communities first instead of focusing on what they
want to accomplish. Bernoff14 ’s POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) approach puts technology as the last step: before deciding which technology to use, you should know your target audience, find out what works (or does not work) for them, define your objective(s) for your presence on social media and have a vision on the actions to be launched in order to support the achievement of the objective(s).
Hakim Benbouchta, CEO Back in Business and former strategist at McCann, agrees with this philosophy: “As a company, you have to know your objective(s), your customers and the budget limit before deciding which social media to use. Social media is an enabler to reach your objective(s), not an objective on its own.”
People – what are your customers ready for? Don't start a social strategy until you know the capabilities of your audience. Skipping this step and making guesses about your customers can work, but you might also build a whole social networking strategy only to find out that your customers are more likely to read reviews than join social networks.
One way to segment your audience is via Forrester’s Social Technographics® Profile15 which classifies people into 6 categories based on how social media are used16 (see figure 5).
By asking which technologies your audience is using via a survey on your website or via a custom survey, you can estimate how your audience is represented in any subgroup. A social strategy to reach this target audience can then be developed taking into account the objective(s) for your presence on social media.
Figure 5: Forrester’s Social Technographics® Ladder
14 Bernoff, Josh (2007), Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Media Strategy 15 Bernoff, Josh (2010), Introducing The New Social Technographics® 16 http://www.forrester.com/empowered/tool_customer.html
E What do most companies do wrong when they enter the social world? No, it's not that they're being fake, or don't "get it". It's that they don't really know their objectives.
Josh Bernoff
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Objectives – decide what you want to accomplish Are you starting an application to listen to your customers, or to talk with them? To support them, or to energize your best customers to evangelize others? Or are you trying to collaborate with them? Decide on your objectives and how to measure them before you decide on a technology. Motivating your presence on social media only by “it is trendy” or “competition is doing it” are no valid options.
Li & Bernoff17 identified 5 main objectives for a company to engage in social media:
1. Listening – monitoring your customers conversations 2. Talking – participating with and stimulating 2‐way conversation with your audience 3. Energizing – allow enthusiastic customers to support each other 4. Supporting – enable your customers to support each other 5. Embracing – enabling your customers to help you improve products and/or services
Listening The individuals that buy and use your products and services are having conversations within their social networks right now. Some of them are discussing your products and their experiences of using these products and services, returning them, breaking them, loving them,… Some of them are discussing your competitor’s products and services and what they love and hate about them. Others are discussing your market place, what they really want, what they will pay good money for.
There is consensus among experts that the starting point for a company in social media is listening. Underneath you can find the main reasons for monitoring social media given by David Alstan, VP Marketing at Radian618 :
1. Complaint – a complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem‐solving abilities and may also draw out other comments from people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach out to them as well
2. Compliment – social media compliments are the online equivalent of those old school references or testimonials; save them for future reference for potential customers looking for reassurance on a purchase decision
3. Expressed need – people shouting out what they are doing and asking the general public for advice when they are about to make a purchase are both situations providing an opportunity to reach out with an offer of assistance
4. Competitor – following competition provides you with information on new competitors/ products on the scene, which industry players are advocates for competitive brands, subjects in which competitors are (strategically) interested in, …
5. Crowd – gives you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who the players are that have opinions on it; especially when the topic has the potential to affect your brand
6. Influencer – knowing who the influencers are and their opinions of your brands will help you to determine who to reach out to for help as advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view
17 Li, Charlene & Bernoff, Josh (2008), groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies 18 Alston, David (2008), Top 10 Reasons Why Brands Should Listen to Social Media: http://www.radian6.com/blog/2008/08/top‐10‐reasons‐brands‐should‐listen‐to‐social‐media/
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Van Belleghem19 points out in his book De Conversation Manager that most companies immediately want to engage in conversations with their customers and do not take (enough) time for the first step: observation of their customers. Only go to the next step if you know the answer on following questions:
• Where are my customers online?
• What are my customers’ social behaviors online?
• What is tone of voice of conversations?
• What social information or people do my customers rely on?
• What is my customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?
• How do my customers use social technologies in the context of your products?
Monitoring20 of these conversations/behaviors can be done via:
1. Do‐it‐yourself, don’t buy anything ‐ desk research trough searching Twitter, Google alerts, blog pulse,… will give an overview of your company and competitors
2. Software tools ‐ give you a platform to listen and measure discussion across the entire social web that will provide detailed reports, including sentiment (is not optimal yet) and workflow management
3. Engaging an agency ‐ who will use a software tool & their own proprietary processes to give you detailed information
Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company/products/services/ … is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then consider participating in the conversation.
Talking The Cluetrain Manifesto21 theorized that due to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e‐mail and chat rooms employees and customers alike found voices that undermine the traditional command‐and‐control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing departments. This book concludes that markets are conversations and that companies can no longer keep up and employees can no longer be controlled by corporate mandate and need to be empowered to keep the conversation going, by providing their opinions and making their value known. Should a company engage in all conversations related to its brand(s)/product(s)/ service(s)/… and is engaging in these conversations the job of all of its employees?
19 Van Belleghem, Steven (2010), De Conversation Manager 20 To have an overview of tools for monitoring the internet: go to annex II 21 Locke, Christopher & Levine, Rick & Searls, Doc & Weinberger, David (2000), The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
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The decision to engage into a conversation depends on the location and the context of the comment, the nature of the comment and also of your interest in engaging. Sometimes it is better not to engage in a conversation and just observe. To avoid pure personal judgment on (1) when to engage, (2) how to engage and (3) who should engage, companies should design a workflow process to handle online conversations.
The United States Air Force (USAF) Emerging Technologies department summarized its rules of engagement for social media into a decision tree (see figure 6 or Annex III):
(1) Negative comments are grouped into 4 categories depending on the sender: “trolls”, “ragers”, “misguided”, “unhappy customer”. The USAF will not be engaged with “trolls” and “ragers”; only with the “misguided” and “unhappy customers”.
(2) If engagement into a conversation, the following response considerations have to be taken into account: transparency, sourcing, timeliness, tone and influence.
(3) Head Quarters should be notified if confronted with a “troll” or “rager”. If any question of when, how and who should react, the contact information is mentioned on top of the decision tree.
Figure 6: US Air Force Rules Of Engagement Social Media
These response considerations are often written down into a social media policy document. A study by Deloitte22 in the US found that only 22% of companies have any type of social media guidelines or policy in place whereas 74% of employees believe it is easy to damage a brand’s reputation via sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Therefore, every company should have social media guidelines, even companies not really active on internet ‐ if such companies still exist ‐ as you cannot avoid your employees being active on social media in their private time.
22 Deloitte (2009), Social Networking and Reputational Risk in the Workplace
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For her latest book Open Leadership, Li23 studied hundreds of social media policies and guidelines. The elements that are essential for social media guidelines for companies are summarized in figure 7:
• Introduction – setting out the context. The first thing your social media guidelines should offer is an acknowledgment that your organization is excited about social technologies and wants its employees to be more open to customers and other stakeholders through the use of social technology. It’s also important to explain when and for whom the policy applies. Explain why the organization needs social media guidelines and in particular when it applies to a person’s personal use of social media.
