All the plans, programs, and platforms we’ve discussed depend on one thing: customer engagement. While you create the experience you want customers to have, that experience is powered by customers themselves, every day, by how they engage with your brand, product, or service and with each other. To succeed you need to understand why customers engage and which channels are best for that engagement. Done right, your value to your customers—and their value to you—increases dramatically.

Chapter contents

• Hierarchy of types: support, sales, innovation
• Hierarchy of values: satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy

Hierarchy of Types

When you take the applications we detailed in Chapter 4, “The Social Customer Experience Ecosystem,” and apply them to a particular purpose, you get an engagement type. Choosing an engagement type—or types, since an enterprise social effort usually includes more than one—is a key decision in creating your social customer experience. It’s important to customers because it determines the ways they can participate with your organization. It’s important to you as an organization because different engagement types impose different opportunities, responsibilities, and risks. Successful social customer experience efforts don’t begin by choosing an application or platform and then seeing how customers decide to use it. Successful efforts determine first what purpose the effort will fulfill, for both customer and company, and then choose and deploy the application to serve that purpose.

The most common engagement types are these:

• Support: Customers give and receive help and advice related to the use of a product.
• Sales: Customers signal needs or share experiences in the context of purchasing a product.
• Innovation: Customers share ideas and experiences to help companies improve products or processes.

Table 8-1 provides examples of company programs related to these different engagement types.

Table 8-1: Engagement programs

When selecting an engagement type, it is useful to think simultaneously in terms of value to your business and value to your customer. From a business perspective, the value may be increased revenues, lower costs, or valuable customer insights. From the customer’s perspective, it looks different: It’s about finding products that are of higher quality and more suited to your needs. It’s also about getting the most out of the products you buy and maybe—in the best case—finding brand communities that you’re proud to be a part of. As a company, how do you align these so that you simultaneously achieve your objectives and satisfy your customers?

It’s easier than you might think. That’s because there’s a hierarchy (Figure 8-1) that links your objectives with the motives and perspective of your customers. The hierarchy begins with customer care and the importance of satisfied customers. Built on top of satisfaction is loyalty, which is built around pre-sales support aimed at getting customers connected with the right products. With satisfaction and loyalty in place, your organization is now in a position to enlist your customers in collaboration and co-creation.

The hierarchy shown in Figure 8-1 provides an insightful look into the experiential mechanics of effective engagement at scale: The hierarchy relates satisfaction (care), loyalty (sales), and advocacy (innovation). It’s also easy to see how connectedness on the Social Web impacts the purchase funnel: If you cannot address in a meaningful, visible manner the majority of your visible (Social Web!) customer requests for service, how can you expect to sell a premium service? At the innovation and advocacy levels farther up the hierarchy, if customer satisfaction is low, then asking for customer ideas is likely to yield gems like “I’ve got an idea: Don’t lie to me! This product doesn’t do what you claimed it would!” rather than thoughtful suggestions that lead to real and sustained innovation.

Instead, by ensuring that customers are basically satisfied—meaning that most customers would say that what you delivered matched the promise you offered and that they generally get reasonable, visible answers to their questions in a reasonable amount of time—you are more likely to build advocates, the kinds of customers who will contribute important, new ideas that lead to innovation, as well as encouraging vocal brand advocates to rally to your defense as they did for Café Coffee Day.

Level 1: Support

The most powerful motivator in social customer experience can be summarized as simple as “How do I ____ ?” Customers ask this question millions of times every day: How do I find, how do I buy, how do I use? While there are other motivations that spur use of social channels—curiosity, a sense of community, even boredom—the “how do I” motivation is especially important because it brings people to social channels with a need to fulfill. If you can fulfill that need well, you can inspire gratitude and even delight. If you don’t meet that need, your relationship with the customer winds down.

Years ago, Joe provided advice to a Marketing department in one of the world’s largest software companies. Their goal was to use online dialogue to discuss how technology was transforming business. They knew that their customers were thinking deeply about the changes brought about by Internet technologies, and they wanted to tap into that knowledge. When they launched their effort, however, their customers delivered a strong message: We need support! Because of the lack of online social tools available for support, customer flooded the new channel with support-related requests—despite the clear signposts that this channel had been created for strategic discussions. The lesson is that you have to meet basic needs first. Some people quite rightly compare this to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, beloved of psychology students. If people don’t have food and shelter, they’re unlikely to appreciate a new art museum.

