3 steps to integrating ratings and reviews into social media marketing
(via MarketingProfs )
Decisions to de-activate Facebook accounts aren’t necessarily permanent. Over half of people who do so return to Facebook. People who permanently delete accounts, on the other hand, generally don’t look back.
“Is a social network without integrated analytics like a vehicle without a safety belt?”
Social media hit a low with the Boston Marathon witchhunt, says blogger Eric Schartzman. Analytics, he argues, needs to be embedded in big data.
Via briansolis.com |Without Analytics,Big Data is Just Noise
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
Charaka Kithulegoda discusses new social technology and social programs at ING DIRECT Canada:
Social banking has also helped us encourage our customer to save, through a program called Small Sacrifices. In a recent survey, we found that 52 percent of Canadians said that if they were able to better visualize what foregoing their daily, weekly and monthly spending on non-essential purchases looked like, they would save them over the short and long term, they would change their spending habits.
With client preferences at the heart of our business, we helped our customers visualize how cutting out everyday indulgences, — i.e. Small Sacrifices — could lead to big savings over the long term. It’s simple, but very effective. First, users choose what small sacrifice they can make, like passing on a daily coffee purchase. Then users decide which goal to redirect the money to, like their retirement fund or savings account.
Once the user specifies how much money they spend on their average, Small Sacrifices creates a chart illustrating how much could be amassed in five- and 25 years by saving that amount weekly. The next time a user is tempted to spend on their non-essential purchase, they can choose to instead redirect that money to a savings or retirement account with one simple click
Dr. Rudra Sil, professor of political science and co-director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania, citing Arab Spring as an example, argued that social media distorts our perceptions of international issues. Speaking at The College of William and Mary he warned against oversimplification:
Unemployment had been rising for five years. And yet, when you hear the social media story, that part seems to be kind of forgotten. It all becomes about the corrupt dictator and the people finally finding a voice to overthrow him. Simplified version of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain did not provide a full picture of what occurred.
Similarly, social media diffusion of the woman raped and beaten to death in New Delhi made the tragedy seem like an exclusively Indian problem, said Sil.
It’s good that social media spotlighted this issue for Indians … but if we really care about rape and stopping violence against women, it’s got to be done on a global scale. Here, social media essentially was pushing us in a different direction.
Instead of rushing to judgment, he emphasized, we need to maintain our tradition of seeking out differing perspectives.
IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab
To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.
Companies with the foresight and know-how to apply [social media] thoughtfully, and with rigor, will be the big winners. A great example is social media’s ability to spur the convergence of brand and culture. It encourages people to integrate their personal and professional personae in ways that lead to new and valuable ideas and work – for the individuals and their organizations. An example of this convergence is a new IBM social website and web service called Voices. Voices is a real-time data service that showcases live social feeds of IBMers who are experts in big data, mobile, social business, cloud, cognitive computing and much more. But it doesn’t end there. Voices then marries the individuals’ thoughts with IBM’s company feeds (@IBM, @SmarterPlanet, @IBMResearch) etc.), as well as a word cloud that shows visitors what’s trending via data visualization technology originating from IBM Research.
via Ethan McCarty, IBM, in wired.com
Solving the social media content problem. With networked content sharing, the communications function creates opportunities for social media account owners to connect instead of trying to do it all themselves. Via CEB Communications Blog
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
