Although the strategy of customer relationships must precede the successful implementation of customer-relationship technology, it was the technology that mandated that enterprises map out their path down the road we’ve been following in the preceding chapters. Customers have always been able to interact with a company, but mainly on the company’s terms—through mail, if a customer could get the name of a person to send a letter to; through phone, if a customer could get the right phone number; and maybe through salespeople, if the customer were important enough to warrant a personal sales call and if the salesperson was authorized to provide service to the customer’s satisfaction. That was pretty much it. Today, the customer rules. And savvy customers are leveraging social networking tools to get what they want, when they want it, more than ever before. But social media also allows new possibilities for dialogue and collaboration between customers and enterprises that can benefit both parties. This chapter addresses how a customer-centric company can recognize and reap the positive impact on customer value these technologies potentially provide.

The Dollars and Sense of Social Media

A colleague of ours was angry about the way Orbitz handled a service issue, so she tweeted about it. She also sent a complaint via the company’s Web site customer support page. Orbitz responded to her Twitter posts via e-mail and resolved the issue. But in response to our friend’s e-mail sent via the “contact us” form on the Web site, the company only sent a generic “we’re reviewing your inquiry” e-mail.

This is just one of the many examples of customer interaction via social channels benefiting customers. The question is, does it benefit the company as well? It does, and here are a few examples:

• Barnes & Noble’s retail sales of specific books increase when customers discuss those books in its online community.
• User-generated content on Hewlett-Packard’s online community site helps improve the company’s search engine optimization. In one case, Hewlett-Packard went from not appearing at all on the first results page of a specific keyword search to dominating that first page.
• Candy bar Wispa (a product of Cadbury Schweppes) was given a second chance thanks to Facebook groups reminiscing about the chocolate sweet. About 14,000 customers banded together and collectively demanded that their nostalgia be returned to store shelves.
• Tibco Software’s customer community enables customers to help each other solve technical issues (that’s what “crowd service” is). Every time that happens, a customer gets the help he needs but the company also saves about $1,000 on a support call. The savings gained more than covers the cost of hosting an online community. “We can show tangible value from our social media strategy,” says Ram Menon, executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Tibco.
  According to a 1to1 Media study on marketing spending, respondent companies increased their recent spending on reaching customers in new ways.
  • 69 percent increased spending on social media
  • 68 percent increased spending on e-mail
  • 50 percent increased spending on search
    The hard-dollar benefits include:
    • Increased buzz around a brand, product, or service online. Not only increases awareness but also has the potential to increase sales across channels.
    • Improved search results from customer conversations about an organization and its products that happen on a company’s online community, blog, customer forum, and the like. Potentially drives more traffic to a company’s Web site.
    • More influence from customer recommendations given on social networks and in online communities than referrals in the offline world. Can lead to more deal closings—in some cases, with less selling required on the part of the company.
    • Deeper insight into customers’ uncensored preferences, needs, and behaviors is invaluable. Potentially leads to improvements in such areas as service delivery, product features, and pricing. Also can lead to better customer experience, increased sales, and greater customer engagement.
    • Customers helping other customers online. Crowd service can reduce costs to serve by deflecting calls and e-mails from the contact center, and may result in better service results for customers as well.

Although some executives are still searching for the best way to measure the return on investment of what many call Social CRM, the bottom-line benefits are clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Start with the end in mind: Determine your ultimate goal or set of objectives for social media interactions. Then create a strategy to get you there that includes measureable results. As Barnes & Noble, Hewlett-Packard, and Tibco can attest, it’s a journey worth taking.

Source: Excerpted and adapted from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., “The Dollars and Sense of Social Media,” in The Social Customer’s e-book, The Social Contract: Customers, Companies, Communities, and Conversations in the Age of the Collaborative Relationship (2010), available at: http://thesocialcustomer.com/submitform/tscebook030810/ ?utm_source=socap&utm_medium=multi&utm_campaign=contract_ebook&reference= smt_socap, accessed September 1, 2010.

The Importance of Listening and Social Media

Becky Carroll

Founder, Petra Consulting Group/Customers Rock!

Instructor of Social Media, University of California, San Diego

One of the keys to being successful in the use of social media for marketing is not how we talk to customers; rather, it is how we listen to the ongoing conversations taking place online. Active listening is critical to the creation of the appropriate social media interaction plans. When we skip listening, our customer interactions via social media begin to sound like traditional, one-way broadcast messages; and in this space, such messages will simply be tuned out.

