As a Former Forrester Analyst, I attended all the software conferences. Now I only attend the ones that I think are really relevant to my clients. What’s nice about being an independent software and business analyst is that I don’t have to pretend any more to say a vendor is great when they are not and I don’t have to be afraid of speaking the truth.

Why Oracle allowed Benioff to speak at previous OpenWorld’s is beyond me, when they are competitors. But they did. Maybe Oracle didn’t see that they were competitors. I think that they looked down on Salesforce and didn’t see what that the world had changed. It’s not the first time this has happened.

Sometimes even the brightest people don’t-know-what-they-don’t-know. In Joel Barker’s book, Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future, he uses the following examples to illustrate how we negate ideas through our own filters or perceptions of the world. When we see the world from our own limited perspective, sound solutions are dismissed or overlooked.

It’s interesting this year that they did what seems to be a last minute change of heart around having Marc speak. What it did is drive all the PR to Salesforce.com, which as we all know, Marc is a master marketer.

I’m not at OpenWorld because there is really nothing new. Oracle’s Fusion has been promised for years. Their customers are frustrated by the user interface, specially when it comes to Customer Service and I don’t think they are leading the social business capabilities that business must have. Their acquisition of InQuira was a good move.  I did attend Dreamforce and I spoke on the ROI of social media and had a great panel with real-world experience of transforming their organizations.

But Social Media is the MOST important thing that has happened to business in 100 years. Companies need software to facilitate this. Maybe that’s why Oracle decided to un-invite Benioff? The handling of this leaves lot’s of room for speculation on why they would do this.

What’s difficult in the connected social network world we live in, is excuses like, “We offered Benioff a different time slot and he choose not to accept it” doesn’t fly in the face of the need for companies to be authentic, genuine and human. This event has been set in stone for a long time. The last minute change up of Benioff’s time slot doesn’t hit the mark with respect to honestly.

It’s a new world we are living in. We are all under a microscope that our behavior as brands gets played out on the big stage called life. And social media is the giant megaphone and broadcast system that reaches millions and billions in a nano-second.

What do you think Oracle should do now? Let it go? Apologize and admit that they changed the time slot because they felt threatened by Salesforce? Make up a different story? Love to hear your thoughts!

Here’s some other articles: New York Times, IT News,

Forbes AllThingsD

Here’s my friend Charlie Issac’s youtube video on Larry Ellison’s speech- that speech may have been the tipping point to the change in the Benioff schedule…

@drnatalie

www.drnatalienews.com

Word Cloud On Netflix from Social Media Monitoring

I teamed up with my friend Jennifer Tyler, @JenHowell4, at Sysomos and we did a little social media monitoring on the Netflix situation. One of the goals of this blog post is to show that data can be used to tell a story. When you tell a story, the audience listens.

A Cause for Pause I hope that this case study gives every CEO, CMO… a cause for pause — to consider social media as well as social media monitoring –to give it a real, hard consideration. Not just because you want to avoid risk, but because you can begin to see that there is mission critical, real-time data that you can use in your business. And so now to our story, aided by the social media monitoring data.

Blockbuster’s Customers Didn’t Like the Delivery System Because It Involved Late Fees If we examine what was being said about Blockbuster in social media prior to bankruptcy, the negative conversation was around late fees. Clearly there was something not working about the delivery of movies. Customers had to come in, rent the DVD and remember to return them on time. Or else the “evil” late fees would consume their positivity around the brand.

But was Blockbuster listening? It doesn’t appear that they were “hearing” the feedback, at least not enough to shift their business model. Here’s a word cloud that can be generated via social media monitoring. It tells you what was being said about Blockbuster in social media. You can clearly see- in the word cloud- that the main jist of the conversation was about late fees. (In word clouds, the larger the words, the more times they are mentioned in social media.)

Social Media Monitoring Word Cloud on Blockbuster

If Blockbuster was using social media monitoring, they could have seen that their customer sentiment was not positive. They could have clicked on the red part of the pie chart to understand what customer’s were upset about. By clicking on the graph they could choose to look at tweets, at blog posts, etc… that pertain to that negative sentiment.