• Guidelines – the detailed guidelines that set out your expectations for what people will and won’t do. ‘Identity transparency’ means revealing who you are and who you work for. Some companies demand always to state this when discussing anything related to your company’s or services, others only in case there are any potential conflicts of interest. ‘Responsibility’ means that you will be personally responsible for your personal social media activities online, and if your are writing about company‐related topics, you will act in accordance with company values and expectations. ‘Confidentiality’ means you will not disclose confidential company information. ‘Using judgment and common sense’ means appealing to people to use their training and experience to distinguish between the OK and the not OK – and to seek out advice when they are unsure.
• Best practices for social media practitioners – setting out the standard quality. The social media etiquette24 has to be respected: (1) respect other people’s opinions, even if you disagree; (2) be honest about what you do and your motives – be transparent; (3) ask questions in order to understand the customer; (4) make sure you read an article in its entirety before you post a comment on it; (5) never include a URL to your own site in a comment on a blog unless it is specifically stated that you can do so; (6) if you add someone as a friend or contact, always send a message, even it’s a simple as ‘hey great blog. I really like your take on things.’
• Oversight and consequences – setting the expectations for what will happen if things don’t go according to plan and the organization has to step in, especially when it involves someone’s personal online activities.
• Additional resources – contracts in public relations if there a reaction taking place outside the company as a result of an employee’s activities, training resources, contact info if questions, contact info for posting improvements, …
For inspiration, visit directory of social media guidelines and policies on: http://www.charleneli.com/resources/social‐media‐policies‐directory/
23 Li, Charlene (2010), Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform The Way You Lead 24 AuthorityDomains.com, Communicate Better With Social Media Marketing
KEY ELEMENT DESCRIPTION
Introduction • Encouragement and Support – why social technologies are important
• When the guidelines apply o Personal use of social technologies when its related to the organization o Using social technologies in an official capacity
Guidelines • Identity transparency o When you do/don’t identify yourself as an employee o Definitely when discussing organization‐related topics o Potential conflict of interests that others should know about
• Responsibility o Take responsibility for your own words, don’t post anonymously o Separate your words from your employer’s with a disclaimer o Respect—for customers, fellow employees, and competitors o Don’t let it interfere with your work ‐ “Don’t forget your day job” IBM
• Confidentiality o Remember the confidentiality agreement you signed o Respect the privacy of customers and peers o Emphasize places where confidentiality might slip, e.g. product features,
customer examples, intellectual property, personnel issues o List out what is OK to share, what isn’t
• Common Sense and Judgment o Most important—make it clear there will be areas where it’s not always
clear, that there’s lots of “gray” o Ask if unsure
Best Practices for social media practitioners
• Tone o Have a personality, develop a voice o Err on the side of caution, don’t post when angry or upset
• Quality o Spelling and grammar o Add value
• Trust‐building o Respond to people o Area of expertise ‐‐Speak in your area of expertise ‐‐ Talk about things you
actually know about to add value to your content. Even though a post may be primarily your personal opinion, be sure any facts you include are accurate.
o Link out a lot o Admit mistakes
Oversight and Consequences
• When the organization will make requests
• Process to follow for managers
• Escalation and resolution process
Additional Resources
• HR, Press, and Legal contacts for managers and employees
• Training Figure 7: Social Media Guidelines Checklist
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A good basis to start is www.socialpolicygenerator.com25: a tool to create free of charge your company’s social policy. The automatically created policy can then ‐ before validation of your legal department ‐ be fine‐tuned based on your company’s specific needs & context, taking into account the social media guidelines checklist discussed above. Other useful resource: the WOMMA “Quick Guide” to designing a digital social media policy: http://womma.org/main/Quick‐Guide‐to‐Designing‐a‐Social‐Media‐Policy.pdf
As some companies lock access to Facebook26 , Twitter, … for some are or all of their employees, it is not always possible for employees to engage in conversations with customers. Alexandre Vandermeersch, CEO Brandialog, understands that some companies lock access to social media because of security risk and/or loss of productivity. He argues however that the fear of loss of productivity is less relevant for companies working in a results oriented culture with empowered and accountable employees: these employees should be granted access to social media. For companies with a less results oriented culture, a first step could be granting employees access to social media in the “non‐productive” hours (eg during lunch time, before and after working hours).
Not all employees with access to social media should engage in conversations with customers, however all employees should sign the company’s social media policy. Same discussions found place around 1999 with the rise of e‐mail: security risk (sending confidential company documents) and loss of productivity (sending not work related messages during working hours). Most companies now have an internet and e‐mail policy and cannot imagine how to survive without e‐mail.
Who should engage in conversations with the customers depends on the organizational structure. In general three organizational models can be identified (see figure 8): organic, centralized, coordinated.
ORGANIC CENTRALIZED COORDINATEDDescription Individual efforts spring up
when and where they find traction.
One person/group leads the efforts and sets the pace.
One group provides best practices, with execution at the edge.
Pros Meets the needs of each department.
Can move quickly, try cutting edge efforts, small staff needed.
Spreads best practices broadly, consistent.
Cons Inconsistent, likely no official funding, support. Multiple groups, uncoordinated, fractured customer experience.
Slower to spread around the organization. May not appear authentic to community.
Competes for limited budgets and attention, not always cutting edge or fast‐moving, requires top‐down buy‐in.
Staffing Driven by individual evangelists, who serve as experts, but not coordinators.
One strong evangelist leads the way, builds a central team over time.
Department‐like investment at the corporate level.
Best suited for New adopters with slim corporate staff and resources.
Strongly centralized, especially with corporate marketing/PR.
Distributed organizations, or advanced organizations ready to invest.
Examples Humana, Microsoft Starbucks, Ford Red Cross, HP Figure 8: Three Organizational Models for Openness
25 To have an example of generated social policy: go to annex IV 26 70% of Belgian companies lock access to Facebook (Smart Business Strategies, March 2009)
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There is no best model. As Li states in her book Open Leadership:
“I recommend that you consider how you are currently organized and balance that against your open strategy goals. For example, if you lack a strong corporate culture and instead have a highly distributed organization, you will want to consider either the organic or the coordinated model. The determining factor in choosing between these two is how much control and coordination you want and are able to exert over widespread efforts. In contrast, if you have a highly urgent goal to move quickly and you anticipate pushback from organizations, you may want to pursue a centralized organizational model, whereby you not only can create successful examples quickly but also will have the ear of the executive team in case you need them to break down barriers.”
Energizing Word of mouth marketing (see chapter 1) is based on marketing techniques that are geared towards encouraging and helping people to talk to each other about products and services. Energizing is focusing on your most committed customers to become your ambassadors. Frederick Reiccheld27 concluded in his book The Ultimate Question that focusing on ambassadors is good for your business:
“If bad profits are earned at the expense of customers, good profits are earned with customers' enthusiastic cooperation. A company earns good profits when it so delights its customers that they willingly come back for more — and not only that, they tell their friends and colleagues to do business with the company. The right goal for a company that wants to break an addiction to bad profits28 is to build relationships of such high quality that those relationships create promoters, generate good profits, and fuel growth.”
The book is about a simple, yet all‐encompassing insight: the best way to build a successful business is to have loyal customers, and the best way to measure loyalty is by the proportion of customers who will recommend you to others (and put their reputation on the line for you). This measure is known as the Net Promoter Score® (NPS). Once you know your score, you still need to figure out ways to improve it but the NPS provides the measuring stick to go about this systematically and more efficiently.