So, it’s important to meet basic needs (support) first. Basic, though, doesn’t mean simple. Getting social support right is hard work. Successful social support engagement requires organizations to have the people, processes, and technology in place to engage appropriately, to meet customers seeking support on the channels through which they seek that support. To see what that means consider next two primary variations of social support: peer-to-peer support and agent-based support.

Peer Support

Peer support is an engagement type in which customers help customers. Dave relates the following story:

I was on my way to Gold’s Gym one morning. It was about 4:30 a.m., and I had a full day planned including a conference call at 10:00 a.m.. As I was checking my calendar, my newly updated Google G1 froze up. I tried the obvious: I turned the phone off and then turned it back on. Halfway through the startup sequence, the process hung on the Android logo. I was stuck in about the worst situation a digital nomad can be in: My connection to the Internet was gone! I was outside the spacecraft, without a tether.

At about 6:30 a.m., between workout sessions, I visited a nearby Starbucks, opened my laptop, and searched via Google for “g1 frozen android cupcake,” because this seemed like a reasonable starting point. (I included “cupcake” because this was the operating system update that had been installed a day or two prior.) Near the top of the search results was an entry whose visible description read “freezes with android logo following cupcake upgrade….”

That looked promising, so I clicked into the result and found myself in the T-Mobile support forum. About five posts down I saw the recovery process for a frozen G1, outlined in detail. I followed the steps, and in less than 3 minutes my phone was functioning, albeit in its basic (default) configuration. After I finished my conference call I reinstalled my needed apps. Problem solved.

The point is this: At 6:30 a.m., much less 4:30 a.m., it would have been a stretch to expect live phone support. But in this case, Dave wouldn’t have been able to call anyway: His phone was dead, and he’d long forgotten how to use a pay phone! (Do they even exist?) Because T-Mobile had created an online community for Android support, he was able to quickly self-serve and resolve his own problem. Had he not had his laptop, he could have done the same thing from any library or other municipal facility in Austin. And he wouldn’t be alone—about 70,000,000 Americans regularly access the Internet from public libraries, schools, and similar public facilities in public, government, and municipal buildings.

Not only did T-Mobile save itself the cost of a call, Dave was delighted, even in the face of a failure. As an occasional user of first-generation devices, he expects a few bumps when using them. Hey, even Apples freeze, right? What’s delightful is when the recovery from such bumps occurs in minutes and without disrupting the rest of an otherwise fully booked day. Dave’s conference call went off as planned, and yes, he recounted this story at the start of the call.

Peer support is arguably the original form of social support. Autodesk, mentioned in Chapter 2, “The Social Customer,” began its social efforts with support discussions (“boards”) in the late 1980s on the commercial online service, CompuServe, at the time also used by home computer hobbyists.

In the early days of peer support, such communities were truly peer driven and often peer created; the company that made the product wasn’t involved at all. Up until the end of the 1990s, in fact, the conventional wisdom was that companies shouldn’t participate. The community, built by the customers, definitely belonged to them as well. Even if the company did organize and fund the community, the general rule was “Hands off.” When companies launched a community, they would say, “Welcome to our community! This is a place where customers help customers. If you’d like an answer from us, please write or call.” It seemed funny not to be involved, but the experts said stay away, so companies did just that.

Over time, companies realized that even in the best support forums, customers never answered 100 percent of the questions. It was obvious that many questions could never be answered by a customer; they required access to information that existed only inside the company. What’s more, when questions went unanswered, people complained! Surely that’s not what should be happening.

As a result, companies began to equip themselves to participate in their own peer support forums. This meant a change in roles. Where early communities were staffed only by a community manager and a moderator, support staff now needed to be involved. The role of the moderator—the person who enforces the rules and helps people use the application successfully—began to merge with that of support agent. By 2005, most peer support communities had some percentage of questions—generally around 5 percent—answered by employees.

Today, employees—often as members of a formal support team—answer an increasing number of questions posed by customers, but make no mistake: The thrust now is still to empower customers to answer other customers in these forums directly. In fact, the customers of UK-based telco giffgaff and France-based telco Joe Mobile, shown in Figure 8-2, provide 100 percent of the support in community-type social applications.

Even for firms that will ultimately deliver a combination of phone and social support, in the early stage of product launch, before customers arrive in large numbers, a significant share of the support-type questions are often resolved in social support forums. On balance this has been a good change: When you participate overtly, your customers see that you are part of the community too, helping you build stronger customer relationships. They don’t just tolerate your presence—they expect it.

As you can see from the list of practices, a successful peer support effort is a marriage of good policy, procedure, and technologies. On the technology front, most successful peer support efforts by large organizations are powered by a relatively small set of technology platforms—most common among them Lithium and Jive. You might ask why so many organizations so often select the same vendors. The answer is that while social functionality like forums is relatively easy to offer, it isn’t easy to bring functionality into a platform that is manageable, measureable, secure, scalable, and available.

Manageable means a company has control over what happens in the community at all times, generally through a robust set of permissions.

Measureable means the platform provides data that managers need to assess community health and measure community value.

Secure has an obvious meaning; no company wants to expose itself or its customers to the risk of having their data compromised.

Scalability and availability are also part of the ante—if your customers can’t use the system, it doesn’t matter what its features or virtues are.

What’s nice about these applications and implementations is this: You can focus on building relationships and managing the processes that support them rather than designing and maintaining the technical environment. This affords you the time to build trust—the product of good relationships and reliable processes—and helps you set an entire context for the conversations that involve your brand, product, or service. Your customers will sort out many of the conversations for you so that you don’t have to respond to every single comment, suggestion, or idea. When you do choose to respond—or when it’s clear that you are expected to respond—you can focus on the requests and suggestions that have a large following or that, if left alone, may generate one. If you can’t implement a specific idea, you can explain it once and move on. And, if you think you might be able to do it given an internal process change, design change, or similar effort, you have at least the beginnings of the customer support you need to make the business case inside your organization for pressing for the required change or innovation.

This brings up an additional point about true engagement solutions: When you connect with your customers and participate with them in conversations—inviting them to collaborate with you and placing an appropriate degree of trust and control in them—your customers will actually enable you to take up their case inside your firm or organization. Rather than stopping at the first no from your legal team or the C-suite, for example, you’ll actually find yourself championing the cause on behalf of your customers. That’s the point where you know you are on the way to a social technology–driven business and to long-term success.

Collaboration and peer support extends beyond commercial business, too: Nonprofits, NGOs, and governmental agencies themselves are all part of the social business evolution. In an especially insightful remark, Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada Emeritus, noted the following:

Governments will collaborate with experts, lobbyists, trade organizations, and service partners. Policy will therefore evolve and the citizen will become more engaged in the political process. To my mind social media will deliver one of the greatest leaps forward in democratic participation seen yet in our world. Government had better be ready.

Agent Support

Another important factor causes companies to take a more active role in their peer support communities: the rise of social networks. Communities are centered on shared interest; therefore, if you create a community around your products, your customers will find you. Personal social networks—you and your specific friends on Facebook, for example—are different. Because personal networks are centered on people rather than interests, specific expertise around specialized questions may not exist, and as a result questions often go unanswered. As a practical matter, no one’s personal network is likely to have all the answers to the how-to questions they might have.

To address the challenge of highly specialized questions—how do I use this particular app on this particular phone?—support-type engagements on social networks have taken on a very different character compared with those in support communities. In social networks, it’s often the company—through team agents trained in specific aspects of technical or sales support—that generally provides the help and advice. Twitter, in particular, has become a significant focus for many companies. Most large companies today have their own Twitter handle, and many companies have a Twitter handle specifically for accepting and answering support and service questions.

Your organization, and in particular your customer team and internal (employee) sources of domain expertise (people who know a lot about how your customers use your product or service), provide an effective liaison of the brand and its values. If you thought this was the lead-up to an important front line when managing customer requests, you’d hardly be alone: Too many organizations still see customer care as the first line of defense in keeping customers from interfering with the otherwise smooth flow of business. In a social context this point of view and operational strategies built around it no longer work.

How do companies engage successfully? You need a strategy, a platform, and a workflow that does for social what your call routing and similar technologies do for your call centers.

Start with automated listening: In Chapter 7, “Five Key Trends,” we talked about active listening. Automated listening goes one step further: Using a platform like Lithium Social Web, Sysomos Heartbeat, or Radian6, you can selectively identify posts on the Social Web that reference your brand or other content that you are specifically interested in. Platforms like Lithium Social Web, Conversocial, and Sprinklr can then take an added step, routing those posts automatically to teams that are specifically skilled in responding to certain questions. For example, posts about current orders or posts about warranty service can be routed to specific social agents with the training to respond to shipping and warranty questions. This enables you to respond efficiently and visibly and to thereby send a message to your customer and (if/as appropriate) to the friends and followers of your customers who may be watching.

Beyond your full-time social agents—typically found in your customer support unit—there are others in your organization also able to assist in response, to help you reduce and manage the combined load of social requests. Experts in other areas—product managers, HR and legal resources, and others—are all appropriately tasked with selected customer requests. This not only provides a better experience for customers—getting to talk to the “source” is often a satisfying experience for advanced or highly technical customers—but it also connects your organization more deeply with your customers. Dell has upward of 5,000 trained, certified employees outside of customer care, each of whom is empowered to talk about Dell issues using social media.

Level 2: Sales

Sales engagement is the second level of the social engagement hierarchy, and it may be surprising to find sales activities covered by a platform typically associated with support.

Brand managers approaching social technology may consider ratings, recommendations, and product reviews as the primary social content that influences product purchases. And while it’s true that product reviews play an important role in supporting online sales, think about how you make buying decisions. In all likelihood, your purchases involve online research, and most online research includes a product review.

It’s important to understand that any peer content can support a purchase decision. Peer support forums are a common location for potential buyers to see what customers are saying about the products they are considering. Purchase intentions are often conveyed directly in the questions people ask, such as

I’m thinking about buying a new 42-inch LCD flat-screen TV. Can anyone recommend one with excellent picture quality?

If you aren’t shopping yourself, you may not notice how common such buying signals are in discussions that have been created for support-type engagement. It’s not uncommon for 25–30 percent of the content in support discussions to contain signals like this. If you have customer discussions today, select a sample and analyze it for signals that participants are sending in a purchase process. Even if only a small percentage of those individuals ultimately make a purchase, the numbers can be meaningful.

The number of retailers who include peer discussion on their websites testifies to the power of customer content to influence purchase behavior. For example, Canadian electronics retailer Future Shop, a unit of Best Buy, includes a host of social applications under a navigation item called Ask & Learn. News, blogs, discussions, reviews, and videos in this section blend customer contributions with those of employee experts and even representatives from vendors like Sony.

Perhaps the most common form of sales engagement today happens in off-domain channels like Facebook, where companies are publishing content in the hopes of generating comments or clicks that result in revenue. We talk more about that in Chapter 10, “Social Objects.”

Level 3: Innovation

The prior sections covered social technology as an empowering channel through which your customers help each other. This section is about your customers helping you: It shows you how to connect your customer with the process and priorities of your marketing and product development teams. Market research—up until the introduction of online social technology an activity largely confined to focus groups and market surveys—can now be undertaken using a purpose-built social application: a research community.

Imagine inviting selected customers to participate in a peer-to-peer, long-term innovation program. How much would you learn, and how special and how connected would they feel to your product or service that they helped design? Research communities are one of the ways that you can begin to engage customers and constituents in a collaborative process. Because participants know that they are engaged in a research and learning effort, they are already in the mode of sharing what they think with you. Unlike focus groups—typically one-off events, too often with only a small number of screened participants—research communities provide a context for more natural participation. This is not a criticism of focus group methodology. Clearly, they are one of the tools that remain important in the discovery and design processes for marketing campaigns, product features, and a lot more. Research communities combine the basics of focus group research with the social structures and potential for collaboration found in social networks.

The business advantage of a research community over a focus group is in its longevity and continuity. Participants may be involved for months or even years. This gives you the opportunity to develop real relationships with participants and for the research community members themselves to become very familiar with the brand, products, or services being evaluated. As a result, the level of feedback—and the insights that you can carry back into your business—can be quite substantial.

Research communities can be launched using services that provide turnkey implementation as well as participant recruitment and community management, or they can be built up from the ground just as you would build any other community. Service providers such as Ipsos and Communispace offer these types of purpose-built communities as turnkey services. Take a look at these offerings if you are interested in this type of collaborative social application.

Hierarchy of Value

The hierarchy of engagement types reflects increasing levels of value for the company. Support engagement reduces cost, sales engagement drives revenue, and innovation engagement produces improvements that offer returns on into the future. But equally, these types of engagement offer customers increasing value as well. Support engagement produces satisfaction, sales engagement can engender loyalty, and engagement around innovation can result in the highest level of bond between customer and company: advocacy.

At the heart of engagement is a fundamental connection between businesses and customers, a relationship in which the customer is an equal partner, not a target. This connection extends to employees, who collectively represent a largely untapped resource in building brand advocates. The requirement to manage this for all of your customers, for all of your stakeholders, and for all of your employees in turn requires that you approach engagement as applied to social customer experience using strategies and processes that are closer to those of your call centers than those of your PR and communications team. Simply, as you scale up for engagement, you are addressing the many rather than just the influential few.

This shift in perspective, from central command and control to a multidisciplinary and participative orientation that scales across your organization, is significant and will be difficult for many businesses to fully embrace. Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang put it this way:

Companies know the problem will get worse before it gets better. Organizations realize they are no longer in charge. They often lack a credible strategy that empowers their employees to catch up with their customers.

What the Social Web really does—and the reason that traditional measures or views of things like engagement are shifting—is driven by the need to involve customers meaningfully in the processes that produce and deliver the products and services that they buy from your firm, not to cede full control to them. So, when a customer says “jump,” you should ask “why?” and then listen to the answer and evaluate it jointly with that customer in the context of your business objectives.

This realization shapes the firm or organization’s response to ideation, support, and similar social engagement applications. Suppose, for example, that customers ask for something that you cannot legally or responsibly do. For example, regulated businesses like airlines, pharmaceutical firms, and banking and investment firms are sometimes governed by processes that may not be evident to customers. In such firms, as a product manager or marketing director you may find yourself bound by regulations that may be at odds with what customers are requesting. If that is your business and your customer is making the request, what do you do?

You must address the customer’s concern or risk alienating (to put it nicely) your audience. The only viable response—which by default makes it the best response—is to clearly explain why this particular request can’t be entertained and to offer instead an alternative if one is available. When customers have the information they need to understand why something is happening (or can’t happen), they generally end up supporting you. This is where the combination of participation and transparency can really pay off. Honest, open conversation includes “We’re not allowed to do this, or to talk about this, by law” or “Our company has made a strategic and top-secret call.” This kind of frank honesty—simply put, sometimes the answer is no—is especially applicable in regulated industries where social media and the adoption of social technology are nevertheless expected by customers and stakeholders. Importantly, your practice of consistently transparent, forthright participation on each and every interaction is essential in building trust: Trust happens not on the first interaction, but on the second, fifth, or hundredth interaction. Building a relationship is done by working at it over time.

As an example of the difference that the right information shared at the right time can make, consider the following: Dave was on a flight heading for Cleveland one evening, and as his plane approached the airport, it began circling. If you’ve flown more than once you know that planes fly relatively direct routes between cities, and so circling generally means only one thing: You are being delayed. Tensions on the plane started rising as it circled for 5 minutes, then 10, then 15.

At this point the pilot came on, explained that in fact this was a delay, and asked the passengers what they wanted to do: The choices offered were either circle for another hour—the estimated time of delay—or divert to Milwaukee and spend the night there. In a unanimous cry, the plane’s passengers opted to circle for an hour or more. However, the pilot then continued explaining the choices more completely: Dinner and rooms would be provided if the plane diverted to Milwaukee rather than circling for the expected hour, at which point he also added that the plane had less than 45 minutes of fuel remaining. Everyone yelled “Let’s go to Milwaukee!” and off they went.

What’s important in this somewhat humorous example is that regardless of how the decision was actually made, the passengers—the customers—were given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the process, early on. This is not to say that airlines should let passengers fly planes, any more than you should let your customers run your business. Instead, it’s about recognizing that even a small role for your customers can often make a huge difference in the acceptability of an otherwise suboptimal choice.

Imagine how different this would have been if the pilot had said, “We are being diverted to Milwaukee; someone will give you more info when we land.” Same basic outcome (we went to Milwaukee), but with essentially no choice. When given all of the information needed to make a decision and the option to actually play a role in that decision, customers are generally a pretty reasonable group. We chose Milwaukee. When customers are kept in the dark and looked at as objects to be controlled, managed, or optimized, predictable problems arise. No one likes to be told what to do and even less so in a dictatorial manner. Yet, that is exactly how too many customers are treated. Engagement in a social technology context depends on active participation and collaboration, not control.

The point is this: When implementing an engagement strategy on the Social Web, you will ultimately present yourself (or your brand) as a participant and as such you will have to participate alongside your customers or constituents. How you participate is up to you: It’s not an all-or-nothing deal. Just because a customer demands something, it does not in itself mean it has to be delivered. What it does mean is that a response is needed and that this response needs to affirm in the minds of your customers or stakeholders that they have been heard and that their point of view has been considered. If the request made in a support forum is in line with the existing community policies—if the suggestion for a process change made via an ideation or support platform is not inflammatory or otherwise at odds with the stated Terms of Use that govern everyone’s conduct within the application—then a response that indicates review, consideration, and thought is expected in return. This includes the possibility of politely, accurately, and clearly explaining why a particular request can’t be honored, or at least not in its present form.