Think of a Cocktail Party

How we interact with customers via social media can be seen as analogous to attending a cocktail party. Upon entering a room, it would be considered rude for you to walk up to a group of people already conversing and start talking about yourself. Unfortunately, however, this is exactly how many firms use social media. If an enterprise sees social media as just another communication channel, it is likely to use the same mass-messaging and marketing “spin” that infuses the company’s direct mail campaigns, its Web site, and its advertising. These messages talk at people, not with people, and are rarely tuned to the needs and concerns of the individual customers being addressed. Definitely rude behavior at a cocktail party, and not appropriate for social media either. Social media is social, and requires social activities—conversation, not pronouncements.

If you are a savvy partygoer and you approach a group of people at the cocktail party who are already conversing, you don’t say a word. Instead, you spend a few minutes listening to see what’s being discussed and to get the proper context. Then, after introducing yourself briefly, you may begin to engage in the conversation by sharing your viewpoint or something relevant and interesting to the other party guests. Or you may enter the discussion by asking a question related to the topic at hand. Either way, you are engaging the other partygoers in a meaningful dialogue. Nontransactional conversations like this are the foundation for using social media to build stronger customer relationships. The familiarity created by a series of social media interactions tends to build better relationships than any series of advertisements could.

How to Listen and What to Listen For

There are two things to listen for in social media: brand and customer. Both are important when determining the optimal methods for interacting with customers (inside and outside of social media), but in different ways. And keep in mind that listening, as we describe the process here, doesn’t occur just once; it needs to occur continuously, over months and years.

Brand Monitoring

An enterprise should always listen for social media conversations that mention the firm’s brand names or areas of specialization. It should also monitor the social media space for any mentions of executives’ names as well as the names of competitors. When monitoring brand social media conversations, these are the questions the enterprise should be trying to answer:

• Who is talking about the brand? Do we need to respond? Are they influencers, potential stakeholders, clients, or most valuable customers? Who else do they influence? The monitoring effort should track those who start conversations, along with those who add to conversations; over time it will become apparent that some customers can be enlisted as evangelists, whether they are major influencers, stakeholders, or simply effective conversationalists. (Note: A customer’s value to the enterprise is certainly related to his or her level of social media influence, so one goal of tracking the people who are conversing about the brand is to have a better idea of who they are and where the most valuable customers are participating.)
• What are people saying? Are they praising or condemning? Are they demanding a response? Are they trying to encourage others to act (either negatively or positively)? Understanding how influence takes place will help shape future conversations.
• Where are they talking? Are they conversing on the enterprise’s own sites or social media properties, or are they having discussions in different forums and communities? Understanding where conversations are occurring will help determine the best places to interact with customers, which often can be in their own “territory.”

An enterprise can use many software and subscription tools to listen to the social media conversation or the chatter taking place online. A company should monitor customer conversations through these online tools at least weekly, and possibly daily, tracking the trends on an ongoing basis. It should track the issues that generate most of the chatter and continue to monitor these issues over time. It should also be alert for mentions of key terms and determine quickly whether a response is needed. If someone mentions the brand, or some other relevant term being followed, the enterprise may want to consider leaving a response or comment in the conversation, if appropriate. Quick responses to potentially negative comments can help put out fires and preempt additional inflammatory statements from other frustrated customers.

Customer Monitoring

Listening for customer insight goes beyond simple observation of what customers are saying via social media sites. Listening pays attention to what customers are saying between the lines, leading to insight about customer behaviors and, ultimately, individual customer needs. This takes place in social media as customers’ voice their opinions and insights, along with unsolicited feedback (i.e., highly valuable, spontaneous feedback not related to the enterprise’s own consumer research). When monitoring customers, here are the questions the enterprise should be trying to answer:

• What are the pain points being highlighted by customers? Are they legitimate concerns? Are they directed toward the company at large, or is something being said about a particular situation or individual? When monitoring these comments, the enterprise should never dismiss customer rants, just because they are emotionally charged. All critical comments—100 percent of them—should be checked out to ensure no underlying issue exists. Even when a customer gets the facts wrong, the perspective or impression still can be valuable. Complaints picked up in social media can also help point out potential unmet customer needs.
• What is the emotion or sentiment being shared, either negative or positive? Uncovering emotions will help reveal how customers feel about the brand, product, or service (or about related and/or competitive brands). Emotions can lead to better understanding of important and influential customer needs.
• What information is being shared about the various customer experience touchpoints? This information can help to supplement customer experience Touchmap details.

Dig into any pain points quickly, efficiently, and without emotion. Once any problems at all are voiced in a social media setting, even if they are relatively minor by nature, they can easily turn into a rant by some other customer (or customers) with a similar experience. As with all human interactions, people engaged in social media interactions easily succumb to the confirmation bias, latching on to every shred of evidence that proves their own view and ignoring conflicting viewpoints. So when a complaint is aired, apologize directly and immediately to the customer for their dissatisfaction, get the customer service team involved where appropriate, and learn from the discussion. Social media can alert a company to a potential product or service issue faster than any other channel. This allows the organization to alert contact centers, mobilize resources behind the scenes, and proactively employ social media to alert other customers to a problem in advance.