Figure 9: Key principle of Net Promoter Score®
27 Reiccheld, Frederick (2006), The Ultimate Question – Driving Good Profits and True Growth 28 Bad profit are described on www.theultimatequestion.com as profits that come at customers' expense and drain the value out of customer relationships. Whenever a customer feels misled, mistreated, ignored, or coerced, then profits from that customer are bad. Bad profits come from unfair or misleading pricing. Bad profits arise when companies save money by delivering a lousy customer experience. Bad profits often boost short‐term earnings; in the long run, they burn out employees and alienate customers.
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Marsden, Samson and Upton29 concluded that the Net Promoter Score® as measure of word of mouth advocacy is useful not only for predicting sales growth, but also for share performance and employee productivity:
• NPS as a predictor of sales growth ‐ likelihood that customers would recommend a company or brand to friends or colleagues
• NPS as predictor of share performance ‐ likelihood that investors would recommend investing in a company to friends or colleagues
• NPS as predictor of productivity ‐ likelihood that employees would recommend working for their company to friends or colleagues
Equipped with these insights, companies can then work on generating positive word of mouth via their ambassadors. As a company, you can rely on “Evangelist Marketing” (cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf), “Influencer Marketing” (identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others) and “Referral Programs” (creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends)30 . In figure 10, you find an overview of how you can support these committed customers.
WOM STRATEGY SUPPORTING ACTIONS Encouraging communications
Developing tools to make telling a friend easier Creating forums and feedback tools Working with social networks
Giving people something to talk about
Information that can be shared or forwarded Advertising, stunts, and other publicity that encourages conversation Working with product development to build WOM elements into products
Creating communities and connecting people
Creating user groups and fan clubsSupporting independent groups that form around your product Hosting discussions and message boards about your products
Working with influential communities
Finding people who are likely to respond to your message Identifying people who are able to influence your target customers Informing these individuals about what you do and encouraging them to spread the word Good‐faith efforts to support issues and causes that are important to these individuals
Creating evangelist or advocate programs
Providing recognition and tools to active advocatesRecruiting new advocates, teaching them about the benefits of your products, and encouraging them to talk about them
Co‐creation and information sharing
Involving customers in marketing and creative (feedback on creative campaigns, allowing them to create commercials, etc.) Letting customers 'behind the curtain' to have first access to information and content
Figure 10: Positive Word of Mouth Strategies, WOMMA
29 Marsden, Paul & Samson, Alain & Upton, Neville (2005), Advocacy Drives Growth Customer ‐ Advocacy Drives UK Business Growth, London School of Economics 30 For a list of word of mouth marketing techniques: go to annex V or visit www.womma.org
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Li & Bernoff state in their book grondswell, that energizing only works for companies with customers who are, or could be, enthusiastic about the company and its products. This implies that first of all you need to have customers who are creators and/or critics31 and second you need to have products/services/brands worthwhile talking about (lovemarks32 vs commodities).
If you energize your most committed customers, you cannot step out in the short term. As soon as customers get the opportunity to participate in the marketing of their brands, they expect in return that products and services will be more tailored to their needs33 . That’s why companies who have chosen for energizing their most committed customers often end up embracing them.
Supporting Running a contact center for supporting your customers is expensive, customers who help each other is for free: customers post their problems and other customers give an answer. With some luck, the answer can be useful for other customers confronted with the same problem. As a company, it is not only cost efficient, it also gives you a forum to listen to the problems and whishes of your customers. As a company, you should also engage in the conversation and deliver answers yourself and ask questions to customers for more info where necessary. But how can you start with such a community?
First of all, you need to ask yourself following key questions34 :
1. Why do you want an online community? Because everyone else has one or you want to become more customer focused and want to offer more value to your customers?
2. Where do you build the new online community? 3. Where are your members? 4. What makes your community unique? 5. How will you attract members and manage the community?
Community building takes a lot of time and effort and results take a long time to arrive. Melissa Parrisch35suggests a 4 step approach which gives an overview of the process marketers need to follow and the important‐but‐sometimes‐overlooked concepts and ideas to keep in mind for launching or engaging with a community (see figure 11):
1. Planning – lay the groundwork 2. Alignment – build support and plan for the future 3. Launch – attract and retain members 4. Maintenance – cultivate relationships
31 Cf Forrester’s Social Technographics® Ladder 32 Lovemarks are the products and brands that arouse emotions. In his book Lovemarks: the future beyond brands, Roberts defines a ‘Lovemark’ as an experience or a product that has the power to create a relationship, long‐term and emotional, with the customer. His realization is that it is the customer and not the company who owns the ‘Lovemark’, “they are owned by the people who love them.” 33 Salzman, Marian & Matathia, Ira & O’Reilly, Ann (2003), Buzz: Harness The Power Of Influence And Create Demand 34 www.communityspark.com 35 Parrisch, Melissa (2010), A Guide to Community Management, Forrester Research
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PHASE SUPPORTING ACTIONSPlanning
• Determine your customers’ social media: use all resources available to understand why and how your customers use social media
• Investigate existing communities: understand if and where conversations about your products and services already exist. Consider the pros and cons of joining rather than building
• Choose one business objective: choose one primary objective as the purpose of your community. Ensure it aligns with what your customers want and expect from you.
• Determine your budget: factor in all vendor costs as well as staffing, marketing and cost of working with other internal departments
• Select a partner: evaluate community platform vendors. Consider agencies for additional creative and strategic expertise.
Alignment • Consult key stakeholders: e.g. Web site development team for look & feel, IT for hardware requirements, PR and Brand Management for communications best practices, Customers Service for FAQs, Product Development for desired input of user input, Sales for desired data collection, Legal for community guidelines approval, …
• Prepare for community management: you may need to add resources in addition to a Community Manager to handle daily operations and to discipline troublemakers
Launch • Use standard communication tools & social media outreach to drive traffic • Newsletters, email blasts, display advertising, sweepstakes,… can help to get the word out • Make sure hosted communities are search engine optimized • Make sure new community members have something to react to when they first arrive
Maintenance • Write & publish community guidelines: include both internal and external policies • Plan for moderation: decide how you will deal with general feedback, guideline violations,
questions, help requests, customer service issues, off‐topic or personal conversations, ideas, …
• Create feedback process to internal stakeholders e.g. product questions to Product Development, bugs and errors to Web site development team, …
Figure 11: The 4 phases of community management, Forrester Research
This act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call is described by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine as crowdsourcing36 . If you have a positive answer on the questions above and you plan to build a community as an enabler for crowdsourcing, some recommendations to take into account:
1. Start small, but plan for a larger presence ‐ Keep your community small in the early days: don’t email thousands of people announcing the launch; you only get one chance to make this announcement. Therefore consider keeping the community closed during the start‐up by allowing only certain people in: ideally people that you really want as members. They will help you to fine tune the community and to generate content.
2. Reach out to your most active customers – Your customers are the best advisers to define how your community should work, therefore reach out to them to become important leaders in your online community.