Blockbuster Sentiment Chart in 2010

But Blockbuster didn’t listen — or at least they didn’t hear and shift their business and had to file bankruptcy on Sept 23, 2010. You can see in the word cloud about Blockbuster’s bankruptcy, that Netflix is showing up in the conversation. Clearly something to pay attention to — when the word cloud is supposed to be about your business and your competitor is showing up in the same cloud! YIKES!

Blockbuster Word Cloud Sept 23 1010 Bankruptcy

Social media monitoring can show you what is being said about your company. Below are clips that represent blog posts in social media about Blockbuster’s bankruptcy.

Conversations on the web about Blockbuster's Bankruptcy

And here’s customer sentiment around Blockbuster’s bankruptcy in tweets:

Blockbuster Twitter Conversations About the Bankruptcy

July 12, 2011 Flash Forward to July 12, 2011. Was Netflix listening to their customers? If you look at the graph at the top left hand side, you see a yellow-ish curve. It is pretty much the same height until July 12, 2011.

What you can do in social media monitoring is to click on the peak and then see what that is attributed to. In the upper, right hand corner, you can see the blog post by Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings is what gave rise to the spike in social media and online conversations. The screenshot is of the Facebook post with a link to the CEO’s blog post. There are 81,789 comments. Out of those comments, there are 1,429 Likes. That’s about 1.7% positive responses.

If we do a word cloud on the same peak, we can see what the main topics are. That’s the group of words to the lower right. The key words are: Netflix, price, hike, streaming, dear…. It’s clear what the crowd is upset about. If we look at the lower left screen grab, you can see a buzz graph. The buzz graph tells you what words are being used in association with other words and the thicker the line, the more prominent is the use of the word. Those words are: increase, stream and redbox…

Social Media Monitoring Data on Netflix July 12 2011 Price Hike/ Change

Here’s the actual blog post by Hastings– note that he ends the post with telling customers that they can cancel their services at any time.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Blog Post July 12 2011, With Invitation To Cancel Customer Subscriptions

Here’s some of the thousands of comments to the CEO’s posts, most all negative, about the changes to the Netflix services:

Customers Reaction to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Blog Post July 12 2011

Despite the >23,000 negative comments on the blog on July 12, 2011, Netflix sent out a notice on the price hike on Sept 19th, 2011. What happens when you don’t listen or hear & you act without considering what customers think, feel and know? Customers were outraged… and the press picked up the coverage… If for no other reason than the press looks to social media for stories, companies MUST start taking social media seriously.

Press That Covered Netflix Price Change and Splitting Up the Company

And here’s some of the titles of the articles below. Companies work very hard to get coverage like this. Unfortunately, it wasn’t positive coverage.

Titles of Articles About Netflix

Here’s a sample of the tweets about Qwikster (Netflix’s new offering) – Sept 19th, 2011.

Sample of Tweets About Netflix Qwikster

And the three top words in the Buzz Graph?

 

Buzz Graph on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

Here’s Doug Gross’s article, from CNN Tech and The Daily Dog’s Report on Netflix:

 

Daily Dog's Story on Reed Hastings and Netflix

And Tom Loftus’s Wall Street Journal story on Netflix and Reed Hastings:

 

Wall Street Journal's Story on Netflix's CEO Reed Hastings

 

And more stories from some great journalists:  

Stan Schroeder, Mashable: Netflix’s @Qwikster Problem: Twitter Account Controlled by Weed-Smoking Elmo  

Ben Fritz, LATimes: Netflix CEO admits ‘arrogance,’ renames disc business Qwikster  Mark Memmott, NPR: Netflix’ News: Signal Of DVD’s Demise?

