Challenges in Managing Online Conversations

If you’re looking for a way to fight back from your company’s primary challenge of being more customer-oriented in how you manage your online conversations than congratulations you’ve found it. Through my research, I have found the four pillars (4 C’s) to solve your problem:

Customer Experience:

Customers enjoy talking about your company’s services and products so give them a reason to, as it can be a key driver for consumer conversations both on and offline.

Conversation:

The goal of conversation management is to converse and not communicate. As spoke about in the last post its extremely; important to listen, ask questions, facilitate the conversation and actively participate in it.

Content:

Provide people with positive and relevant company news were they can be brand ambassadors and spread the good news or share it on social media.

Collaboration:

Asking the customer what they want, therefore your involving them in everything your company is doing. As customers are your primary source of revenue through generating profits for your company, it seems only right to involve them in your decision making processes. Placing customers in the decision making process is based on producing a product which customers truly want.

Tune in next time to find out what exactly characterizes a social media crisis and how to successfully manage it online.

References:

Van Belleghem. S (2012), The Four C’s of the Conversation Company: Still a long road ahead for most companies, [online], Available at:http://www.briansolis.com/2012/09/the-4-cs-of-the-conversation-company-still-a-long-road-ahead-for-most-companies/, (accessed 15/11/2013).

 

How to Initiate and Manage Online Conversation with Your Customers

Looking for much some mind-blowing information on how to initiate and manage online conversations with your customers on social media sites, well look no further! As promised last week, I have done some in-depth research and have developed three main elements:

First is observation, however luckily for you guys I have found many freely available tools to enable ye to track, how many people are talking about your company, who’s talking, and what they’re saying. These tools enable companies to out carry social media metrics include back tweets and plugg.io along with Facebook Insight. The key objective is to observe your customers to better understand them, allowing you to produce products and services which they actually want.

The second is facilitating conversations online, if your company takes time to talk with your customers, it implies you’re using the right social media channels to reach out and target your audience. Consequently, if your customers are freely talking about your company, it illustrates you’re providing credibility conversation content, for example through funny viral videos.

Thirdly, when you’re joining conversations with your customers on social media sites, it’s important to listen to what they have to say and focus all your attention clearly on them. Customer may also feel like you’re interested if you ask questions, to show you’re genuinely concerned, interested and care.

These steps may also be important for implementing CRM strategies with your customers creating positive word of mouth about your company which may occur face-to-face or on social media sites.

Tune in next week to find out the challenges which many companies face in managing online conversations.

References:
My Customer (2013), How to kick-start conversations with your customers, [online], Available at: http://www.mycustomer.com/feature/social-crm/how-kick-start-conversations-your-customers/164936  (accessed 05/11/2013).
Social Media Today (2013), 50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytic’s, and Management,[online], Available at: http://socialmediatoday.com/pamdyer/1458746/50-top-tools-social-media-monitoring-analytics-and-management-2013 (accessed 05/11/2013).

 

Viral and WOM Actions

 

Shockingly Viral marketing, word-of-mouth (WOM) or “buzz marketing” are all deems to be identical terms. Who’d have thought that and why is this you ask? The main aim of all, is to pass on marketing messages to other sites or users, creating a potentially mass exploitation of message’s both visibility or in text on the web.

Viral Marketing occurs on a range on social media sites such the popular Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or even Blogs. Facebook has an outstanding 1 billion active users with a leadership position in 127 out of 137 countries in the world while Twitter has an astonishing total of 554,750,000 register users in the world.

You may ask, how does social media link to Web 2.0? Social media has provided consumers with their own unique voice, not as passive respondents of the past web 1.0 relationship, but as active members of brand communities who have the confidence to give their opinions both good and bad.

It allows firms to target very specific segments of people with particular products/services, it entices interaction with the hope of positive customer involvement and satisfaction, allows for mass exposure to over increase sales potential.

Well what are the negative effects? Cluttering, privacy and irrigation due to the high of viral ad’s which may irritate consumers by clutter their news feed. While the potential for deception looms as web has been referred to as ‘a web of deceit’ in relation to advertisers.

Over the next few weeks, I will discuss the way to initiate and manage online conversations with customers, the challenges and expectations faced to companies and a wealth of other information including many core examples. If you find this topic interesting tune in next week for some mind blowing findings.

References:

Miller, R. Lammas, N (2010), Social media and its implications for viral marketing, Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal, [online], Vol. 11, Available at:http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/apprj/articles/11-miller-lammas.pdf (accessed 8/11/2013).