3. Plan to drive traffic to your community – Nobody knows about the existence of your community so you need to get the attention of potential member (via e.g. advertisement, search engines optimization, …)
36 Howe, Jeff (2006), The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired Magazine, June 2006
4. Build in a reputation system ‐ Members of your online community need to feel valued: they want to receive respect, attention, admiration, information, … Keep them motivated by telling them how great they are – but be genuine. If a member writes a great post, drop them a message telling them so. Make your admiration public by highlighting the best member content. Interview your members to put them in the spotlight. Don’t worry too much about jealousy: it could be a great motivator for other members to contribute even better content so they receive the next ego stroke.
5. Let your customers lead you ‐ If you are serious about building a community, show it the respect it deserves. Incorporate the community into your main website. Have community content appear on your homepage, don’t hide it all behind a ‘community’ tab. Your community needs to be primarily for the benefit of its members. Don’t sell to your community. Treat them with respect. Listen to them. Talk to them. Be involved.
For more information on community management, visit www.community‐roundtable.com where social media, community, and social business practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts.
Embracing Embracing your customers is finding ways to involve customers in the development of new products or services. Core idea is as you have many customers and the time of your people working in research & development is limited, the customers offer a greater potential for innovation than you have via only in house development (even if only a small part of your customers is willing to participate).
Li and Bernoff define two distinct reasons why embracing audience participation is useful:
1. Develop better ‐ real customers with real issues are telling the business what to fix 2. Develop faster ‐ you can get information from visitors anytime, and you can go back to them
for more when you change things
Getting feedback is not enough, the key is to show that feedback online ‐ good and bad ‐ where people can see you are ready to act on it, that you are committed to improve things. These people can even help you prioritizing this feedback if you allow them to judge each other’s suggestions. This has several advantages: (1) suggestions that rise to the top reflect the cumulative desires of many customers instead of single customers, (2) customers who are motivated to be critics but not to be creators are engaged in the process of offering suggestions and (3) staff have a cleaned out list of suggestions from which to determine strategy. Then staff can spend their time where it's needed most, figuring out how to interpret and add value to those prioritized suggestions and visitor‐created elements.
Once you decided which objective to focus on, you can start with making a roll‐out plan based on available budget and desired timing.
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Strategy – plan for how relationships with customers will change Strategy here means figuring out what will be different after you're done: before you measure success, know what it will look like when you see it. Do you want a closer, two‐way relationship with your best customers? Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones? Which budget are your prepared to invest into it? What is your time horizon? Imagine you succeed: how will things be different afterwards?
To be successful using social technologies, companies must first prepare and align internal roles, processes, policies and stakeholders with their business objectives: silos in organizations are to be broken down, be prepared to give (perceived) control out of hand, … As social business is a profound change that impacts all departments in the organization, it should be managed as a change management project 37 :
1. Establish a sense of urgency ‐ For change to happen, it helps if the whole company really wants it. Develop a sense of urgency around the need for change. This may help you spark the initial motivation to get things moving. This isn't simply a matter of showing people poor sales statistics or talking about increased competition. Open an honest and convincing dialogue about what's happening in the marketplace and with your competition. If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself.
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition ‐ Convince people that change is necessary. This often takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization; turn them into ambassadors for social media. Managing change isn't enough ‐ you have to lead it.
3. Create a vision ‐ It may take a long time before any real change visible. A vision and a plan to ensure that you remain on track. A clear vision can help everyone understand why you're asking them to do something. When people see for themselves what you're trying to achieve, then the directives they're given tend to make more sense.
4. Communicate the vision ‐ What you do with your vision after you create it will determine your success. Your message will probably have strong competition from other day‐to‐day communications within the company, so you need to communicate it frequently and powerfully, and embed it within everything that you do.
5. Empower others to act on the vision ‐ Put in place the structure for change, and continually check for barriers to it. Removing obstacles can empower the people you need to execute your vision, and it can help the change move forward. Make sure your internal and external partners are ready for it ‐ choose other if necessary. Make sure the right people are executing the strategy.
6. Plan for and create short‐term wins ‐ Start with small steps with big impacts. Advantages are that it remains manageable, you can gradually learn and adjust your approach. So hopefully this is a case that others in the company (not least the top management) can convince to move along the chosen path.
37 Kotter, John (1995), Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review, March‐April 1995
7. Consolidate improvements and sustain the momentum for change ‐ Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early. Real change runs deep. Quick wins are only the beginning of what needs to be done to achieve long‐term change. Each success provides an opportunity to build on what went right and identify what you can improve.
8. Institutionalize the new approaches ‐ Finally, to make any change stick, it should become part of the core of your organization. Your corporate culture often determines what gets done, so the values behind your vision must show in day‐to‐day work. Make continuous efforts to ensure that the change is seen in every aspect of your organization. This will help give that change a solid place in your organization's culture. It's also important that your company's leaders continue to support the change. This includes existing staff and new leaders who are brought in. If you lose the support of these people, you might end up back where you started.
Technology – decide which social technologies to use A community, blog or wiki? Once you know your customers habits, your company’s objectives with social media, and your company’s strategy for reaching these objectives, then you can decide on which technologies can support you to reach these objectives (see figure 12).
LISTENING TALKING ENERGIZING SUPPORTING EMBRACINGBlogs, UGC, Podcasts,… X X Communities X X X X XSocial networks X X X X Wikis and open source X Forums, ratings, reviews,… X X X XTags X RSS and widgets X Figure 12: Overview how social media technology can support social media objectives
Your engagement in social media will generate extra traffic to your website: from people linking directly from articles/tweets/posts/… to your website and as more traffic is generated to your website your ranking in search engines will increase which will increase again traffic to your website. If your company’s website ‐ the electronic entry door to your company ‐ is not optimized to get visitors on your website to take the action that you want them to take, you must optimize your website first.
The biggest challenge isn’t whether you master the technology; it is whether or not you are accomplishing a useful business goal. Coming back to my definition of a friend: a friend should help you in achieving these business goals. As friendship is a ‘two parties process’, you have to (start to) listen to your customers (online & offline) and find out about customer’s behavior and goals. Once you know (better) your customers and know their wishes/complaints/frustrations/suggestions/ delights, you have the necessary elements in hand to find a win‐win situation (or if impossible, communicate about it) which based on mutual trust will create or reinforce friendship (or at least avoid making enemies). But how will you measure success and prove that the effort was worth it? Measuring the impact of social impact is the subject of the next chapter.
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Measuring the impact of social media on customer equity
ompanies need to be able to evaluate the impact their use of social media is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media
ROI can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. As always, the metrics to be used can only be determined after the bigger picture ‐ the required business outcomes ‐ are determined.
Impact of social media on Customer Equity Your company’s customer equity is the sum of the discounted lifetime values of all of your customers. Rust, Zeithaml and Lemon38 identified three drivers for customer equity:
1. Value equity ‐ the customer's objective assessment of the utility of a brand, based on the perceptions of what is given up for what is received
2. Brand equity ‐ the customer's subjective and intangible assessment of the brand, above and beyond its objectively perceived value
3. Retention equity ‐ the tendency of the customer to stick with the brand, above and beyond the customer's objective and subjective assessments of the brand
The customer equity model enables marketers to determine which of the three drivers ‐ value, brand or retention equity ‐ are most critical for increasing customer equity in their industry and company.
Frederick Reiccheld39 argues however that the value of a customer is not only in what that person buys: how a customer feels about a company and what a customer is prepared to tell others about a company can influence a company’s revenues and profits just as much. Therefore, if you want to calculate your customer’s full value, you have to include a measure taking into account a person’s ability to bring in profitable new customers. But the nearest that most companies get to for estimating the value of a customer’s referral power is some estimation of the individual’s willingness to make referrals. The trouble is that most good intentions remain just that – good intentions.