Scott Cleland, Forbes: Netflix Crushes Its Own Momentum

Matt Burns, TechCrunch: Netflix Stock Erases 12 Months Of Massive Growth, Crashes Through 52 Week Low

Mike Issac, WIRED: Meet Qwikster: Netflix Spins Off Discs-By-Mail from Streaming Video

Austin Carr, FastCompany: Netflix: What We’ve Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate

What was interesting is that I checked Blockbuster’s twitter handle… and guess what I saw? Blockbuster is NOW listening! They are offering 1 year subscription to the people who provide the best reason for leaving NetFlix:

 

Qwikster Tweets

Did Blockbuster cross the chasm of it’s time? No. It’s customers were saying, “We want a different delivery system where we don’t get dinged for late fees.” It didn’t shift with the changes in the marketplace. Did Netflix take their spot. You bet. Did Netflix get arrogant? One would think that after >87,000 comments or 24,000 comments, that if the customer’s weren’t good with what was being proposed, and Netflix went ahead anyways, yes, it appears so.

What could Netflix have done better? Ask the customers what they think before making a declaration. Explain that to keep the company profitable and to keep delivering the streaming services, that there might need to be some changes. Ask, don’t tell is the VERY FIRST things good leaders learn in and out of business school. Asking vs telling would be a paradigm shift for most CEOs.

Netflix announced the deal with Facebook and Michael Drobac, director of Government Relations at Netflix is asking customers to help bring Facebook Sharing to the US. Has Hastings done so much damage that fans and customers will not rise to help? Did the apologies and explanations by Hastings help or hurt the company? Do you think Hastings understands what he did wrong?  Todd Wasserman of Mashable.com reported rumors of Blockbuster to launch a Netflix rival. Is it too late for Netflix?

A Social Media Teaching Moment What can we learn from this? Call it a “teaching moment.” We can conclude that’s its important to listen to our customers. It’s important that executives listen to customers and use that feedback to make good decisions. The information about a company that is contained in social media is real-time and real relevant. It’s your customers, your advocates, your influencers, your ambassadors, the press and your nay-sayers giving you their point of view. And it lives forever, it can go viral and change not only what customer’s think but also what investors think, as well as stock prices. Social media is clearly a medium, that if you don’t understand it, it can get you!

So where is your company in the adoption of social media? If it’s stuck, then perhaps consider social media monitoring. It will give you:

• A benchmark on where your sentiment and share of voice is- especially compared to your competitors
• Assurances that what you are doing is working; fair warning when it isn’t
• Mission critical data to adjust your products and service
• Data to help create a business case for the decisions you are making
• And give you data that can be used to calculate social media ROI.

Where is Social Media Going? Many people are asking me what’s the next phase in social media? They’ve got their Facebook and Twitter handle and they are posting. They have somewhat of a content strategy and interaction plan. And they are trying to drive customers through a marketing funnel and help customers with their customer service issues.

The Third WAVE of Social Media Adoption The next phase, and maybe it should be one of the first phases, is to do social media monitoring. Why? A good case study in this is re: Netflix and Blockbuster situation. Where we are in the social media lifecycle is the Third Wave. Wave One was lead by the Innnovators. Wave Two was championed by the Early Adopters.

The Social Media Adoption Curve by Dr Natalie Petouhoff

For social media to become the business-changing paradigm shift that it can be, it must win over the Early Majority. If that happens, then the business world would be entering WAVE Three, in the Social Media Adoption Curve. (I adopted Geoffrey Moore’s and Roger’s Diffusion Theory thought leadership around this concept.)

So what will it take to get the majority of the business world to buy into social media? The Early Majority are pragmatists. They want assurances that what they are going to do, is gonna work. They want business cases and they’d love to see ROI. One of the ways to show companies that social media matters is all of the above. And one of the best ways to create a business case is to do a little social media monitoring. At least that’s my take!

Don't do the Ostrich

Take your head out of the sand and cross the chasm

What’s your take on where business is in the social media adoption process?

Does this type of social media monitoring data make it easier to understand why someone should invest in social media? Love to hear your thoughts!

The Social Media Adoption Chasm - Don't Fall Into The Gap

@drnatalie Learn. Share. Grow!

