Social media has quickly emerged as a significant part of an average consumer's daily life. Each day an individual participates in social media they are providing valuable data about themselves to those keeping track. This data, however, is only as valuable as their ability to analyze and uncover the underlying connections, relationships and patterns. There is an immense loss of opportunity if businesses are not able to connect the dots to uncover insightful, useful patterns among the disparate [...]

Read More: Why Developers and Brands Need Real-Time Understanding of Customer Data

Today's post is written by Jennifer Roberts. I was riding up one of the canyon roads in Boulder, Colorado a few weekends ago. I wanted to use the ride to work out how to write an article linking my online social behavior with the concept of a social consumer. But my high-end Sella Italia Lady [...]

Read More: Profiling Your Social Customer

Comcast and service are two words that have been closely aligned and analyzed since Frank Eliason initiated the @ComcastCares program on Twitter. Eliason built a new channel for engaging customers to solve their problems. More importantly, he also developed a new infrastructure at Comcast to learn from their experiences. Frank has since joined CITI, but [...]

Read More: How Social Customer Service is Changing the Culture at Comcast

According to the 2011 Cone Online Influence Trend Tracker released back in August, four-out-of-five consumers have changed their minds about a recommended purchase based solely on negative information they found online from the social customer. This is up from just 67 percent of consumers who said the same thing in 2010. Additionally, positive information has a similar effect on consumer decision making, with 87 percent of consumers agreeing a favorable review has confirmed their decision to pur [...]

Read More: [STUDY] The Social Customer and Their Influence of Other Customers

This is part two in a short series to introduce The End of Business as Usual…originally posted on Harvard Business Review (edited) There's an old saying that carries renewed meaning these days: Give the people what they want. Brands are furiously creating profiles in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the hopes of [...]

Read More: Social Media’s Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows

I am a Comcast customer. I actually love Comcast. I have their high speed internet service, cable and an HD box to compliment my wicked Sony TV.  I am a huge fan of On Demand and their programming is second to none.  I’ve called customer support a few times over the last 8 years and honestly … sometimes the issue was my fault, not theirs. A few years ago, Frank Eliason did something awesome.  He started monitoring Twitter for Comcast mentions and he quickly realized that there was an opportunity [...]

Read More: Comcast is Solving Customer Problems but Are They Changing Their Business Model?

nick_gundry_superhero_smcedteam.jpg Do you use personas when you’re working on a a design or marketing plan?It’s not a good sign when a four year old girl points out that you are putting a door handle on backwards is it? That’s happened to me before, it’ll happen again too. If you were trying to reach me as a prospective customer you could identify by my demographics. A caucasian male in late thirties, shops at home depot [...]

Read More: Using personas to help you understand your customer

Almost seven years ago, in October 2004, I wrote The Social Customer Manifesto. It was short and sweet and it read like this: THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER MANIFESTO I want to have a say. I don't want to do business with...

Read More: Reflections on the Social Customer

On August 18, 2011, a group including Tom Guarriello, Matthew Mahoney, Tim Bursch, Sean Bohan, Jeris JC Miller, Nancy White and Christopher Carfi held a Google+ Hangout to discuss different scenarios that were enabled by Google+'s announcement that it was...

Read More: Google+ for Customer and Brands: Scenario Planning Summary [video]

Whenever I come across a Facebook brand page with dozens of unanswered fan questions on the wall, I cringe. It's the digital equivalent of walking into a retail store and not finding a single employee to help you return a previous purchase or to tell you more about a product you're thinking of buying. That's [...]

Read More: 5 Challenges For Managing Customer Service On Facebook

Social media is expanding marketing. It's expanding outreach and branding. It's reducing advertising spends and increasing advertising hiring. It's doing so many wonderful things for business, but one thing that isn't getting the benefits of social media as much as it should is customer service. It's there. It's right in front of us, right under [...]

Read More: In a Fickle World, Customer Service is Suffering (despite the ultimate tool being right here)

Do you have many subgroups (or tribes) your business relies on? Have you figured out how to connect with these groups? Some brands, like Wachovia, use a single corporate channel for all of their social media efforts. Other brands, like Kodak, created multiple corporate channels that are managed by individual business units. Why Tribes? As [...]

Read More: 7 Ways to Develop Customer Tribes for Your Business

We are proud to nominate our client, Discover, for a 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award. View the official nomination here, and be sure to give it a quick rating or review and check out other entries!  When it comes to listening to customers, the credit card industry has been slow to embrace customer conversations. Faced with stricter [...]

Read More: Customer feedback helps Discover live their brand promise

I have never done this before on my blog but I am going to be writing a series of blog posts about customer and brand advocacy.  Chapter 9 in my book is all about advocates so much of the series will pull from that content.  Many companies today are starting to shift their marketing dollars and are looking to create formal advocate programs. Their focusing less on reaching out to influencers, and instead, identifying those social customers who may or may not thousands of Twitter followers but lo [...]

Read More: Blog Series: How to Create a Formal Customer Advocacy Program