What Keeps Me Up At Night

Good morning everyone! Happy Friday.  More importantly Happy Mother’s Day Weekend to all of you fortunate enough to have children, what a blessing they are thanks to you Mom. I’m very lucky, my mom Donna is an amazing mother and I love that I moved back to Detroit to spend more time with her. As lucky as I am, my 3 children have really hit the jackpot with Staci. One day is nowhere near enough to celebrate all she does for our children.

Mom’s….and Dad’s for that matter in social media I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. There are so many exciting opportunities and challenges in social that I thought I’d put a list together of the things I’ve been working on with clients that keep me up and night.

1. Social Sales – Everybody wants to know how do I make money with social, how do I show a hard ROI.
2. Social Customer Care – Executing the use case for customer retention and customer service in social media and showing the impact on retention/loyalty.
3. Social Marketing – Optimizing the most effective and efficient use of marketing investment across the social internet, social marketing is the last unaccountable spend but not for much longer.
4. Competitive Analysis – There is such a hyper focus on competitors in social media, wish more resources were focused on improving internally first.
5. Social Technology – Integrating social media listening, publishing, advertising and search strategies to optimize social investment, resources and results.
6. Social Partner Management – Define, document and present a preferred social media ecosystem including digital and creative agencies, media buyers, solution partners and system integrators.
7. Customer Experience – Present a coordinated Web/Mobile/Social customer experience every single time.
8. Employee Engagement – Educate, create and harness the power of a brand’s greatest social media advocates? Think about the power of employee advocates for a brand like Lowe’s with all those customer touch points.
9. Social Culture – Drive the same cultural revolution inside a brand at a faster speed than consumer behavior is changing on the outside in social.
10. Social Decision Making – Driving adoption to the point to where a brand routinely leverages social data and customer feedback to make improved business decisions.
11. Social Center of Excellence – Create a social media nerve center centralizing key functions including PR, Communications, Agency, Customer Service, IT and Marketing into one physical location all centered around the customer.
12. Big Data – Measure the impact of online to offline transactions on new customer acquisition, conquests and retention.
13. Social Media Playbook – Building a social media playbook outlining the key goals, metrics, roles/responsibilities, process, policies, content and engagement guidelines, education and adoption strategies.
14. Sponsorships & Events – Maximize the positive impact of social media on sponsorship opportunities and live events.
15. PR & Crisis Management – Protect the brand and mitigate risk from the tidal wave of negative sentiment.

I think it’s going to be a long night! See you next week. Thanks for visiting my blog.

What is a Social Hub? Why is it Important?

 

Thanks for joining me this week on “No Fluff” social media.  Appreciate you reading my blog but I know you are busy so let’s get right to it.

If you are a social media professional, do you find yourself saying……….

“I wish I could listen and engage more on social conversation with my customers but I just don’t have enough resources to handle it all.”

“The tool I use to monitor social media can’t weed out the ‘noise’ and give me just the ‘actionable’ stuff.”

“I feel like I’m missing a huge opportunity to generate sales in social by not routing leads into our Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) so the sales team can respond.”

“I feel even worse that I’m not responsive in responding to my consumers that have had a bad experience and tell the world about it on our Facebook or Twitter account.”

“I wonder if the same consumers engaging on social networks area also calling, emailing or chatting with our brand.”

“It would be fantastic if I could combine a person’s Twitter handle with their other consumer data like name, address and email.”

“I don’t want to respond just because they are influential, but it would be nice if I could automatically detect when an influencer mentions our brand so I could provide a little VIP service.”

“Maybe the thing that frustrates me most is we have PR, marketing, customer service, legal, R&D and our handful of agencies all using a different social listening, engagement and reporting platform.”

If these thoughts sound familiar you certainly aren’t alone. At least not down here in the trenches of social media where I’m at.  Fortunately, one of the emerging trends in 2013 for social professionals is the concept of a Social Hub.

So what is a Social Hub?

Monitor MORE social conversation with LESS people by automatically routing ‘actionable’ social interactions to the right resource. Who couldn’t use a little productivity bump and save a few bucks in their budget?

Start driving social sales by automatically routing sales leads in to your CRM system for your sales team to follow-up on. Cha Ching!

Automatically route those complaints and questions on Facebook and Twitter to your contact center so customer service agents can retain consumers and improve loyalty.

With a Social Hub you can log in to your CRM and see the full 360 view of each consumer with their social data like twitter handle and followers on the same screen as their name and other demographic data.  Wonder if social customers spend more, are they more loyal? Those reports are possible with Social Hub.

I know you don’t want to treat influencers differently just because they have 50k followers but with Social Hub it easy to automatically identify them, maybe give them a little extra attention or quicker response, then sit back and take the credit from all the positive word of mouth driven by those positive mentions.

Granted no social software is best in listening, responding, reporting, and managing social content and that is the primary reason why large organizations have so many different tools.  But isn’t it time for a little teamwork in social media. A Social Hub can help stop the turf wars and get everyone holding hands in the same system.

The bottom line. A Social Hub is a social media business rules engine. It applies business rules to automatically route interactions to the right people to drive the right engagement.

It’s the glue Sales, Marketing and Customer Service need to sell, connect and serve your consumers.

Wow! That sounded a little fluffy didn’t it? Well we speak nothing but the truth here at No Fluff so keep in mind Social Hub is brand new stuff. It’s not perfect. It will take some tuning and continued improvement to work out the kinks.  No different than any other influential emerging technology.

Below is an example of what a 360 view of a consumer can look like after implementing a Social Hub. It includes the consumers contact information, where she last tweeted, social insights on her engagement level, other household members, campaign/promotion activity, customer service case history and more.

See you next week and if you found this information about Social Hub valuable please click one of those fancy social media share buttons below.

How Brands Can Sell More TV’s Using Social Media

Since I’m looking for a new TV and in celebration of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas I thought I’d blog about how brands can sell more TV’s using social media.  Below is my actual tweet at 10.36pm on Jan. 9th. The rest of the twitter conversation is completely made up.

ChadSchaeffer 10:36pm via HootSuite Going to buy new TV soon. Suggestions? 55″ so it can be hung in built in. Plasma vs LED? Wireless for apps obviously.

Panasonic sees my tweet and replies……

@chadschaeffer Who are you rooting for? Is there anything more fun then a new TV? Man cave or family room? How big will the wife let you go?

@panasonic Uggh! Cowboys fan. TV for SB party in family room. thinking 55”. Want wireless for netflix, youtube, amazon, app store.

@chadschaeffer Link to cnet TV reviews http://ow.ly/gez, link SB party recipes http://ow.ly/cke, 2 Excedrin for being Cowboy fan

@panasonic you must be Eagles fan! Looks like P55VT50 is highly rated.

@chadschaeffer If we are lucky enough to earn your business here is link to P55VT50 http://ow.ly/gez. Twitter code #TW01 15% discount.

@panasonic Wow! I think you did earn my business. Great service. BTW..love the hot wing recipe!

@chadschaeffer Please send us a pic of your new Panasonic once it arrives. Questions just tweet us, here to help. Enjoy the game and wings.

My last tweet would probably mention @panasonic

If you are looking for new TV check out reviews on @panasonic. Plus they have awesome service on Twitter. Bought P55VT50. Please RT!

Now I only have about 1,300 followers on Twitter, 425 Facebook friends and a few hundred people read my blog.

So my reach is 2,000 people.

Perhaps 1% of my followers read and RT and they each have a reach of 2,000 people. 20 x 2,000 is an online reach 40,000.

Panasonic would likely RT my last comment to their 16,000 followers, again same ratio of 1% read and RT and their reach is 320,000.

Total online reach is 362,000.

Now 1% would be way too high a number, 3,620 people are not going to run out and buy a Panasonic.   But is 1% of 1% too high?

Could an interaction like the one above influence the buying decision of 36 people? Maybe but probably still high. Would 3 people be reasonable and at $2,000 for the P55VT50 would you agree the return on investment of 3 or 4 tweets is worth $6,000?

Also keep in mind this does not take into account my offline influence through positive word of mouth when I share my incredible experience with Panasonic.

But here is the hundred thousand dollar question. How many total TV buying conversations are on Twitter everyday leading up to Christmas and through the Super Bowl.  I’m guessing hundreds of thousands.

I smell opportunity!

Ready for the million dollar question? How much is it worth to the Panasonic brand to just be social? To connect with people talking about TV’s? To engage and have conversations about TV’s? Or simply be nice and helpful?