Kumar, Petersen and Leone40 developed the Customer Referral Value (CRV). By analyzing the lifetime value of customers of telco’s and financial services companies who were referring the companies to others vs. those who weren't, they found out that the value of customers who recommended the companies to others was up to four times the value of customers who didn't. Most surprisingly, there was no clear relationship between the value of a customer's own purchases and the value of their recommendations to others: your most valuable customers are not necessarily the ones who buy most.
38 Rust, Roland & Zeithaml, Valarie & Lemon, Katherine (2000), Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy 39 Reiccheld, Frederick (2003), The One Number You Need To Know, Harvard Business Review 40 Kumar & Petersen & Leone (2010), Driving Profitability by Encouraging Customer Referrals: Who, When and How, Journal of Marketing
C If growth is what’s your after, you won’t learn much from complex measurement of customer satisfaction or retention. You simply need to know what your customers tell their friends about you.
Frederick Reiccheld
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By adding Customer Referral Value (CRV) to the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), you can calculate the full value of a customer. By using CRV and CLV, your customers can be segmented into four types:
1. Affluents – customers who buy a lot but are poor marketers for your company 2. Advocates ‐ customers who don't buy much but are strong marketers 3. Champions ‐ customers who both buy and market well 4. Misers ‐ customers who do neither well
By using this segmentation, you can tailor your marketing efforts more precisely to boost each customer's total value to your company and hence your company’s Customer Equity.
ROI is a business metric, not a media metric Social media is not for free: it takes people, technology and time. As resources are invested in social media, how can the return of the efforts in social media be measured?
Patrick Willemarck, Brandialog, asked about ROI of social media:
“As social media is about relations, the ROI of social media is to be seen on the long term. Besides revenues from lead generation, social media can offer various other benefits: real time focus/discussion groups (no need to order/wait for marketing research studies), immediate communication channel towards your stakeholder when e.g. issues arise (no need to wait for official statement of PR department), … which are difficult to quantify and bring into the equation of ROI. If used properly social media will have a positive image on your branding which can turn a company into a company where people want to work for. As there is a shortage of talent, how should you quantify this? Coming back to the definition of ROI, one thing is sure: not investing in social media will surely guarantee no return at all.”
Ultimately, doing business is about revenues and profitability; business activities to be translated into economic results. Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial for calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. Once your goals are defined, you need to estimate the baseline before starting or changing your social media strategy: what you can’t measure you can’t improve, therefore companies must be able to benchmark what has been done. The chosen goals have to be aligned with the bigger picture, the goals of your company (e.g. becoming market leader). Make the chosen goals as specific as possible: the more concrete they are, the easier it will be to measure your success. A non‐exhaustive overview by Owyang & Lovett 41 of KPI’s linked to specific business goals and monitoring tools can be found in figure 13.
41 Owyang, Jeremiah & Lovett, John (2010), Social Marketing Analytics ‐ A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE
KPI CALCULATION VENDORS TO WATCH
Forster Dialog
Share of Voice Brand mentions Total mentions
Alterian, SM2, Radian6, Scout Labs, Statsit, Trendrr, Visible Technologies
Audience Engagement
Comments + Shares + Trackbacks Total views
Coremetrics, Webtrends, Radian6, Scout Labs, Converseon, Filtrbox (Jive), Visible Technologies
Conversation Reach
Total People Participating Total Audience Exposure
Alterian, SM2, Radian6, Scout Labs, Social Radar, Statsit, SWIX, Trendrr, Visible Technologies
Promote Advocacy
Active Advocates
# Active Advocates (during specific period)Total Advocates
Biz360, Filtrbox (Jive), Radian6
Advocate Influence
Unique Advocate’s Influence Total Advocate Influence
Cymfony, Filtrbox (Jive), Lithium, Radian6, Razorfish (SIM Score), SAS, Telligent, Twitalyzer, Visible Technologies
Advocacy Impact
# Advocacy Driven ConversionsTotal Volume Advocacy Traffic
Coremetrics, Lithium, Omniture, Webtrends, SWIX, Telligent
Facilitate Support
Resolution Rate
Total # Issues Resolved Satisfactorily Total # Service Issues
Filtrbox (Jive), RightNow Technologies, Salesforce.com, Telligent
Resolution Time
Total Inquire Response Time Total # Service Inquiries
Filtrbox (Jive), RightNow Technologies, Salesforce.com, Telligent
Satisfaction Score
Customer Feedback All Customer Feedback
ForeSee Results, iPerceptions, Kampyle, OpinionLab
Spur Innovation
Topic Trends # Specific Topic Mentions
All Topic Mentions
Alterian, SM2, Cymfony, Filtrbox(Jive) Radian6, SAS, Scout Labs, Social Mention, Social Radar, Trendrr, Visible Technologies
Sentiment Ratio
Pos or Neutral or Neg Brand Mentions All Brand Mentions
Alterian, SM2, Converseon, Cymfony, Filtrbox (Jive) Radian6, SAS, Scout Labs, Social Radar, Trendrr, Visible Technologies
Idea Impact # Positive Conversations, Shares, Mentions Total Idea Conversations, Shares, Mentions
Biz360, Cymfony, Filtrbox (Jive), Luglron, Radian6, Scout Labs, Visible Technologies
Figure 13: Social Marketing Analytics Business Objectives, KPI’s, Calculations, Vendors to Watch, Altimeter Group
When you have defined your goals and baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are. What you want to know is whether the social media efforts are having any incremental impact, and if so how much, so you can assess the return on investment. Even if the social media is producing a good return in terms of its specific metric, if it isn't supporting the required business outcome, then you probably need to re‐assess your effort.
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It is only by taking all of the benefits by social media marketing into account that the complete value of these efforts can be understood. Forrester42 uses a social media marketing balanced scorecard which considers metrics from four different perspectives:
1. Financial ‐ has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased? 2. Brand ‐ have consumer attitudes about the brand improved? 3. Risk Management ‐ is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or
problems that affect reputation? 4. Digital ‐ has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?
Marketers who only seek to measure results in one of these perspectives get an incomplete picture and, as a result, are unable to make effective decisions about social media marketing investments.
42 Ray, Augie (2010), The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More Than Dollars and Cents
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How social media can help to rebuild trust in the financial industry
ublic trust in financial institutions has sunk to historic lows, underscoring the need for financial institutions to repair the badly
damaged customer relationships. As trust is one of the three conditions in my definition of a friend, I have chosen the financial industry to investigate how social media can help to restore that badly damaged trust and hence financial institutions becoming friends (once again) with their customers.
An US Banker article43 entitled Thinner Wallets concluded that ‘Lose trust, and you lose share of wallet. Gain trust, grow share of wallet.’ So by restoring trust, you will not only be able to turn your customers into friends, but also grow your business. But how can this trust be (re)gained? And what about creating win‐win situations between customer and company, the two other conditions in my definition of a friend?
It all start with listening and open communication Based on the power of social media and its ability to shape customer impression about a financial institution, every financial institution should consider and discuss the adoption of social media. If buying decisions relative to financial institution products are highly dependent on word of mouth, and if word of mouth is a significant activity taking place on social networks, financial institutions need to ensure that they are at least monitoring the conversations taking place that involve them.
