Marketers today are pondering their social media strategies, questioning the best tools, how much to invest, and the real benefits.
This week ForeSee Results attempts to answer some of those questions in a newly released study, "The Key to Driving Retail Success With Social Media: Focus on Facebook."
New technologies follow a pattern. They start by imitating older technologies before they evolve to their true forms. The first automobiles looked like horseless carriages. It wasn't until the Vintage Era of the 1920s that cars evolved to a form that we'd recognize today with features like front-engines, enclosed cabs, and electric starters. Televisions started off copying radios -- they looked more like an armoire with a small screen stuck on the front.
In the process of working on my latest piece of research, it became clear that the Web has followed a similar pattern. Early sites imitated a much older medium: paper. And even though "web page" still dominates our thinking, online experiences have begun to evolve away from the page-based metaphor. In the next 5 years the evolution of online experiences toward their true form is about to take off at a much faster rate than in the previous 5 years.
Continue reading "Forrester's Moira Dorsey: The Future of Online Customer Experience" »
Online customer communities used to be just a message board where customers could ask questions or more likely, complain about products. But as social tools become more available and user adoption increases, online communities should advance with them.
Continue reading "Online Customer Communities Embrace New Social Tools" »
To say that marketing today is fast paced is an understatement. Consumers want information quickly and have little patience for slow-loading Web pages, interruptions in streaming videos and ads, or off-target marketing as they browse a brand's site. According to a December 2009 survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly three quarters (74 percent) of American adults use the Internet. This high Internet usage by everyday Americans further validates that consumers are tuning in online for information, product research, and an always-on connection with the brands and sites they rely on most.
A colleague of mine was angry about the way Orbitz handled a service issue, so she tweeted about it. She also sent a complaint via the company's website customer support page. Orbitz responded to the Twitter posts via email, and resolved the issue; the company only ever sent a generic "we're reviewing your inquiry" email in response to the complaint sent via the website.
This made me wonder whether Orbitz's service channels are actually connected on the back end. Many companies now have people whose primary focus is tracking and responding to complaints aired in online communities and social networks; but not all of those teams are integrated with the rest of the service organization in a way that promotes information sharing.