Creating Customer Advocates

Ultimately, engagement is all about driving collaboration and the development of brand advocates. It may be reserved or casual, or it may be spontaneous and enthusiastic. But in the end what you are after as part of the leadership team within a business or cause-related organization—and especially so as a marketer—is a customer base that spreads beneficial word of mouth for you. Peter Drucker noted that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” With the advent of social technology, the objective now includes the notion that customers will (also) create (more) customers.

Looking at the awareness-driven purchase funnel and connecting it to the Social Web creates a closed-loop feedback path. Cyclical behaviors that surround social media and the purchase funnel feedback loop often resist definition in terms of starting and ending points: It’s an iterative process, not a line with an end point. Listening leads to innovation and product or service design that delights customers and in turn drives beneficial word of mouth that shows up as favorable posts in listening exercises and social media analytics. Life’s a circle, right? So is business.

To make it simple, assume that if at some point in the cycle customers are actively promoting a brand, product, or service, then this is the “result” desired. In other words, as a marketer it’s less about creating awareness (though awareness still matters and is the right focus of your advertising efforts) and more about creating advocates and evangelists. Imagine the delight of our fisherman friend if the first fish that spied that lure told three others, “Hey, you’ve got to check this out.” That’s what you want on the Social Web, too.

What Drives Advocacy?

Collaborative activities, in a business context, are designed to move current and potential customers up and through the engagement process toward true brand advocacy. Brand advocates are an essential factor in a brand’s overall success: Not only do they promote the brand and its associated products or services, but they will defend the brand when it is being attacked. The earlier example of India’s Café Coffee Day made clear the beneficial impact of brand advocates.

There is a larger play to be made, however, using social technologies. Similar to the diffusion that is observed in PR (where easily identified journalists or industry experts active in traditional media give way to lesser-known but nonetheless important brand enthusiasts present on the Social Web), the development of brand advocates requires a deeper dive into the conversations that surround a brand, product, or service so that the advocates—and the topics around which advocates may form—can be identified and nurtured.

Most useful is the following realization: Whether social activity drives business success or business success provides a context for an active social presence is not the issue. Instead, the connection between the social activity associated with successful brands and the business success of those brands arises out of the combination of business acumen and significant time spent in defined, measurable activities that engage customers. The result is a higher-than-average generation of brand advocates, further driving this (positive) cycle! In other words, it’s not the social activity that matters per se; it’s what happens in and around a business or organization and its marketplace as a result of this social activity. More engagement + better experiences = more advocates.

Consider a successful business—in the profit and loss sense—that largely ignores the conversational (social) issues that surround it. Walmart in the early nineties comes to mind, with issues ranging from hiring and pay differentials to product pricing practices and controversial new store locations. While Walmart was being attacked on all sides, its public policy, summed up, seemed to be “We can’t hear you.” As businesses took to the Social Web, Walmart tried as well—unsuccessfully—to create an early presence in places like Facebook. Each time it tried it was overrun by hard-core detractors, or worse stumbled over its own efforts to control social media.

Compare this with Walmart now: Stores are changing, becoming more open, designed and located with more input from communities, with attention to the kinds of products stocked and the quality of these products. Walmart has introduced organic foods and worked with Bazaarvoice to implement a comprehensive ratings and reviews program across its product lines. These are all efforts that would be widely praised if just about any other retailer were to have implemented them. A few years ago, if you searched Google for “Walmart brand advocates,” the top results returned were things like “Why do some people advocate boycotting Walmart?” Today, you get information on Walmart’s own brand advocacy programs.

The insight is this: Commercial success by itself does not translate into overnight Social Web success, particularly when a historical view of the business presents a picture that is counter to the norms associated with the successful use of social media and social technology. Furthermore, when such brands involve themselves in social media, the results are typically lackluster, or worse, actually contribute at first to the further negative perception of the brand. Tarnished reputations on the Social Web, correctly managed, do heal. Walmart appears committed to this and over time will benefit from a sustained effort to reinvent itself. As noted earlier, building a new reputation takes time. Walmart is certainly on the right path and will ultimately get there. It is an organization built on clear goals that serve the needs of its customers, and it is run by smart people.

Back to advocates: It really is about the combination of business savvy and a genuine intent to place customers—and not the brand—at the center of the social experience. Brands like Starbucks (which openly and deliberately called on customers to help it find its way forward) and Zappos, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Nike, and SAP have all undertaken specific programs to overtly reach out and connect—to engage—with customers and constituents. The result is increased momentum—call it brand mojo if you want—that places a further distance between these firms and their competitors while decreasing the separation between the businesses and their customers. The overall result is the emergence of brand advocates and, in particular, brand advocates that are unexpected and/or nearly invisible (except to the potential customers they influence!).