Here’s more information to that might help you:

A link to the powerpoint presentation on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/doctornatalie/social-media-breakfast-club-and-sysomos-presentation-sept-22-drnatalie

Link to my Social Media ROI videos: http://www.drnatalienews.com/blog/did-u-see-the-videos-on-the-roi-of-social-media

Link to my white papers on the ROI of Social Media: http://www.drnatalienews.com/blog/roi-of-social-media-white-papers-by-dr-natalie-petouhoff

 

One of the things that I’ve discovered is the need to talk through the ideas in social media and how they get applied to transform businesses into social businesses. (BTW — I’ll be very happy when we stop using that term “social” business. It’s ok for now because we are trying to distinguish between what “was” and the “new” way… I look forward to the day that we just say business!)

To help executives, directors and managers to have a better idea of how to apply social media to their business and get real hard business results, Kathy and I have created a series of roundtables. We invite you, in a Aristotle type platform, to come and listen, contribute and evolve the field of social business. I’ve found when the crowd or community has a conversation, that’s when the real unique points and differentiators are revealed.

If you want to learn and contribute, please join us!

Here’s the details and to sign up, go here:

Each week, in this ongoing series, we’ll hear Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and Kathy Herrmann discuss what business leaders need to know to successfully implement holistic social strategies. You’ll be armed to effectively break down silos to engage, influence, collaborate, and create with customers, partners, and employees using the social business model.

This week, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and Kathy Herrmann will continue the Simplifying Social Business roundtable series by deepening the discussion on The Promise of Social CRM. Participants will learn:

• Why social data is so valuable to companies
• How Social CRM emulates the human approach
• How to make sense of social interactions

I’ll post soon on the next part of the series!
Learn. Share. Grow! @drnatalie

I thought I would post the white papers here… In case you want to see how ROI can be calculated…
Lot’s of people have done studies to show that maybe people are being required to calculate the ROI — others have told me that while they are not being asked to calculate the ROI – that because the research that I and others have done, just knowing that there is real business value has helped them in their ability to convince their company to move forward. And others have said they used the information to calculate the ROI of their social media program…

So here’s some more brain candy!
Love to know what you think! And hope it helps to forward whatever you are doing!

Learn. Share. Grow!
@drnatalie

Social_Customer_ROI_Guide_DrNatalie Petouhoff

IDC White Paper ROI OF Social Business Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

One of my favorite topics is talking about how social media is really changing business. Having looked at this topic for a number of years now I still surprised that more people aren’t familiar with building the business case for social media. Regardless of what role I have had, I continue to see the same patterns. Customers not happy with a company’s products and/or services are using social channels to broadcast their frustration, and often disdain, to millions. And there are still some companies that are unsure whether social media is really here to stay and even hesitating to really dig in deep to social media. That really blows my mind!

Many companies have done the basics… get a Twitter handle and tweet or have a Facebook page… But what really sets a company apart is the understanding that just doing the basics in social media is only the tip of the iceberg. Many of you who have seen me speak on this topic know my point of view on social media. It’s not just a channel or a technology. It’s probably one of the most important contributions to business since the assembly line.

The reason? It is literally transforming business. That may sound a bit dramatic, but my point of view on this comes from my days of listening to my dad speak about working in the auto industry. He would tell me stories about a man named Edward Deming. Deming’s moto was essentially to listen to your customers and your employees. Take that feedback and integrate it back into your company. If you were successful in doing that and really making the changes that needed to be made on an ongoing basis, you’d have a very successful company.

What I’ve found most striking about social media is that — if used as an enterprise feedback tool — it is the best source of data… from both customer’s and employee’s that a company could ever dream of obtaining. And what we are seeing is that companies that realize how to use social media – across all departments — PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Product Development, Sales, Manufacturing, etc… are the ones that are truly getting huge return’s on their investment.

I’ll be doing a series of posts on this topic and go into more detail on some of my philosophies on social media and how its transforming business. But for now, I’ll share with you some links to some of the content we’ve recently created. You may have seen Kathy Herrmann and I speak on the topic of social media ROI. To help people get a better handle on this topic, we put our thought leadership together, along with Salesforce.com to produce a white paper and several videos.