According to Ehrlich and Fanelli 44 :
"As with most services, the most common selection factor is word of mouth referral. This is not surprising, since most people don't have an objective way of judging the quality of financial advice, insurance claims handling, or other types of services. When seeking the services of a stockbroker, pension adviser, private bank, or hedge fund manager, both institutional and consumer buyers seek the advice of their peers."
As noted by Erlich and Fanelli, consumer buying decisions are shaped by word of mouth. By monitoring and responding to conversations taking place on social media platforms (e.g. social networks, blogs, ...), financial institutions have the ability to demonstrate to the community that they are interested in truly engaging with their customers. But more importantly, these interactions go a long way in turning negative word of mouth into positive word of mouth, resulting ultimately in improved sales.
43 Rosta, Joseph (2009), Thinner wallets, US Banker, September 2009 44 Erlich, Evelyn & Fanelli, Duke (2004), The Financial Services Marketing Handbook
P There is no silver bullet. Social media won’t answer all of your marketing problems; it’s just another way — and an important one — to develop your business. Kristen Luke
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Customer service as differentiator That customers service is not reserved to high end products/sectors and can create the difference in a mass market sector is proven by Zappos.com45, a company selling shoes on the internet. Shoes are by no means an unique product and there is no question of exclusive deals with brands. The company’s philosophy is surprisingly simple: ‘We will do all that we can to make the customer happy. In fact, we are not selling shoes – we are selling top quality customer service.’ This outstanding customer service is the starting point for numerous conversations – creating positive word of mouth ‐ which leaded to the success of Zappos.com, recently sold to Amazon.com for $1,2 billion.
Although since the crisis (traditional) Belgian banks are (re)focusing again on relationship banking and putting the emphasis on serving their clients, Hakim Benbouchta from Back in Business questions if Belgian banks walk the talk:
“Within the financial sector, as most products have become commodities and most banks look alike, it is difficult to differentiate on a rational basis. Therefore, differentiation should be done on an emotional basis: the relationship between banker and customer is important. Paradoxally, although most Belgian banks want to go back to relationship banking, they keep on closing branches and pushing customers towards pc‐banking.
Banks should focus on what is important for their customers and how they can offer solutions to their customers; if banks really want to deliver service to their customer, they have to stop putting only themselves on the first place (e.g. cost reduction programs): a win‐win situation has to be created. Launching a ‘money academy’ not (purely) focused on selling but on informing, providing personal finance management tools, … or just getting the basics right by answering swiftly and accurately to questions/problems and improving transparency in costs/interest rates could be examples of this. As not all customers are online, and hence not using social media, this approach should not only be the privilege of the online customer. It has to be a cultural change in all the company and through all customer contact points.”
In the view of Benbouchta, if a financial institution wants to differentiate itself from the rest, it needs to transform its business model from a transactional/product push business model towards an engagement model focused on customer centricity, service delivery and finding win‐win solutions for customer and financial institution. Erwin Van Overloop, Communications Manager BNP Paribas Fortis, confirms the importance of this change management process:
“Your staff is the first line customers face when interacting with your company. They are the bank’s greatest resource as brand ambassadors to their personal network. It is of utmost importance that they act as your ambassadors and are trained in helping clients and finding win‐win situations. Social media can help here, but will not replace the existing channels: it is a not to be neglected extra channel that can help you.”
As these change programs are enterprise wide impacting multiple channels, we will only focus here on social media; one of the possible channels.
45 Hsieh, Tony (2010), Delivering Happiness – A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Referring to my definition of a friend ‐ by going for win‐win situations and putting the customer again in the center (creating a two way conversation), two of the three conditions for being a friend are fulfilled. What about trust? Here social media can play a role. Social media demands honesty and transparency from users ‐ especially commercial companies such as financial institutions. Social media allows financial institutions to become more transparent. By answering swiftly and accurately questions, by being upfront and honest about making a mistake and addressing the issue promptly and head on, … financial institutions can go a long way in gaining the respect of customers ‐ particularly in today's financial industry environment. When customers see a financial institution step up and do the right thing, it goes a long way in gaining the respect and trust of customers, and eventually becoming a friend of that financial institution (see ‘How social media made the difference for Rabobank.be’).
How social media made the difference for Rabobank.be
The Belgian online bank Rabobank.be is monitoring its customers, brand, products, competition and industry on the internet. Rabobank.be also engages in conversations with customers. Therefore it did not create its own forum or blog, Rabobank.be followed its customers to where they are discussing about its brand and products with their peers.
Therefore, in 2008, Rabobank.be contacted the owner of the website www.spaargids.be to see how Rabobank.be could leverage its banking knowledge to visitors of the website and find a win‐win situation. Visitors of the website www.spaargids.be have since then the option to ask a question to Rabobank.be. Rabobank.be deliberately chose not to interfere in conversations taking place between people and only to interfere when asked (or if flagrant faults were said). Thanks to this initiative, Rabobank.be could demonstrate its knowhow and increase its brand awareness while solving customer’s problems – a win‐win situation.
On 1st of January 2009 – in full financial crisis ‐ there was a fault in the calculation of the yearly interest payments that impacted 75k of Rabobank.be’s customers. As banks are closed the 1st of January, lots of customers were asking questions about this miscalculation to their peers and were given criticism on the forum: all banks are thieves. There was a spiral of negative worth of mouth going on. One thing changed all this and turned it into a positive spiral: the conversation manager of Rabobank.be intervened on the forum. He confirmed that there was a problem and that Rabobank.be was looking for a solution. By giving an explanation the tone on the forum changed. People were pleasantly surprised that Rabobank.be took care of that problem very quickly, and that on a holiday. This is an example of how social media can help you in a crisis situation. Engaging in the conversation with the customers made the difference.
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The greatest potential for differentiation in the financial industry is according to research done by Bain & Company46 service delivery. Promoters cited service over six times more frequently than rates and fees and branches as their top reason for recommending their bank. Poor service delivery topped the list of factors named by detractors, with rates and fees not far behind. Service delivery has ‐ according to this study ‐ the greatest potential to set a financial institution apart for good or bad and hence create positive or negative word of mouth (see figure 14).
Figure 14: Customer feedback on loyalty drivers in financial institutions, e‐Rewards NPS Survey 2010, Bain & Company
The importance of customer service as way to differentiate will according to Jaffe47 only grow. Good customer service will create positive word of mouth which will attract new customers: the new form of customer acquisition will be retention.
Social media can be used to support customers, but as said before it is only one of the possible channels. Unfortunately, support is not as easy as financial institutions may like it. As a highly regulated industry, financial institutions need to ensure that all communications are compliant. According to a study done by American Banking Association48, 40% of interviewed banks – all active on social media ‐ said that they avoid discussing specific products and services in their social media efforts. The legal risk of anything said via social media being used in court of law is considered (too) high. Therefore, having a social media policy in place which clearly stipulates who, when and how to react is a must. Also taking conversations offline is an option: if e.g. you receive a complaint about a product/service, you can answer online ‘sorry to hear that’ and propose the customer that you will contact him via phone, arrange a visit in a branch or even via e‐mail.