When Comcast championed the industry's first Twitter-based customer service program, the initial observation was simply “A lot of people are complaining about us on Twitter—maybe we should pay attention to that.” This is a really insightful first step. It was not a corporate strategy to do something about the firm’s image problem on Twitter but rather a decision to engage customers where they are, a point stressed by Jeff Jarvis in his work relating to creating a social business. Based on what they found, and what the firm’s internal customer advocates did next, the result was profound: In the words of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, “It has changed the culture of our company.”

In addition to looking at social technology as a marketing application, and beyond the actually engagement points—support forums, communities, ratings platforms, and similar—that help shape a social business, look to your own purposeful and decided participation as a way to build a force of advocates. Combined with a decent business model, an orientation that positions your firm as the advocate for your customer is a smart play.

Create Advocates through Engagement

Having established the path from consumption—think traditional media and traditional-media-like activities in a digital context (banner ads or video pre-rolls, for example)—to collaboration and advocacy as a sort of process template or design guide for your social business engagement programs, the next step is connecting the resulting expressions of advocacy to your business.

Recall Fred Reichheld and the Net Promoter Score: A base of customers or constituents that are highly likely to strongly recommend a brand, product, or service is a fundamental condition for driving long-term profits and sustained growth. This is precisely what advocacy is all about. Advocates will readily and favorably recommend brands, products, services, and causes, which in turn leads to a competitive advantage by reducing expenditures required to overcome a lack of referrals or worse (detractors, for example). Offering price breaks, discounts, rebates, or similar concessions intended to offset inferior quality inevitably eats away at margins. Over the long term, any unnecessary expense and the associated deterioration of margins will obviously hurt the business or organization.

What is perhaps less clear (though equally valid) is that sustainable higher profit margins—think Whole Foods versus the other food stores against which it competes even if not directly—lead to enhanced opportunities to innovate, to the ability to attract and retain higher-quality employees, to support higher-quality suppliers, to use better raw materials, and to realize other similar business benefits. Each of these has a distinct, measurable payback of its own.

Consider innovation and the ability of a firm to afford the programs that support and drive innovation. An enhanced ability to innovate means your business or cause or program is less likely to be stymied by a change in the legal or business environment (as when AT&T was forced to open up its local lines to upstart MCI) or technology (say, from horse-drawn to horseless carriages). The latter example may seem obsolete, but Fisher Body is the classic case of innovation and survival after its core business—depicted in its logo (shown in Figure 8-3)—dried up in the face of technological and industrial change.

Fisher began by making horse-drawn carriages. Seeing the opportunity for innovation as Ford and other auto manufacturers sprang up and having access to working capital, they adapted what they knew about carriage building to become a premiere auto body builder. The result was a firm that became a household name building car bodies for General Motors long after horse-drawn carriages and the firms that made them had disappeared. The point is this: Innovation is the lifeblood of business, and the opportunity to innovate rapidly is enhanced through the engagement and collaboration with customers through social technologies.

While much of the interest in social media marketing is driven by sales and demand generation, innovation as a result of the adoption of social customer experience processes can pay an additional dividend: higher sustainable margins that enhance your ability to attract and retain higher caliber employees. Investing in better employees across the board pays big dividends when your firm or organization sets out to transform itself—for example, into a social business that is connected more directly to its customers. This type of transformation can be upsetting, so you need employees who will buy into the change and who have the innate ability to step up to a more complex job.

Superior employees are both more capable and more willing to learn new skills, to consider different ways of doing things, and to look for and champion new solutions. This is critically important. When you connect your business to your customers, those customers will no doubt ask for things that your firm has not considered—or has even decided against. Your ability to innovate and address these suggestions and ideas, to rethink past decisions, and to question established practices will rest entirely on the willingness and capability of your employed or retained workforce. All other things being equal, better people will produce a better outcome.

Create Experiences That Drive Advocacy

As a practical example of the connection between operations, marketing, and social business, consider JetBlue’s terminal, T5, at JFK. All airlines have delays—they are part of the trade-off between the reality of weather, a highly interconnected flight system, and the overriding concern for passenger safety. JetBlue’s T5 is the kind of place one actually looks forward to visiting—shops, restaurants, plenty of free, robust Wi-Fi, and pleasant open space. Dave spent an extra few hours there one evening when ice had closed all but one of JFK’s main runways. As Dave looked around, he was struck by the relative calm, with a large number of people watching Hulu on their laptops and patiently waiting.