Below are the links to the materials we’ve created. We hope that these help people:

• Believe that the ROI of social media can be calculated
• Gain a better understanding of how ROI can be calculated
• Use this information to start to create their own business cases and
• Stimulate a lot of discussion on the topic.

We believe that in the course of dialogue on topics like this, some of the myths will be shattered, people will begin to help each other to get a clearer understanding of the impact social media can have on their business and together we can transform not only business, but education, government and many many other things that are very important to us all! And this is ONLY the beginning!!!

I hope that these materials help you and look forward to talking with you more. We’ll be hosting several Twitter Chats on the topics in the next few weeks, so be on the look out for when and what time!

Cheers and many, many, many happy returns!

@drnatalie  Learn. Share. Grow!

Videos:
Snackable Insights Into ROI of Social Media
Episode 1: How to Build a Business Case for Social Customer Service
Episode 2: Calculating ROI for Social Customer Service
Episode 3: How Social Customer Service Benefits the Entire Company
White Paper: ROI Guide

Info on: Social Customer Service

One of the fears of executives is that if they begin to engage in social media, customers will use it to try to take advantage of the company.  While that fear is not unfounded, there are things a brand should consider in this new social media customer interaction world.

Customers Are Talking About Your Brand Whether You Are Listening / Interacting Or Not In working with clients, sometimes they are worried that if they have a presence in social media channels, customers will circumvent the normal channels, i.e., phone or email, and go straight to Twitter or Facebook with a horrible and damaging post. What I’ve seen over the years that I’ve been covering Customer Service, Marketing, PR, etc… and social media is that some customers do use social channels to complain. Whether that becomes a problem has to do with several things:

• Products & Service Issues: Is there something wrong with the products or services you provide that would make customers so frustrated that they’d go to any length to say bad things about your brand? If so, that information has to be provided to the departments within a company that can fix it. Often times we don’t think of Customer Service as an information/feedback distribution center. But what we’ve learned is that customer service and especially social media customer service does provide real-time, often genuine and valuable feedback to a company that they can’t get any other way. A brand needs a way to collect, analyze and distribute that data — and then take the right action to fix the issues so they don’t create brand crisis situations.

• Poor Customer Service Experiences: Is there something wrong with the service that Customer Service is providing? If so, that needs to be fixed. Often times it can be a combination of strategy, technology and execution… Is it that the agents don’t have helpful answers? Address knowledge management, training, cross-channel communication capabilities, etc… Is it that the agents don’t know enough about the customer’s other tries to solve the issue and the experience of trying to get help is blastic-inducing. It could be that the IVR, the website, chat, or that social media interactions aren’t connected to one another so the customer has to restate the problem to each person they interact with.

As customers, we’ve experienced that and we know it doesn’t feel good. If that’s the case, then a company needs to create unified customer interactions, business rules, policies, knowledge bases, workflow and analytics in a common cross-channel platform. Having insight to what a customer has done and experienced across customer touch points dramatically improves the customer’s experience. (And it can drive down costs!)

• Manage Customer Expectations: If there something misleading about the promise the brand is making? Is the marketing not truthful or creating a situation that is a set-up for customer disappointment? Reviewing products and matching brand promises to create realistic expectations is key.  When branding or marketing, don’t over promise and under deliver. It will result in Customer Service nightmare. Often times Marketing, PR and Customer Service groups don’t collaborate. But if they do, you can see where making sure that all departments are aligned — will in the end — not only serve the customer,  but also the company.

Get the Basics Right: If you can say that you are providing the best products/services you can, your PR/Marketing is delivering an accurate promise and Customer Service is deployed in a way that creates great experiences — from the customer’s point of view– then you will be in pretty good shape. Often companies need to address the basics of business. What I’ve found is that when sincere customers go blastic, its because the company is misfiring in one or more of these basic areas.  Lesson learned? Get the basics right.

Beyond the Basics: So if you are one of the exceptional companies that is getting the basics consistently right, then you want to think about how you are going to handle customers who either start or migrate to social media channels to air their frustration. Just like anything in life, there are always the “bullies” who think they can trash a brand in social media to get free stuff, better service, etc.. Unfortunately part of what’s happened is that when customer’s do use social media to complain, companies are providing better service than if the customer used traditional channels of phone, email or chat. Reward behaviors you want repeated.

The Witness Factor: What companies need to realize is that customers are very smart. They figure out very quickly where they can get the quickiest and best results and answers. If your company consistently provides poor customer service in traditional channels, consider that you are setting the company up for bullies to take advantage of the “publicness” of social media.

What I mean by that is what I’ve called the Witness Factor. The Witness Factor is the idea that because something is public — i.e., everyone can see it — that THAT changes how companies treat customers. There can’t be one way to treat customers who call on the phone or email — i.e., poorly  — and then a different way to treat customers who use social channels- better and faster. It’s a clear set-up for bullies to use social media to try to take advantage of the company. They’ll figure that out and use it to their advantage — because they know you don’t want them to go blastic in public.

Know Your Customers: If you have a good system for identifying and really knowing your customers — i.e., contact center solutions, CRM, etc… then you are able to identify who you are dealing with. In researching this topic, I interviewed many clients. I asked them how they deal with these situations. The collective wisdom is that when a company can tell the difference between a real issue and a customer who is using social to take advantage of the situation, they make the better decisions on how to deal with the customer.

Often times companies don’t have good contact center/CRM systems, so they don’t know much about their customers. And they don’t have that integrated with social channels so they can’t connect who the person tweeting is to their contact center or CRM database.  So lesson learned here is to update systems and processes so that you can know and track customers and their interactions for all interaction channels.

Fire Your Bully Customers: One client told me that when they get a customer who consistently complains, they mark that person’s account. They set a limit on how many times they will allow that customer to try to get more out of the company than they deserve. And in some cases, they fire the customer. While that may seem extreme, what they find is that what those type of customer’s want is to take advantage. So rather than trying to please them– reality is you can’t — they decide on criteria that warrants firing a customer. Once these type of “bully” clients realize your firing them, they either leave or they change their behavior.

(Note- I’m not talking about customer’s who really have a problem they need solving. I’m talking about customers who consistently complain to take advantage of a company.) It’s important to identify theses conversations early — so social monitoring your brand is essential. And the second necessity is the ability to take the interaction offline and out of social channels into channels that are less visible to the public. Once you take it to other channels, then discern if the customer’s concern is real or if you have a “professional complainer” on your hands.

Gratefulness is Repaid in Spades: Often times, when customers who do have real issues are helped, they are so appreciative and sometimes even flabbergasted that a company was helpful, that they will return to social channels and will unprompted, they say how amazed they are with your company. There’s nothing like sincere, authentic and genuine compliments about your company in social spheres. You can’t pay for PR like that, especially in a world where Customer Service has now become PR. And especially in a world where social customer bullies are trying to take advantage of the company using social.

Brand Advocacy Matters: The other tip that the companies consistently mentioned was that if you have worked hard to create strong brand advocates, then when a bully starts to go off on a brand, the crowd will do one of several things. If they think its a frustrated customer, they may offer solutions and help to that customer.  That’s great because often advocates or SuperUsers do actually know more that your own agents — they’ve made your brand, products and knowing about them their personal hobby. And if they think its a social customer bully, the crowd will police it’s own social sphere. Often these social customer bullies get a reputation as a brand basher and neither the brand or current/potential clients pay much attention to them — or better yet the crowd calls the bully on their bullying. Creating brand advocates is key.

Let me know if this post has been helpful and please share how you have handled social customer bullies!

Learn. Share. Grow! @drnatalie

Are you a “T” executive? I was recently speaking with my friend John Shiple and he told me I was a “T” executive. Someone who had vast cross-functional knowledge, but also deep subject matter expertise. I didn’t know that it had a name. Pretty cool.

Part of that has come from an innate knowingness of when people work together things work out better.

Having worked as a management consultant in CRM (Marketing, Sales and Service) meant that I had to work with three different departments that didn’t normally work with each other or even want to work with each other. It meant that I was faced with trying to creating cross-functional capabilities in organizations where there had not been any.

Some people think of me as a  Customer Service expert because of one of my most recent positions. But even in that position I worked directly with CMO’s, with PR Directors, with Product Managers and Brand Managers– I didn’t just cover Customer Service, I also covered CRM. And CRM means Marketing…. It’s interesting how you get put in a box… I’ve done everything from small PR initiatives… like just write a press release to designing the whole media buy… i.e., TV and radio spots…

What I can tell you is that while some companies realized the need for it, and some even realized their ROI would be higher, the ability for individuals to work outside their own functional capabilities is slow to none. And that’s part of why I was thrilled when Marsha Collier, in her new book, The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide, asked to interview me for the first chapter.

The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide by Marsha Collier

What Marsha and I discussed in the interview and what is in the first chapter is what companies are facing and need solutions to regarding cross-functional capabilities.

There are millions and billions of dollars being wasted because of the lack of interdepartmental collaboration. It should be a crime when they don’t collaborate.

Not to mention the facturing of the brands equity in the social sphere when the separately interact with the customer. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of Marsha’s book; if you want the whole chapter, you can get it here: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/06/04706377/0470637706-152.pdf

The interview excerpt: “With your online presence, you are in the position to regularly interact with customers. You have the opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t. Knowledge gleaned from outside your inner sanctum will enable you to address key questions, such as whether your product or service offering is right for the market and up to date with current trends. This helps you motivate employees to deliver the level of service required and to identify what, if any, are opportunities for your company’s growth. Interestingly, that has been the main focus of former Forrester analyst, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff (@DrNatalie on Twitter). At Forrester, she covered not only customer service and customer relationship management (CRM), but by observing the new juncture of social media and those disciplines, she wrote the world’s first social media return on investment (ROI) model.

Natalie, now the chief social media and digital communication strategist at Weber Shandwick, is one of the truly brilliant folks in her field; her work is legendary at businesses whose budgets we can only imagine.

Her groundbreaking ideas in this arena can help to center our thoughts on exactly how this is all going to work for our own businesses. When I asked Dr. Natalie about my theory about customer service becoming the new marketing, and about how small business has an innate advantage today, here’s what she shared with me:

People asked me why I went from addressing customer service and its professionals to a public relations and marketing firm. What I found was that companies are fracturing their brands. This started to happen even before social PR and marketing departments were crafting amazing brand promises. But because the way those departments have been organized, they don’t interact with customers after the brand promise has been delivered. So who does have to deliver on the brand promise? Customer service. And because customer service has been largely trapped into the category of a cost center, it rarely is able, during those customer interactions, to deliver on the brand promise, or even have enough respect within the organization to have others accept the idea [that] they have to change products or services to better meet customers’ wants and needs.

This dynamic—the lack of interdepartmental interaction— has been happening since companies left the mom-and-pop model. Along comes social media, and what are consumers using it for? Among the many uses—to keep in touch with friends and family, find a lost love, shop—they are realizing they can broadcast to millions their disdain about how companies are not meeting their brand promise. As a management consultant back in the days of the top management consulting companies, (the “Big 6,” including Accenture, Price Waterhouse, Coopers & Lybrand, Ersnt & Young), as PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant, we were taught that more than anything, managing customer expectations was the key to success. And that lesson learned can be applied here today in business. That is the reason I joined a PR and marketing firm. I wanted to help companies manage their customers’ expectations. After many years in the corporate world, I realized the chasm in corporations needed to be healed. That chasm?

Interdepartmental disconnect and dysfunction. If I were to really help the business world make this huge change, I myself had to be the change.

I saw that PR and marketing had mastery over delivering a brand’s promise. And that their worth was based on the ability to help customers become aware, and to consider purchasing products and services from their company. Once sales “closed the deal,” customer service’s role was to help, answer questions, and solve problems.

The disconnect was that PR and marketing professionals were not always delivering a brand promise that customer service could consistently provide. And, note, none of this was the fault of PR, marketers, or customer service. It was an artifact of how companies organize themselves into groups of specialties; and rarely do they have leadership that has the intuition that continuing to interact as disparate silos not only is not in the best interest of any of those departments, [but that] it will actually be the downfall of companies, which will go out of business if they don’t “get it.”

Of the companies that do sense some of this, many of them may not know how to break down the silos in the politically charged situations they work in. And even in the best situations, they certainly would not be compensated for interdepartmental collaboration. What social media is doing for companies is essentially this: It is a source of real-time feedback.

That feedback is filled with information, if you are listening, that can be used to change your products and service to meet your customers’ needs. Imagine how much easier it would be to market and sell a product [that] your customers said they wanted. Imagine if you are listening to your customers and you are using [what they’re saying] for product innovation. Imagine if your competitor is not. Imagine the market advantage you’d have. And imagine if you used customer service as your differentiator. Why would your customers go anywhere else?

PR has now become customer service. Customer service in now PR. The question you have to ask yourself is, “How are you going to be managing the expectations of your customers, and how will all your departments deliver on your brand’s promise?” No customers, no business. Period.”

To get the whole chapter, click here: http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/06/04706377/0470637706-152.pdf

To order the book, click here: http://theultimateonlinecustomerserviceguide.blogspot.com/

Thank you Marsha! For addressing a much needed discussion and for writing a wonderful book!

Learn. Share. Grow. @drnatalie

CEO of ScoutLabs.com Jennifer Zeszut

In many companies, Marketing and PR were the first to pay attention to customers in the cloud.  Jennifer’s interview addresses some of the issues around the various functional departments within an organization and how measuring can help customer service.

Click here to hear Jennifer’s interview: CEO Jennifer Zeszut, of ScoutLabs at Web 2.0 NYC

You can follow Jennifer and scoutlabs.com on twitter:@jenniferland and @scoutlabs

And you can follow all the fabulous speakers at http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2009/

Learn. Share. Grow.

Follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/drnatalie

Sean Power, Author of Complete Web Monitoring

At web 2.o Sean was kind enough to spend a few minutes with me on the necessity of measuring your social media initiatives.

Click here to learn more about metrics and measurement by Sean: Sean Power on Measuring Web 2.0 and Social Media

You can learn much more in his book, Complete Web Monitoring, written by co-author Allister Croll. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596155148/

Complete Web Monitoring By Sean Power and Allister Croll

Follow Sean on twitter: www.twitter.com/seanpower

Follow Alistar on twitter: www. twitter.com/Acroll

Learn. Grow. Share.

You can find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/drnatalie

In this interview, I spoke to Tony about his thoughts on where we are and the future of Social CRM.

Tony Nemelka, Social CRM Expert

Tony started his career at IBM in mainframe sales, then went to watch the PC, client server revolution.

And today he is seeing a new kind of revolution:

• First is the transformation of business to a more social business where customers and employees are thought of as “partners.”  This change in strategy and its accompanying technologies results in changes in business processes introduced by the internet.
• And second is revolution is around the “cloud” or others might refer to it as SaaS.

He sees companies looking to deploy things that are going to offer them competitive advantages. And the questions they will be asking themselves are:

• “Where is the innovation going to come from?”
• “Where is it going to be built? On premise or in the “cloud?” and
• “What tools/ applications will can we use?”

He talked about his experience with the VC (venture capital) world. He does not seem them focusing on funding on-premise technologies or applications. Which sounds like the innovations will be centered around the “cloud.”

Click here to hear how Tony sees the future shaping up:

You can follow Tony on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tnemelka

p.s. Tony’s lanyard was via http://www.zebra.com/

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

Learn. Grow. Share.