4 Takeaways from the Social Media for Customer Management Summit

The virtual interface for Call Center IQ’s 4^th Social Media for Customer Management Summit was certainly pretty, but the true value of Wednesday’s event belonged far more to the steak than the sizzle.

And, appropriately, a central theme of the event was to "get serious about social."

Articulated best by Lithium’s Katy Keim, the "get serious about social" concept urges customer management professionals to openly embrace the complete spectrum of good and bad associated with the buzzworthy channel. Rather than dabbling in Facebook and Twitter to keep up appearances while keeping investment costs low, organizations must make a full commitment to a social customer experience strategy.

Only then will they be able to explore the channel’s vast means of driving customer loyalty, creating competitive advantages and accelerating revenue growth.

Keim introduced the "get serious about social" tag in the day’s final presentation, but every presenter on the day-long virtual event expressed a similar philosophy. Now is not the time to worry about whether or not the business can go social but on how it can create value for its customers and stakeholders in the digital age.

Below are four essential takeaways from the 4^th Social Media for Customer Management Summit:

Social is a lifestyle

Get over yourself. Customers might connect with your brand via social media, but they are not using social media because of your brand.

Social networks represent an unparalleled gateway for individuals to share their thoughts while connecting with friends, coworkers and strangers of common interest. They use the platform to showcase their identities, and they will naturally gravitate towards those networks and entities that fit into such a framework.

Since that framework will certainly have them talking about more than positive and negative service experiences with a brand, any brand with a prayer of engaging customers must do the same. It must speak the customer’s language as it attempts to enter their universe.

Whether developing keyword-driven ad campaigns or personalized engagement, brands must make themselves valuable not simply as a touchpoint for getting discounts or customer service but as an extension of the audience’s identity.

From joking about current events, to finding out what pop culture items are of interest to the audience, to simply communicating in a non-commercial, non-threatening manner, the most social brands are those who strive to be liked for "who they are" rather than simply for what they sell.

You don’t have to be everywhere, but you must be there

Pressure to serve is multiple channels governs today’s customer management world, but for keynote presenter Eric Bryn, that could also drive brands to the wrong conclusion.

Contrary to common belief and urging, brands do not have to literally have a presence in every channel. They do not have to serve customers in a new social channel simply because it exists and other "trendsetters" are doing so.

What they must do, however, is assure that they live up to customer expectations in the channels they do service. The need to go "multi-channel" is not an excuse for imperfection in existing channels, and when a brand makes the decision to start supporting or continue supporting customers in new or traditional channel, it must invest the needed resources and mindset.

When social first emerged, the "reputational hazard" was the fear that customers could share complaints in an open forum. That concern still matters, but today’s greater reputational risk is attempting to engage customers in a new channel without the strategic sensibility to assure a successful engagement.

A customer might value a brand’s omnipresence, but he will absolutely despise a brand’s incompetence. There is no participation trophy in customer service, no "A for Effort." There is only delivering—or not delivering—a quality customer experience.

Take off the social-colored glasses

Progressive business leaders are quick to dispel the notion that creating a separate, isolated social media function brings value to the business. If social media is operated by people who do not understand the corporate culture, who do not understand the brand marketing mission, who cannot push customer service measures through the organization or who cannot pipe customer feedback into the product team, it will prove ineffective.

But there is another dimension to integration: social media leaders must assure they are aligned with overall business objectives. They must shape their strategy based on what matters to the business rather than on "soft" metrics that matter only within the world of social media.

Customer management thinkers will scoff at those who overlook social media strategy, but it is not because social is necessarily an end in and of itself. It remains a means to greater customer experience and business objectives, and in order to truly prove the worth of social and incentivize greater investment and collaboration from stakeholders, social leaders must unpack the channel’s value to overall business objectives.

And they must develop—and govern—social strategy in strict adherence to those objectives.

Social nurturing

Knowing how a social presence can impact the greater business is important, but before you can count the money associated with that success, you must determine the type of social engagement that will put your organization on the right track.

Social engagement is a living, breathing organism that must change as it goes through the lifecycle. A brand’s initial reason for reaching out to a specific customer—or even the abstract "customer"—might differ greatly from the drivers six months or six years down the road. And just as the nature of the brand-customer relationship evolves, so too must the social strategy.

As its social lifecycle progresses, brands must not only benchmark performance in terms of how many customers they are engaging but in terms of how well it is optimizing the engagement opportunity. A campaign to boost followers might be the most appropriate strategy for the first phase of social media, but once it starts to welcome those fans into its network, it then must determine how to best monetize engagement with these "loyal" users.

With interest in analytics and "big Data" resulting in more carefully-constructed customer engagement strategies, it is important to apply such concepts to the social space. Knowing—and acting in accordance with—a customer’s value in each phase of the relationship life cycle is essential for succeeding on social media.