The robust Wi-Fi in T5 is no accident. JetBlue actually takes a further step in ensuring that its T5 runs smoothly from the perspective of travelers by recognizing that Wi-Fi (along with food, drinks, and engaging activities in shops and restaurants) is essential to maintaining a sense of calm. When people are productive or happily diverted, things work better! Wi-Fi is also largely a function of external providers, so JetBlue works with its external Wi-Fi support services to ensure that their services, too, keep pace with the needs of its customers while in T5.

Social customer experience management is all about connecting customer feedback and business processes, about using what is learned and building on responses and engagement, and finally about creating systems—in the case of JetBlue, direct customer experiences in T5—that trigger and cultivate advocacy. Recovering from a near meltdown following a severe storm, JetBlue did the hard work: They reexamined and rebuilt operations-driven processes to match their differentiating marketing prowess. The result is the steady rise in the creation of JetBlue advocates.

Here again, social technology (used to connect employees and passengers to drive service innovation) comes into play. The combination of active listening—understanding what is happening (positive or negative) right now—and collaborative systems that facilitate ideation and innovation inside of JetBlue as it grows is a large part of what defines its successful approach to business in a socially connected marketplace.

If you’re wondering about how powerful the combination of operations and marketing really is and about the kinds of conversations this kind of alignment can generate, go to Twitter and search “JetBlue T5.” Figure 8-4 shows the typical results. My favorites? “T5 is by far one of the greatest terminals ever.” And how about Adam Greenwald, evidently planning to get married in T5! Kind of makes you want to Fly JetBlue to New York, doesn’t it? That’s not a coincidence. It’s a business decision, designed to create a great social customer experience.

The combination of active listening, touchpoint analysis, and collaboration (via engagement) makes obvious the root causes of dissatisfaction and the potential solutions (ideation and innovation) that drive enhanced satisfaction. More than anything else, what makes airline travelers nuts is the feeling of an almost total loss of personal control from the moment you contemplate purchasing a ticket until the moment you successfully retrieve your bags on the return flight. At the same time—and again very much the subject of social business—consider the employees of the airlines and their role in all of this: They have ideas, too. The motivated and consumer-oriented professionals at Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and United Airlines or Dubai’s Emirates—to name just a few—have a significant impact on the business success of their organizations.

Review and Hands-On

This chapter, the first of the “social customer experience building blocks” chapters, covers engagement in detail, viewing it from the company’s and the customer’s perspectives. The latter is critical: Analogous to catching more fish by learning to think like one, getting it right in social business means engaging your customers from their point of view. In short, it means becoming their advocate so that they might become yours.

Review of the Main Points

The key points covered in this chapter are summarized in the following list. Review these and develop your own practical definition for engagement in the context of a social business:

• Engagement is a customer-centric activity.
• Think about engagement types: support, sales, and innovation.
• Think about engagement value: satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
• Implement a strategic approach to social business that specifies a plan to create advocates and then measure your performance.
• Finally, it’s still your business. Placing customers at the center of what you do doesn’t mean handing them the wheel.

Chapter 8 sets up the primary activity that differentiates social customer experience from other things you do as a business. A business that steadily builds its own base of advocates is a business that steadily and surely wins over the long term.

Hands-On: Review These Resources

Review the following and apply them to your business or organization as you create your plan for integrating social technology into your fundamental processes:

1. The case studies in Lithium’s online case study library contain well-documented examples of a variety of social applications that result in both advocacy and positive ROI.
2. www.lithium.com/customer-stories
3. The whitepapers in Jive Software’s resources library, in particular Social Business Software Adoption Strategies.
4. www.jivesoftware.com/resources

Hands-On: Apply What You’ve Learned

Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:

1. Make a note of every recommendation you give or receive over the next week. Rank them according to the degree of enthusiasm on the part of the recommender.
2. Starting with the resources listed previously, develop your own library. Look for the similar resources offered by other social business software firms, and add those to your library.
3. Review your own engagement programs, and carefully examine how you are measuring or evaluating engagement and from whose perspective you are defining engagement.
4. Assuming that you have an appropriate social computing and social media use policy for employee use in place now, design a plan for an ideation, support, or discussion platform that will actively solicit customer-led conversations about your firm or organization or about your brand, product, or service.