46 Bain & Company (2010), Customer Loyalty in Retail Banking – North America 2010 47 Jaffe, Joseph (2010), Flip the Funnel – How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones 48 American Banking Association Banking Journal (2009), Compliance concerns slow new‐media rollouts by banks
Besides being nervous about potential compliance problems, the biggest hurdles for being present in social media were not understanding social media and not believing in the fit with customers. I can imagine that customer interest is fairly low (I guess that not many people want to follow a banker) and that the legal risk is considered high. However, as more and more customers are active on social media, you cannot neglect this channel. Not being able to listen to your customers creates the potential of customers becoming enemies. After all, it is not about customers following you, but about you following your customers. Financial institutions have to be present where their customers are in order to study customer feedback and then take action on it.
Social media put financial institutions (and other companies) under the microscope and multiply reputational risk. In the old days, angry customers had few means to spread their disaffection. Nowadays social media result in customer empowerment. Instead of settling for the role of passive customer, the active social media user wants to contribute and discuss the latest news. They document their experiences in blogs and write scathing reviews on customer‐opinion platforms with global reach. These additional information sources challenge sales and marketing policies but may also help to create an emotional bond between customer and product/financial institution and if used properly can be a means to re‐establish trust.
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Conclusion
dvancements in the technological capabilities of internet have facilitated a dramatic shift in power from businesses to customers. People want to
know what their friends and peers think about products and services as they put more trust in recommendations by friends and peers than company advertisement.
A We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how we will do it.
Erik Qualman
By spreading his experience with a brand/product/service (could be positive or negative), the customer is influencing the buying decision of other customers. Via social media, the customer received an extra channel with global reach to ventilate this opinion. The customer has become a true marketer.
My definition of friendship is a relation between two parties who trust each other and are helping each other to achieve each other’s goals. When one of these conditions is not fulfilled, than customers can become enemies. The customer as friend or enemy is hence different from a good or bad customer, profitable or unprofitable, happy or unhappy one. If customers active on social media could be turned into friends, then they could be helping your company in increasing your customer value. Therefore each company should monitor these conversations not only to find out who their brand advocates are but also to identify complaints and other possible areas of improvement.
Social media is a communications and marketing tool and, as such, needs to fit into your broader business development strategy. Before getting involved, you should think about what you are trying to achieve overall, and how social media may complement and extend your other activities. That will help you determine which tools and platforms you may want to use. Social media does not replace existing marketing techniques, it complements other online and offline marketing initiatives.
The benefits from social media are much larger than pure financial ones. Marketers should consider different perspectives (financial ‐ brand ‐ risk management – digital) to get a complete picture on the true return of social media.
But make yourself no illusions: social media will not solve all problems and is for the moment only being used by a limited number of customers. However, by not being present in social media, you are ignoring customers and take the risk that they will become enemies. And that is just something we want to avoid. So start listening to what your customers are talking about on social media and based on your overall business objectives, analyze how social media could play a role in supporting these objectives.
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Bibliography
Books
• Erlich, Evelyn & Fanelli, Duke (2004), The Financial Services Marketing Handbook
• Godin, Seth (2001), Unleashing the Ideavirus
• Hsieh, Tony (2010), Delivering Happiness – A Path To Profits, Passion, and Purpose
• Jaffe, Joseph (2010), Flip the Funnel – How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones
• Li, Charlene & Bernoff, Josh (2008), groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies
• Li, Charlene (2010), Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform The Way You Lead
• Locke, Christopher & Levine, Rick & Searls, Doc & Weinberger, David (2000), The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
• Peppers, Don & Martha, Rogers (2008), Rules to Break and Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short‐Termism
• Reiccheld, Frederick (2006), The Ultimate Question – Driving Good Profits and True Growth
• Rust, Roland & Zeithaml, Valarie & Lemon, Katherine (2000), Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy
• Salzman, Marian & Matathia, Ira & O’Reilly, Ann (2003), Buzz: Harness The Power Of Influence And Create Demand
• Qualman, Erik (2010), Socialnomics – How Social Media Transforms the Way We Lie and Do Business
• Van Belleghem, Steven (2010), De Conversation Manager
Reports & Articles
• Alston, David (2008), Top 10 Reasons Why Brands Should Listen to Social Media
• American Banking Association Banking Journal (2009), Compliance concerns slow new‐media rollouts by banks
• Bain & Company (2010), Customer Loyalty in Retail Banking – North America 2010
• Bernoff, Josh (2007), Objectives: The Key To Creating A Social Media Strategy
• Bernoff, Josh (2010), Introducing The New Social Technographics®
• Bughin, Jacques & Doogan, Jonathan & Vetvik, Ole Jørgen (2010), A new way to measure word‐of‐mouth marketing, McKinsey Quarterly
• Buzzcapture (2010), T‐Mobile en Youp van ‘t Hek, Buzzreport October 2010
• Constantinidis, Efthymios & Fountain, Stephan (2008), Web 2.0: Conceptual Foundations and Marketing Issues, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, Vol.9 No3 pg 231‐244
• Court, David & Elzinga, Dave & Mulder, Susan & Vetvik, Ole Jørgen (2009), Consumer decision journey, McKinsey Quarterly
• Deloitte (2009), Social Networking and Reputational Risk in the Workplace
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• Drury, Glen (2008), Social media: Should marketers engage and how can it be done effectively?, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practices, Vol.9 No3 pg 274‐277
• Howe, Jeff (2006), The Rise of Crowdsourcing, Wired Magazine, June 2006
• Kotter, John (1995), Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review, March‐April 1995
• Kumar & Petersen & Leone (2010), Driving Profitability by Encouraging Customer Referrals: Who, When and How, Journal of Marketing
• Marketingtribune.nl (2010), Youp van ‘t Hek brengt T‐Mobile reputatieschade van een ton
• Marsden, Paul & Samson, Alain & Upton, Neville (2005), Advocacy Drives Growth Customer ‐ Advocacy Drives UK Business Growth, London School of Economics
• Nielsen (2009), Trust in Advertising
• Owyang, Jeremiah & Lovett, John (2010), Social Marketing Analytics ‐ A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media
• Paine, Katie (2007), How to Measure Social Media Relations: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same, Institute for Public Relations
• Parrisch, Melissa (2010), A Guide to Community Management, Forrester Research
• Ray, Augie & Bernoff, Josh (2010), Peer Influence Analysis
• Ray, Augie (2010), Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid ‐ Marketers Must Leverage The Three Tiers Of Online Peer Influence
• Ray, Augie (2010), The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More Than Dollars and Cents
• Reiccheld, Frederick (2003), The One Number You Need To Know, Harvard Business Review, December 2003
• Rosta, Joseph (2009), Thinner wallets, US Banker, September 2009
Websites
• www.charleneli.com
• www.community‐roundtable.com
• www.forrester.com
• www.mashable.com
• www.mckinsey.com
• www.theultimatequestion.com
• www.visible‐banking.com
• www.womma.org
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Annexes
Annex I
List interviewed experts
• Alexandre Vandermeersch, CEO Brandialog
• Clo Willaerts, Business Unit Manager Conversity.be
• Dirk Dewulf, Marketing & Conversation Manager Rabobank.be
• Erwin Van Overloop, Communications Manager BNP Paribas Fortis
• Hakim Benbouchta, CEO Back in Business
• Patrick Willemarck, Executive Chairman and Founder Brandialog
List questions from interviews with business experts
• What is your definition of consumer/customer as friend? Quid impact social media on this definition?
