A while ago, I was asked to present at the ICCA conference on social media & how it relates to customer service. Of course, more & more these days social spaces such as twitter are increasingly important in this regard as more & more people seek to get answers to questions from brands & organisations through social media - twitter in particular.

Flick through the presentation below for some insight & examples of how some brands are doing it brilliantly…and how others are failing!

(As my presentations are mainly visual, for the transcript, view the presentation on slideshare and click the ‘notes’ tab!)

What are your experiences? Let me know in the comments below.

In between global economic meltdown, a royal wedding, the Arab spring and Kim Kardashian’s marriage there’s been plenty happening in 2011. So has it left you breathless, tired out and not in a Christmas mood? Or are you positively bursting at the seams for some Yuletide fun? Checking across our office it’s clear that people are falling into two distinct camps, one that is positively cheery and the other completely humbug.

This got us thinking about how the year had left people feeling about Christmas. As always these days, Twitter is a great place to look for immediate opinions on subjects. And with that we’ve decided to do away with a Christmas card - instead, this season we’re using Twitter to help people spread Christmas joy or humbug, dependent on their mood.

We’ve created a microsite, which acts as a pinboard for people’s tweets that are hashtagged #traxmas or #trahumbug. The tweets are then converted into hashtag snowflakes and dependent on how cheerful or miserable the messages are the scene changes. At the last check it was 74% cheery so things are looking quite rosy for Christmas at the moment.

One thing is for certain, regardless of the final result it’s generated a lot of interest and delivers an engaging way of presenting and recording the mood on Twitter. If you’d like to add your opinion to the scene visit http://traxmas.realadventure.co.uk today and add your Tweet!

Now might be a good time to check your privacy settings as Facebook have just unveiled the ‘subscribe’ button. In a bid to further compete with Twitter & Google+, this feature allows users to subscribe to other people’s public updates which will appear in their news feeds. Public updates are those which are not restricted by any privacy settings, indexed by Google and can therefore be seen by anyone online.

“The ‘subscribe’ button means that as well as friends on the site, Facebook users can now have followers that they don’t know, just like on Twitter. Interestingly when a Facebook user sends a friend request to another person on the site, they instantly become a subscriber to that user’s public updates – unless the user turns the subscribe button off” - Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor of The Telegraph.

To check your subscription settings, click the ‘subscriptions’ link on the left-hand side of your profile. If your privacy setting are already locked down like mine, then the subscribers should be turned off too.

Another new feature launched by Facebook this week was Smart Lists, a new tool which is being seen as a direct response to ‘Circles’ in Google+. This feature makes it easier for people to group their Facebook friends into different categories, so a user can control who they see the most or least information from. Smart Lists automatically groups friends with common characteristics into Friend Lists based on their relationships and what they have in common.

Source: The Telegraph

First of all, let’s set the scene:

• Over the past few years, the number of active users on social networking sites has risen dramatically.
• We’re also more likely to value a friend’s opinion over the opinion of “RandomBlogger29″ for example.

To take advantage of these two points and improve the relevance of search results for users, the boffins at Google HQ launched Social Search back in 2009. However, there have been some recent developments which could potentially revolutionise the way that search and social media work together.

What is social search?

Google Social Search pulls tweets and other posts or updates from your favourite social networks into Google’s natural search results. For example; you want to go out for a nice in meal in Bath and naturally, the first thing you do is search for ‘restaurants in Bath’ on Google. You notice that below one of the results is an annotation marked “@danmorganuk shared this on Twitter”. It’s then possible to click-through to the tweet and see whether I thought the restaurant “served tasty food at a reasonable price” or I “had to queue for 45mins to get a table”. The idea is that you’ll find this recommendation from someone you know to be a lot more useful than a regular search result.

How have Google changed Social Search?

Previously, Social Search annotations would have been listed together at the bottom of the page. This latest update means that they are now shown just below each appropriate result, wherever it appears on the page. If you’re signed up to Twitter, Flickr and/or Quora, a new development allows you to see Social Search annotations when your friends have shared content via these social networks. The third new development means that you can choose whether you want to connect your accounts publicly using your Google profile or privately in your Google account; this offers users more control.

What it means for social media and SEO

Search engines are increasingly realising the importance of social media in search; this latest news goes to show how important it is for brands to have a good presence within social media, as this should mean a better presence in natural search results. One thing that hasn’t changed is that the key to success in social media and search is creating engaging, unique content. A notable omission from Google Social Search is that of Facebook ‘likes’ which are used in Bing’s version of social search. What impact will these changes to social search have? Will social search on Bing prove to be more powerful than Google’s offering? We’ll have to wait and see!

Twitter have finally launched the long awaited ‘Tweet Button’ for sharing articles on websites and counting how many times they have been shared. This button is apparently the most comprehensive counter of retweets and shares across Twitters’ network, a crown which Tweetmeme have held until now. It is also very simple to embed with a single line of code (similar to that of the Facebook share button).The other great thing about this button is you can customise it to tweet a line of text, a URL and also recommend two accounts to follow after you have used it. Great stuff.

For more info watch the video below or visit Twitter.

If you’re wandering along Oxford Street on a Friday feeling in need of a caffeine injection head on over to Debenhams, check in with Foursquare and collect your free coffee.

Debenhams is one of the latest national retailers to get on board with the emerging location-based social network Foursquare. If you’re not familiar with this new phenomenon, the basic idea is that you ‘check in’ to real-world places from your GPS-enabled mobile device and earn points for doing so. And what do points mean? Well, free coffee in Debenhams’ case but the possibilities are endless for retailers to utilise this service to retain their customer base and gain new customers.

When you check in, your foursquare friends are notified of your whereabouts (hmmm… a bit Big Brother) and you can automatically Tweet and update your Facebook status too. There are other features of the service like ‘tips’ (if the place you’re in does the most awesome hangover bacon butties) to help you spread the word about what’s great … and what’s not so great about where you are.

Of course, the potential for bricks & mortar retailers to capitalise on this are significant. Offer discounts, freebies, new services to loyal customers who check-in with foursquare and they’ll spread the word for you. And hopefully a good word at that.

Foursquare in the UK is in its infancy. But it looks set to become big in 2010. Who knows, with national retailers like Debenhams coming on board, it might even see growth like Twitter saw last year. Watch this space.

Poor old @VodafoneUK have fallen victim to the dangers of social media - and boy have they done it in style(!!)  On Friday afternoon, someone posted this homophobic remark on their @VodafoneUK twitter feed to their 8500+ followers.

Ouch.

Disgruntled employee perhaps? Or ‘innocent’ mistake posting to the wrong account? After all the apologising that they did, it seems it was a “A severe breach of rules by staff in our building“. Either way, despite their swift attempts to delete the tweet, it had been re-tweeted and captured for posterity for all to see. A quick Google now shows over 1,200 results for the exact offending phrase.

Interestingly, the blunder gave them a bit of a boost in followers. People wanting to witness in person their next public fail? Hmmm…

Just goes to show that measuring social media success by number of followers alone isn’t appropriate! I guess Friday’s incident just highlights the power and speed of social media. And the inability to retract our digital utterances, thanks to it’s real-time and re-publishable nature. Social media can be quickly damaging to a brand if care isn’t taken.

In this increasingly socially digital world of ours, brands are being forced to be more open, more honest and more able to engage in real-time conversations. All power to the consumer! Not since the birth of the internet itself has something had such a levelling effect on the way we all communicate.

Of course, social media is here to stay and it will reap significant benefits to those who use it well. And for those who don’t?  Well, they’ll probably be left out on the street - presumably like that Vodafone employee.

I’ve recently had two personal experiences of customer service delivered through Twitter - twice in one week.

The detail is below, but in summary:
I now expect brands to respond to me when I tweet about them. Those that do, I like. Those that don’t… they don’t think I’m important enough…so they go down in my estimation.

Experience 1 - Gist

I recently signed up to Gist – a service which aggregates information about all your contacts from different sources (outlook, facebook, twitter, etc) and puts it in one place. Sounds great. After setup, however, I couldn’t log in.

So (not expecting a reply) I tweeted…

They got back to me… 3 times… Initial contact was only 2.5 hours later (read bottom up)

So I @replied, again on Twitter.  And they got back to me again.

I spoke. And they listened. Not only did they listen, they actively engaged me in conversation. They made me feel special. That’s a good thing. I like them. I’ll recommend them. That’s great for them.

Experience 2 - Xmarks

Xmarks is a bookmark synchronising service which syncs your bookmarks between PCs (and Macs) and allows you to share them online too. It’s great.

But I recently had to re-install it (new laptop…old one died)… and it caused a problem.

So I tweeted…(again not expecting a reply)…(and note, didn’t do @xmarks, just a simple xmarks)

3 days later…they got back to me.

OK, so it took 3 days.  But at least they bothered. I’m about to email them.
Both brands above are clearly actively monitoring the social space in order to pro-actively engage with their consumers. And benefiting from my improved perception of them by so doing.

Many brands could learn from these experiences and grow their advocates through social media-enabled customer service.

(Inspired by a tweet from @socialmedia2day…)

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

We like to think of marketing in human terms (see our previous post on this). I’d like to suggest this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of me seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

The time and resources devoted to enabling relationships between brands and their consumers can still be achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it does require a change of mindset, it does require brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.