International Digital Marketing

“If someone has 1,000 followers, for example, and complains about a company then that company needs to be seen to be dealing with the issue.”

Michael Taggart, head of digital at communications agency MRM

In Twitter bad news can spread very quickly. Re-tweets and complaint “hashtags” (e.g. #vodafail, #BTfail) have increased the importance of proactive and real-time Twitter monitoring and customer service.

Many companies are finally realizing, that to manage their online reputation they need to get involved and do something. Besides Twitter active BT, Alsa, Bank of Scotland and other companies, now the car brand Peugeot has launched officially a customer care centre in Twitter.

By setting up a customer Twitter service you may be able to solve problems before they become crises and close the deal before competitors even know there was one.  But how to make sure it will not just make things worse?

#1 Build a template/chart to help your CRM classify which tweets qualify as high, medium or low alert

There are so many tweets it is important to prioritize. Define tweet’s importance by building a chart that helps your customer Twitter service to classify the urgency of each tweet and see which requires immediate action. Read more details on which tweets/posts to respond, ignore or escalate here.

#2 Decide what kind of customer Twitter service you want to establish

It is important to decide from the beginning whether to establish an official customer Twitter service or simply surprise customers by tweeting. As mentioned before, there are few companies who have opted in for an official Twitter customer service. However, before establishing one, be realistic on your time, resources and budget. The customer who gets a sudden answer and solution to his tweet is delighted, but a customer who does not receive an answer to his tweet for the official customer Twitter service gets more upset.

#3 Establish a clear process

Brief and supply the person/team who handles the customer Twitter service with a clear process. Make sure they know how to classify and prioritize the tweets and who to escalate important issues. All the team should know each others roles in the process e.g. who searches, who classifies, who responds…

#4 Use tools to track the tweets

There is a lot of tweets out there – in 2011 Twitter reached billion tweets per week. Without proper tools, the quantity of information can be too much to handle.

The first tool to use is of course Twitter search to have an overview what people are saying about you, to refine your search and add filters go to advanced search. To monitor in real time what is being said about your industry, your brand or competitors, for example TweetDeck is a good tool.

#5 Act and respond fast

Tweets need to be responded to quickly, approximately within 10 minutes because of the speed they come, go and spread across the social networks.

#6 Assign the right person to answer

Make sure the person who answers is the right person to be handling the post/situation. To be sure, create a list for the people handling the tweets to help them to re-assign the post to an appropriate person e.g. leads to sales, dealer issues for person in charge of dealers, etc.

#7 Do not use a non-personalized automated response and do not Spam

Nothing annoys more an angry customer than an automatic cold non-personalized message in the time of need or anger. Occasionally people get even upset of you tweeting them, but remember not to take it personally. Best way to proceed is to tweet once offering your help or solution, but if you do not get a response and the conversation does not start – Stop. Do not insist, it will just backfire and you will be accused publicly of spamming.

#8 Do not forget the reporting and follow up

Ask the person/team to keep log on the happenings, classifying them by incidents, queries, opportunities and problems. Include the date, person’s “name”, tweet, response and status. This is how you can see end of the month how many tweets have you responded, now many tweets were escalated, how many satisfied customers you had and how many issues were resolved. Then follow up, follow up, follow up. See if these customers tweeted something positive about you, have a look around the web if the escalated issues are also in blog posts and customer forums and think constantly ways to improve the service and process.

#9 Use Twitter Favorites as real-time testimonials

After a while, it might be a good idea to use Twitter favourites to gather positive tweets from your fans and customers. It has its own RSS feed, which is a nice resource of short, 140 character, real-life testimonials for new potential leads – and top management of course to justify the investment. It is short, effective and works.

#10 Ask tweeters how you could improve your customer service

People in Twitter are more reactive and more likely to answer than in other medias. People also like to give their opinion and advice freely. Some of the feedback is quite obvious, but sometimes there are very good ideas as well. Why to guess, when customers know the best what they want?

Customer Twitter service can be a success or a flop. Remember that monitoring and responding tweets is a time consuming task and requires resources. Before going ahead, make sure you are able to answer and follow up the negative feedback, queries and opportunities. If there are unanswered queries or comments or if they are handled sloppily, the end result might be worse than the situation was in the beginning.

Also, do not stop investing in your call centre. BT has a long spread reputation of having a rubbish call centre and there is a big online (and offline) buzz going on saying that if you want to get you problem resolved without hanging on the phoneline for hours, you need to tweet negatively of the company and in 5 min you get a response. There is similar feedback on Alsa, Royal Mail and Bank of Scotland. Maybe it is me, but customers should not be encouraged to complain publicly to get their issues resolved…

Other thing us marketers forget sometimes is that most of the people are not in Twitter and especially older people do not how exactly to use it (or even see a reason to use it). Therefore it is important to concentrate on both call centre and Twitter service. If the call centre is good, quick and effective, there will be less negative tweets spreading across web to thousands of people  and if the customer Twitter service is good the crises are resolved before they even started.

Social Networks killing E-mail marketing? No, integration of the two is possible – and even recommendable. According to a study by GetResponse, e-mails containing social media sharing options such as Facebook or Twitter generated a 30% higher CTR than e-mails without them. What is even more promising is that the e-mails including at least three different sharing options had a 55% higher CTR. A very significant result, yet the study states that only 11.2% of e-mails currently offer three or more sharing options.

But why to limit to simple buttons in the end of the e-mails, when there are so many other possibilities to integrate e-mail marketing with social media? If just inserting few buttons can be so successful, imagine what other tricks can do!

Top seven tips to integrate e-mailing and social media:

1. Publish Facebook competition winners in the company newsletter

You acquire a double advantage, because besides of additional incentives of social media competitions, the Facebook community becomes part of your e-mail subscribers.

2.  Promote exclusive offers in Facebook and Twitter – that are only available for e-mail subscribers.

Subscribers want exclusive advantages for their loyalty. Reserving certain privileges for only this group, the perceived value of your e-mail subscribers program increases and gives motivation for other users to join. Since social media is highly viral, the information will spread quickly.

3. Include links to the best web versions of your Newsletters to Facebook and Twitter.

This tactic increases amount of people reading and clicking your Newsletter, even more than just adding “like” buttons.

4. Include “like” buttons in newsletters and promotions, but offer users a reason to use them.

A study by Nielsen Norman Group showed that students used much more the “share” option, when they got benefits from it. For example, “share this in Facebook and find out what your friends think about this product”, “Share this in Twitter so your friends know where to find you”

5. Encourage your subscribers to ask through Facebook or Twitter.

Unfortunately, the subscribers cannot answer commercial messages, so show them the dedication of your customer service by encouraging them to ask questions through social networks.

6. Include questions that were published in Facebook and Twitter in your e-mail and answer them.

If a company is active in social networks, it develops constantly a big base of frequently asked questions and answers that should be included in communications.

7. Create a mail group that includes Twitter followers and send them additional information through email.

Twitter followers appreciate the personal perspective the 140 characters offer, so offer them information that awakens their curiosity.

There has been talk about death of E-mail marketing after the emerge of social media, yet both ways of communication can complement each other and create considerably better campaign results. Another additional benefit of these strategies is creating a strong up-to-date database by encouraging social media users to implement their personal information into the company database.

Capturing social media users (Twitter followers, Facebook fans, bloggers…) personal data is complicated, because of the contact permission issues, yet if they give it voluntarily this can create a considerable amount of leads. Not to mention the possibilities the data capture brings for customer loyalization programs.

European Parliament’s Internal market and consumer protection committee has adopted this week (8th Nov 2010) a report on the impact of advertising on consumer behaviour by French MEP Philippe Juvin.The report focuses on intrusive new advertising techniques that have arrived with online social networks, forums and blogs.

Even if the current EU legislation (2005) battles against aggressive and misleading advertising, it does not cover fully the new online advertising practices, such as abuse of data privacy by targeting individual’s interests or community managers who pretend to be consumers and leave comments and information in the forums. These practices should be controlled by the message board monitors and require “behavioural advertisement” warnings, says the Internal Market committee. Consumers must receive clear, accessible and comprehensive information about how their data are collected and used. This private information cannot be used without consumers’ opt-in.

Data privacy and ads tailored to individuals

Law makers want to prohibit certain intrusive practices, such as:

• “Robots” on Google’s Gmail service that are able to scan private emails for keywords to automatically generate targeted advertisements.
• Practices that tailor advertising to individual consumers’ needs involving retrieval of information from social networking sites such as Facebook and “geolocation” services via  mobile phones connected to the Internet.

The report states that these practices constitute “an attack on the protection of privacy when it involves tracking individuals”, e.g. with cookies or profiling.

“Behavioural ad” warning and data collection

Lawmakers also suggest implementation of “the clearly readable words ‘behavioural advertisement’ into the relevant online advertisements along with a window containing a basic explanation of this practice” e.g. posts from advertisers posing as consumers on Internet forums.

The report also demands the Europe Commission and Member States “to ensure that different levels of data collection are kept wholly separate” and stresses that consumers must be well informed on how their data is been used and what it is used for. This information should be kept and used “only by explicit agreement by the consumer”.

Hidden advertising

The current EU legislation does not cover yet the development of “hidden” internet advertising, which happens in forums where consumers post comments to one another about products or services. This may not only mislead consumers, but can also ruin a company’s brand image with one click. An example would be TripAdvisor, which received complaints from hotels and restaurants accusing the company of many users’ defamatory comments.

According to the report, Member States should “encourage the emergence of forum observers/moderators who are alert to the dangers of hidden advertising”.

Transparency and education

The Commission is asked to develop an EU web site labelling system, modelled on the European Privacy Seal, that certifies a site’s standard of data protection. To monitor and control the websites, the report suggests the use of  EU-wide simultaneous web site “sweeps” carried out by Member States. To protect and educate “vulnerable consumers such as children”, the lawmakers urge EU commission to develop an EU advertising literacy programme modelled on the UK’s “Media Smart” initiative and create information campaigns to warn consumers of “hidden” forms of advertising.

If this new legislation goes through, CRM and data collection through Social Media will surely become more complicated. What will happen to Facebook and its huge database it sells to the world, targetted advertising based on key words, cookies and consumers interests, LBS, Facebook Deals@Places, etc…? Who draws the line between customer service in forums and “hidden advertisements”?

The report was approved in committee with 30 votes in favour, 1 against and 2 abstentions. The plenary vote will take place in December.

Note: The report has been plenary approved in December.