• What is your definition of consumer/customer as enemy? Quid impact social media on this definition?
• When should a company start with social media? How should a company handle this? Which department in driver’s seat?
• What is ROI of social media?
• Should a company block access to social media for its employees? Why (not)?
• Does a company need guidelines for its personal on how to act on social media? Why? Which guidelines?
• Is social media the end of marketing as we know it? Where do you see the biggest impact?
• Can you give examples of Belgian firms successfully active on social media?
• What is your advice for the financial sector regarding social media?
• For bank experts: tell me about the experiences and plans with social media in your company?
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Annex II
Non‐exhaustive list of tools for monitoring conversations. For more info, go to: http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track‐online‐traffic/
For free
• Blogpulse (www.blogpulse.com) ‐ on this site you can determine what percentage of blog posts are about a specific topic. For most brands, this is expressed in promille. It is not the overall volume that is important, but the evolution in time. If the buzz around your brand suddenly rises, it is important to know why.
• Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) ‐ useful to keep track of what is written about your own brand and competing brands
• Technorati (www.technorati.com) ‐ Google for blogs: the system works exactly like Google, it searches all blogs. The website allows to identify and track interesting blogs in your industry.
• Google Blog Search (blogsearch.google.com) ‐ Just the same as technorati but made by Google. Sometimes results are different. Alternating use is recommended.
• Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) ‐ this tool allows you to monitor trends in search terms. Keywords are the words that people type in Google for a search.
• Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) ‐ you request from Google to send you emails when something appears on the internet about a certain topic. You can specify e.g. your own brand or specify a competing brand. You can change the frequency of these emails yourself.
• YouTube (www.youtube.com) – look for what you can find about your brand and sector
• Facebook (www.facebook.com) – look for groups or fanclubs about your brand. Are people talking about your brand? What are they saying?
• Flickr (www.flickr.com) – YouTube for pictures. Give in the name of your brand and look for pictures that people link with your brand.
• Twitter Tweetscan (www.tweetscan.com) and Summmize (search.twitter.com) – you can search in real‐time in Twitter posts. Handy to look on the day of a product launch what people are saying.
• Getsatisfaction (getsatisfaction.com) – it is a summary of what is said on different social networks
• Alexa (www.alexa.com) – gives you an overview of the most visited websites, within certain categories, countries or industries
• Brandtags (www.brandtags.net) – on this website you will find the brand perceptions of thousands of brands. Look up yours.
• Jodange (www.jodange.com) ‐ tracking your brand or a product is one thing, but turning that tracking into a measure of customer sentiment about your brand or product is something completely different. For that, Jodange has TOM (Top of Mind), which tracks customer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
• Overview of social networking websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
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Not for free
• TruCast (http://www.visibletechnologies.com/solutions.html) ‐ TruCast by Visible Technologies provides in‐depth, keyword‐based monitoring of the social Web with an emphasis on blogs and forums. Its dashboard applications provide visual representations of sentiment and trends for your brands online.
• Radian6 and CisionPoint (http://www.radian6.com/ and http://www.cisionpoint.com/) ‐ Radian6 pulls information from the social Web, and analyzes and provides customer sentiment ratings for your brand. When paired with CisionPoint from Cision, Radian6's dashboard can provide a wealth of information.
• Alterian (http://socialmedia.alterian.com/) – Alterian is a social‐media monitoring and analysis solution for PR and marketing folks. With a focus on complete analysis and comparison, the Alterian experience draws information from all major social‐media channels.
• Collective Intellect (http://www.collectiveintellect.com/) ‐ Collective Intellect (CI) is a real‐time intelligence platform, based on advanced artificial intelligence. Its solution provides automatic categorization of conversations based on CI’s proprietary filtering technology. According to CI, its technologies provide credible groupings and reduce the "noise" seen in other keyword‐based searches.
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Annex III
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Annex IV
The following guidelines apply to contractors or employees of Your Company who participate with or create content on social media websites like wikis, blogs, virtual worlds and social networks. Popular examples of such online environments include Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Myspace and Yelp. As an employee of Your Company, if you choose to participate in such online communities then you need to be aware of the following guidelines.
Your Company does not forbid its employees from participating in social media websites. As a forward‐thinking organization, Your Company believes that there is a great deal of inherent value in social media sites. However, Your Company expects employees who participate in online commentary and other actions to be aware of and adhere to the following guidelines. The ultimate goal of these guidelines is to ensure that employees of Your Company participate in social media websites in a respectful and pertinent way, while always maintaining the spirit and letter of the law.
1. Take care to never misrepresent yourself or Your Company; always be prepared and willing to substantiate any claims that you make on the Internet, and do not engage in dishonesty.
2. Always disclose the fact that you are an employee of Your Company. Use your real name and be forthcoming and transparent about your role within the organization.
3. Keep common courtesy in mind in all of your online transactions and exchanges. Obtain permission before disclosing private conversations or confidential information from within Your Company.
4. Don't "derail" topics on social media websites. Do not engage in spam activity, and do not go off topic or use offensive terms or tactics.
5. Should you disagree with somebody while having a discussion on a social media website, be polite about it. Avoid using antagonistic behavior. If you are unable about how to proceed or about how to disengage from a potential volatile situation, seek guidance from the PR Director of Your Company.
6. During online discussions, conversations and other communications, always remain within your area of expertise. Feel free to give your own unique perspective on issues and topics, as long as they are not confidential in nature.
7. Be conscientious about never discussing or disclosing the legal activities of Your Company. Should Your Company be engaged in litigation with another organization, avoid discussing that organization at all times when participating in social media websites.
8. Should the competition come up during an online discussion or conversation, always be diplomatic. Stick to the facts and don't let emotions influence what you say. Be sure that you have the necessary permissions, as well, when discussing the competition.
9. If a topic being discussed within a social media website could be considered a crisis situation, refrain from participating. Remember that even if you post anonymously, you can still be traced back to Your Company through your IP address. Get the PR Director or the Legal Affairs Director involved in such scenarios.
10. Always make your privacy and confidential information on Your Company your number one priority when participating online. Anything you publish will be accessible to the world at large and will be out there for a very long time. Never act impulsively and think carefully before clicking that "publish" button.
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In addition to the preceding guidelines, please keep the following points in mind when participating in Social Media:
• Respect fair use, copyright and financial disclosure laws. • Never cite or make reference to suppliers, customers or partners without their express
permission. • Cite others who may be blogging or discussing the topic on hand online. • Always try to add value through whatever online interactions you are participating in.
Remember that what you say and do online reflects upon the reputation of Your Company; strive to keep the Your Company brand in mind.
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Annex V
Common types of word of mouth marketing according to the World of Mouth Marketing Association are listed below. This is not a complete list and not everyone agrees that each of these should be part of word of mouth marketing as many marketers use different terms to describe them.
• Buzz Marketing ‐ using high‐profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.
• Viral Marketing ‐ creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.
• Community Marketing ‐ forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.
• Grassroots Marketing ‐ organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.
• Evangelist Marketing ‐ cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.
• Product Seeding ‐ placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.
• Influencer Marketing ‐ identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.
• Cause Marketing ‐ supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.
• Conversation Creation ‐ interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.
• Brand Blogging ‐ creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.
• Referral Programs ‐ creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends.