Just had the pleasure of reading this great book by Paul Dunay, Buzz Marketing for Technology with Colleen Totz Diamond. I believe every business executive should read this book.
To request the book (It’s free), click Get My New Book
It’s that important. Let’s share a key point from the Introduction. But the bottom is this:
People are talking online about your business. You don’t control these conversations. Get used to it.
“One of the biggest challenges for organization today is managing the flow of information about their brands, products and services that occurs in social media channels, including micro blogs (such as Twitter) social network sites (such as Facebook), blogs and online forums.
More than ever, consumers use social media to spread the word about the brands they like and perhaps most importantly, don’t like. With the introductions of each new media channel, the landscape changes. To help achieve that goal, organizations now adopt formal processes that structure how their contact centers organize, distribute, and analyze the information they collect from many channels.”
This is so right, Paul. Conversations, good and bad, are happening everywhere today, and it’s only going to grow in the future. Business leaders ought to embrace the approach espoused here.
Every day business leaders talk about the growing importance of social networks. But companies that operate contact centers stand to benefit the most. The contact center is also where you will get the highest ROI from social media.
Here are some examples:
Comcast – sees between 5,000 and 8,000 mentions of their name in Twitter per week. They’ve resolved hundreds of customers support issues using Twitter. Because of their strong customer service, they have over 25,000 followers.
Dell - sees between 28,000 and 30,000 mentions per week. Dell resolves thousands of issues each day using Twitter. They also report $6 million in sales of refurbished items on Twitter.
The Social Network Landscape
There’s a bewildering variety of social networks out there, including Ning, Linkedin, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook. In fact, Facebook is now the most popular website on Earth – surpassing Google. If the users of Facebook were a country, it would be the 6th largest in the world. Google can find and index Facebook pages, improving a company’s position in search rankings, so it is critical that businesses are there.
Blogs are also a popular place to share information. A blog is an online journal where one can post articles, short or long, to showcase perspective, culture and personality. Most blogs have a central theme. Fearless Competitor is all about business to business demand generation.
Listening Platforms
Social media is more than connecting and broadcasting. It’s also about listening, collecting and analyzing data about online conversations. Here are 3 leading vendors of listening platforms.
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are leaders in the space.
The book discusses free tools, how to choose the right listening platform and types of conversations to monitor, and how to create a work distribution system. Finally, it explains how to test the system.
To read the original post, click http://pauldunay.com/social-media-and-the-contact-center-for-dummies-wiley/
Check out our Thought Leadership Interview series.
Companies today need a Chief Content Officer.
Join us every Thursday at 8pm ET/5pm PT for Twitter chat about b2b demand generation. Just go to http://tweetchat.com/ and enter hashtag #b2bchat.
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.” He’s also the author of two highly acclaimed white papers, How to Find New Customers and Definitive Guide to Making Quota, as well the ebook, Prospect Driven Marketing (and he’s about to start on his third white paper) and holds a BBA in Marketing from the University of Notre Dame.
Find New Customers helps business develop and implement programs to improve the way they find and acquire new customers using best practices in lead generation.