The insight gained from listening in on social media conversations among customers can easily be used to refine the enterprise’s understanding of its customer needs groupings. In fact, a company may find out just as much (or more) about particular needs-based types of customers through their verbatim language on their favorite social media site (be it a consumer-focused or business-focused site) as can be obtained from costly research surveys and interviews. After all, the conversations started by customers in the social media context are likely to be much more genuine than the responses elicited by even the most carefully designed research questionnaire. Nevertheless, it’s also important for the company to supplement what it learns via social media with additional primary research. Social media is likely to provide great insights, but sometimes it represents only a subset of your customer base.

Now more than ever, it’s critical for customer-centric companies to move beyond organizational silos to listen to their customers across the entire experience, and social media channels offer a superb opportunity for doing this. Social media interactions involving proactive brand and customer listening can serve as a very effective tool for strengthening and deepening a company’s customer relationships.

Crowd Service: Customers Helping Other Customers

Natalie L. Petouhoff

Digital Strategist, Digital Communications Group, Weber-Shandwick

In 2009, Forrester found that 44 percent of U.S. online adults are “persuaders”— those who tell others about products that interest them. They’re brand-motivated, open to ads, and highly active in social applications.a And in those conversations, these persuaders are not just affecting a few people, they are affecting millions, often in the time frame of a nanosecond, through social media vehicles as diverse as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogs, third-party community Web sites, and perhaps even your own company’s Web site. Using these new technologies, anybody can post information about anything at any time, including views about your own company’s products and services. No matter where they choose to converse, engage, or persuade, customers increasingly have a free voice in the affairs of your company. What’s disconcerting for many companies is that they can’t control this voice. Many are finding it difficult to get used to the fact that their customers, their employees, and their suppliers are talking about them through unregulated social media. But companies do have a choice. They can choose to abstain from this conversation and allow anything to be said about them, without their knowledge or participation. Or they can choose to join the conversation and try to help customers get what they want—including honest opinions and advice, objective service and support, and informed assistance for solving problems they encounter.

One of the most thrilling and interesting developments in how companies have come to rely on social media is in the area of customer service. In the old days, customer service had to answer all customer questions directly. A company’s customer service department might do this over the phone, or sometimes via e-mail, and of course contact-center capabilities often now include chat and cobrowsing technologies. Naturally, companies want their customers not to have to call in at all, and we are all familiar with the concept of “self-service” when it comes to fixing problems—whether they are problems with a credit card account, or a computer printer, or a trip to Spain, or a vacuum cleaner. The customer goes to the company’s Web site and expects to find the solution to the problem in the frequently asked question (FAQ) section or perhaps in a downloadable user’s manual. If the problem is one that many other customers frequently encounter, the company might even have chosen to highlight some guidelines right on the site. But today’s customer doesn’t want to read the whole 100-page manual, they want the one paragraph out of the manual that answers their question. The key is providing advanced knowledge management capabilities, but most companies don’t distinguish between the types of search or realize the need to use natural language processing to help identify the context of the question and its resulting answer.

Often companies see self-service as a way to minimize their own service costs and, if it’s done right, customers like self-service for the same reason they like automated teller machines (ATMs) more than standing in line at a bank branch during bankers’ hours to get cash: because they are in control. But especially for very complicated or technical problems, or for issues that require some degree of personal judgment or experience, self-service often just doesn’t work very well, leaving a customer unsatisfied and a service problem unsolved. And then it means that your investments in self-service go up in smoke, because when self-service doesn’t work, customers call and are angry and desperate for help. This leaves you wide open to having customers comment about how lousy your service is. Especially if you hide your 1-800 number, and the customer who can’t find the answer online is also deterred from calling you.

Today, however, using the tools of social media, a company can solve a customer’s complex or difficult problem by harnessing the insight and expertise of thousands, or even millions, of other customers. Rather than self-service, some pundits are calling this “crowd service.” This is a transformation in who is solving what. Instead of asking the company to solve a problem with its own product or service, customers are asking other customers to help them solve their problem. At first, this might seem a little risky to many companies. (What if customer 1 gives customer 2 the wrong information? Who is liable?) Inherent in the very idea of crowd service is the notion that the company itself will be giving up some degree of control over its own service processes, but experience to date shows that this is actually much less of a problem than most executives would think.

Myfico.com is a site where consumers who no longer have good credit can register, buy products, and work toward improving their credit. What myfico.com found, though, was that because it was a government-regulated business, its call center agents could not provide answers to customers’ many questions. What myfico.com couldn’t do was provide advice on what products to buy and what process to follow to improve a customer’s credit scores, even though it sold products on its Web site specifically designed to do that. Faced with a dilemma, the customer service folks at myfico.com turned to social media.

