Scale social programs gradually

To succeed in social business, organizations need to talk to customers as though they are sitting directly across from them and scale these conversations to reach a broader audience than ever before. To set up social programs for this purpose, focus on 3 steps:

Connect with individuals. Start thinking about what your consumer is doing on social channels – why they are there – and develop programs to those folks based on what they want from that channel

Scale personal interactions. Do not rush in scaling social marketing to gain new customers. Create open, engaging dialogue with a few and you will open your doors to others who take note of not only what you say, but how you say it. (Which is why lurkers are as valuable as the vocal minority.)

Build your social business based on individual conversations and gradual scaling, Over time, you will make decisions to adapt to your audience, drive new programs, or add resources to make this model work.

Via Todd Wilms in Forbes BrandVoice

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“Customer experience is the ‘eat healthy and exercise’ of the business world.”

  • Everyone knows it’s important, and why.
  • When talking to others we probably pretend we do it better than we actually do.
  • Deep down we aren’t quite sure what we should do – it’s complicated and confusing.
  • The things we know we should do just aren’t that fun or exciting, so we often avoid them.
Via Megan Burns, Forrester

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CEOs share secrets of connecting with customers in an age of mass intimacy

From The Age of Mass Intimacy

Mary Dillon, U.S. Cellular: Wrote personalized songs to customers who tweeted with service complaints. Internal contest identified employees who were exceptional singers. 70 videos created, tweeted back to individuals and posted on YouTube.

Joe Rigby, PepCo Holdings: Only now, through smart meters, do we have the ability to know when an individual’s power is out. That means more efficient restoration and personal dialogue online.

George Halvorson, Kaiser Permanente: We have no paper. 100 million e-connections with patients last year. 68 million lab results electronically. In one month, over a million users using iPhone app to get lab results in hours.

Dan Jauernig, Classified Ventures: Shoppers on our site can get real-time, online answers from other customers while shopping for a car or apartment.

What it takes for mass intimacy to happen? 

Steve Hasselmann, IBM: Make sure somebody has the mission. Most often it’s the chief marketing officer and the CIO as a pair. 

Via Forbes

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Hybrid Wisdom Labs Launches A Speedy, Scalable Engine For Visualizing Customer Insight | TechCrunch Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs. The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from “more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley”, resulting in today’s launch of its patented “Collaborative Discovery Engine”, a scalable way for companies to rapidly generate realtime insight from their customers and employees. To date, the technology has been used by General Motors, Unilever, Humana, and the US State Department, Goldberg said. The idea for this new collaborative engine stems from the fact that most tools companies are using to gain intelligence from social media end up being list-based discussion interfaces that don’t scale well and quickly grow to unmanageable proportions, the founder said.

Hybrid Wisdom Labs Launches A Speedy, Scalable Engine For Visualizing Customer Insight | TechCrunch

Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs.

The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from “more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley”, resulting in today’s launch of its patented “Collaborative Discovery Engine”, a scalable way for companies to rapidly generate realtime insight from their customers and employees. To date, the technology has been used by General Motors, Unilever, Humana, and the US State Department, Goldberg said.

The idea for this new collaborative engine stems from the fact that most tools companies are using to gain intelligence from social media end up being list-based discussion interfaces that don’t scale well and quickly grow to unmanageable proportions, the founder said.

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