Why You Don’t Want a Social Media Strategy and Why You Should

Companies of all sizes are talking about their "social media strategy." Like lemmings throwing themselves off the social networking cliff, they are rushing to launch initiatives to engage with customers in highly specialized groups via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online games and other communities. They seem to have set aside the lessons from recent revolutions related to e-mail and e-commerce, lessons related to the importance of integrated marketing and services.

The fact is that social media should not be pursued in a vacuum. Companies need to be talking about their "multichannel strategy," not merely their social media one. Customer complaints and opinions need context. When those customer complaints and opinions are in social media, they need to be aligned with other customer feedback, marketing, and service principles and processes.

Customer input is derived from a host of sources: social media, e-mails, private web communities, service notes, chat sessions and more.A key component in increasing loyalty and revenue opportunities is thus being able to listen, analyze, relate and act — better than anyone else — on customer input derived from these multiple channels.

Social Media Strategy, Bad; Multichannel Feedback Strategy, Good

Why is it so important for companies to create a multichannel strategy rather than merely a social media one?

Consistency of brand experience.Customers who contact the company via e-mail or a web form should get the same response as a customer who engages via Twitter, unless that’s a deliberate decision on the company’s part. Regardless of channel, customer response personnel need access to the same knowledgebase of information and the same set of processes.

Validation or negation of a trend. Customers might complain about a product issue within social media, but they might be merely echoing complaints based on overheard rumors, rather than on actual first-person experiences. (The supposed iPhone "death grip" springs to mind.) If customer service records show very few calls about the issue, and return rates have remained fairly consistent, there might be a PR problem, not a product integrity issue.

The "why" behind the trend. Perhaps there’s a lot of chatter among existing or potential customers wanting to buy a newly announced product. By sending a follow-up survey to those people, or creating focus groups, companies can dig into more details about why those customers are so excited. It’s also possible to uncover and address any uncertainties that might negatively impact customers’ desire to purchase the product once it’s available on the market.

So, how can you create an effective multichannel strategy in your company?

Come Together, Right Now

Giving the customer the right experience is multi-faceted and exists across silos. It’s vital to get all the players sitting at the same table.

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Customer experience has many touch points, from initial education, thought leadership and marketing, to the sales process, the product experience, and the support experience during and after the purchase or sign-up. You should involve everyone who interacts with the customer at these different stages, which can include representatives from sales, marketing, customer service, market research, and even channel partners. Each may have his or her own objectives, structures and to-do lists. So many voices and viewpoints can make alignment across channels a real challenge, but not impossible.

LISTEN

You need to then determine where you are listening to your customers today. Are you currently surveying your customers? Are you looking at survey verbatims or just the numbers? How connected are your pre-purchase and post-purchase survey and focus group programs? Are you mining external customer communities where customers gather, e.g., expert sites or review sites? Do you have your own internal customer communities? Are you listening to social media, or do you need to extend existing social media programs? How are you leveraging feedback from your e-mail and contact center systems?

Measure volume of conversation in aggregate, across all channels. You should also evaluate performance by channel, for yourself and for your competitors, to find which sections are performing well and to help give your numbers specific context.

ANALYZE

Once you add up all of this feedback, you’re talking about a lot of information. This is where analysis comes into play: using the power of automated text analytics to reveal the products, trends, issues, and sentiment being described in the text of each of these customer conversations. If you discover a spike in negative sentiment or a peak in buzz for one of your competitors, you need to dig in and find out what’s driving it.

When you are dealing with social media or unstructured messages inside your firewall (such as e-mails, call center notes and text surveys), you need a robust semantic tool to help surface the most prevalent issues and trends. If you are dealing with structured survey data, you should be working with a statistical tool.

By creating a centralized repository for multichannel communications, you provide a single authoritative source to which every constituent can come to find out answers. Now each team is able to see the complete customer picture, instead of drawing potentially incorrect conclusions based merely on a small sliver of data.

RELATE

Information gathered from social media text fields needs to be related to both structured information within those social media sources (for example, feature ratings on a product review site, demographic information, etc.) and to other information withinorganization. This allows for deeper exploration of feedback, revealing the "whys behind the numbers".What were the top concerns of people who rated this product a "2" versus a "4"? How much of this product did we ship in the last month? How are customer service complaints stacking up against social media complaints?

It’s very important that your analytics solution interact well with your in-house data warehouse solutionto provide a unified view and deep analysis of all of your customer conversations: sentiment, issues, and root causes. This can help you break down the informational silos that exist in your organization

ACT

While many people understand the importance of monitoring social media (it seems as if every day there’s a new Twitter tracking service), it is more difficult to be able to go beyond monitoring to action. Being able to act on information coming in through social media requires customer service agents to mine and report on the information, route and respond to the information, and re-use and deliver the information to those who need it.

You need to consider a wide variety of questions. Do product managers, executives, and others come to your market research or analytics department asking for specific pieces of information? Or does your analytics team understand the business well enough to be able to proactively approach others with ideas and insights? To what types of issues does your company want to respond? How quickly should that response be done? Who should respond and based on what criteria? Do you treat "influencers" or "VIP customers" differently from everybody else, or does your company espouse an "every customer is important" ideal?

Thinking through these points in a comprehensive way will enable you to be more effective, not only in your social media efforts, but across all of your customer engagements. So don’t just jump into a social media strategy, remember the basics and think about social media in an integrated way.

Still need convincing? Check out Heidi Miller's Customer Service Smackdown.