Today, customer service is among the more sought-after professions for bright young professionals who expect to love their work and be well compensated for it…. A 2012 report from CareerBliss, which conducted an analysis of more than 100,000 employee-generated reviews, found that the Customer Service Representative was one of the “happiest” jobs in America. What’s more, according to employment website indeed.com, the number of high-profile social customer service jobs has more than doubled since January of 2006.

Via pandodaily

By 2016, 80 percent of marketing tech investments will come outside of IT, Gartner predicts. Here’s where those marketing dollars are going now. 

* Marketing automation. Content management and social media monitoring, as well as the automation, aggregation, and analysis of social data. Also, established technologies such as sales-force automation and CRM. These  increase the effectiveness of the marketing processes themselves.

* Social technology and mobile technology. Both technologies produce fundamentally different interactions with and among customers. How to take advantage of this? At one end is the monitoring new behaviors — what they comment on in social media and how they shop or look up information when not at a desk, for example. At the other is using these new conduits to customers to serve them actively, such as tapping into location data to provide localized recommendations — marketers use the terms “geotargeting” and “hyperlocal” to refer to these new types of possible services.

* Analytics for real-time business intelligence. Historically, companies have used business intelligence to assess the past, then roll out changes based on that assessment. But in a fast-moving world, that insight often comes too late. Also, it’s typically based on data collected for very specific purposes, so the insights that can be gleaned from it tend to be limited to those original purposes. But new, often cloud-based technologies — collectively called big data — are providing ways to analyze information very quickly (even in real time), from multiple sources. Companies can adjust their operations and marketing more quickly — and even more targeted to specific types of customers

Via cio.com

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

Researchers have found several factors that impact credibility of Twitter and Weibo posts in the U.S. and China, and they tend to be specific to each country:

• U.S. readers view tweets from authors with “internet style” user names as less credible than those with topically relevant user names. 
   
• In China, internet-style user names enhanced the credibility of political messages — official-sounding sources may be viewed with distrust as a result of government censorship.   
   
• Anonymized profile images resulted in lower credibility ratings for the associated messages Overall, this effect was less pronounced in China, perhaps due to acceptance of anonymity as a way to circumvent limitations on free speech.   
   
• Perceived network overlap between the author and the reader also enhanced credibility perceptions in general, with the exception of political posts in China, where the lack of network overlap actually enhanced credibility, presumably because participants assumed that only people with special connections would have access to political news (and these would be unlikely to be people whom they would be personally connected to).  
   
• In the US, posts attributed to authors in more liberal locales (e.g., Seattle, Washington vs. Biloxi, Mississipi) were also rated as more credible.

Via Follow the Crowd