What exactly did they do? They created an online community (via a Lithium Technologies platform). What myfico.com did not know was if anyone would join a community to talk about messed-up credit scores. It’s generally not the type of thing that you want to admit. So as the brave souls at myfico.com designed their community, they did the single most important thing: They invited super-users (experts in the field of consumer credit) to join the community. As myfico.com launched, it had a nagging doubt about whether anyone would actually step forward to join. It also did the second most important thing one has to do in social media initiatives: It marketed and advertised the community. It sent out e-mails to all those customers who had bought something from myfico.com.

How does this story turn out? With 850,000 unique registered users, myfico.com is one of the most interactive and vibrant communities online. What myfico.com realized was that if it could draw, engage, and keep super-users in its community site, those super-users would answer the questions that agents couldn’t. How did they get around the legal aspects? Specific guidelines around community policies.

The third thing myfico.com did right was to deploy a community platform technology that allows customers (users) to rate the answers super-users provided. So when 10,000 people say “Yes, this answer was useful and solved my issue,” you can have confidence that the answer has been tested and found to be accurate and helpful. (Of course, the community platform you use also has to be “game” proof, meaning that there are controls that won’t allow one or several customers to vote for a solution more than once. This way, a Superuser can’t game the system to increase their followership or apparent expertise.)

You might be wondering what the business results are with this community, right? What myfico.com found was that sales increased by 61 percent for those in the community! Why? Simply because customers were getting straight answers from people who had used myfico.com and felt they benefited from the company. What better marketing avenue could you ever wish for?

Are other companies’ results similar? In many cases, yes. Consider iRobot, for instance. Executives at iRobot, a manufacturer of consumer robot vacuums (e.g., the Roomba) knew that top-notch technical and customer support was critical to the brand’s success and revenue growth. But its customer support technologies were not integrated into a seamless customer experience, nor had the company considered employing social media as a part of its customer care efforts. The global technical support director at iRobot led an effort to revamp customer service, incorporating a social media initiative to allow existing iRobot customers to help other customers. The company’s management embraced the idea immediately, realizing the power of using social media to improve its customer service. And with the actionable voice of the customer data it began collecting, the company transformed not only its service process but the way the whole organization worked together. The results? Customer-focused business decisions by integrated multidisciplinary teams working together to solve customers’ issues, develop new products, create fanatical customer experiences, increase customer retention and revenue, and reduce costs for customer service, marketing, and engineering.

What about a company that decides to build its own communities (as opposed to contracting with an outside vendor, such as Lithium Technologies, which helped both myfico.com and iRobot)? Although it’s not recommended unless software is one of your core competencies, Intuit has shown it can be done. Intuit began more than 25 years ago with a mission to revolutionize people’s lives by solving their important problems. The company wanted to make so profound an impact for each customer that people would not be able to imagine going back to the old ways. The company’s flagship products are Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax. In 2007, with the acquisition of Digital Insight, Intuit also began creating the next generation of online banking, and today the company helps banks and credit unions offer easier and simpler online financial services to their customers.

To continue to transform the way people manage their money and their small businesses, Intuit has embraced social technologies and social media. Kira Wampler, director of social media interactions for Intuit’s SmallBusinessUnited.com, is not a traditional marketer and was quick to realize that rather than using social media simply to push content to its constituents, Intuit needed to tap customers’ feedback and incorporate it into the way it handled the service task. When Wampler ventured into the social sphere to monitor and listen to customers, she said what impressed her was the passion with which customers were talking about Intuit’s products. But she also found that sometimes this passion did not have a positive sentiment. Rather than simply monitoring for negative comments and then turning them over to someone else for handling, Wampler began responding directly to customers. She apologized. She began by soliciting what Peppers and Rogers call “complaint discovery” and asked, “What would be better if … ?” And she didn’t stop there; she went back into the company and actually made the changes that customers were looking for. Once she did that, she tweeted the changes or posted them on the e-review sites. As customers realized that there was someone behind the brand who actually cared, jaws began to drop. Intuit was not some big monolithic monster that didn’t pay attention. Instead, customers saw the heart that all Intuit employees put into their work.

As a result, in the first few months of Wampler’s care, sentiment in the cloud went up by 30 percent. Wampler had proven that even just one brave soul showing she cared made a difference. Over the next five years, Intuit was able to drive better and better online customer sentiment and awareness for its consumer and small business offerings, and increased marketing campaign effectiveness. It also systematically integrated Voice of the Customer data into its product development process, improving customer support while lowering support costs.

One important key to social media is what I call the 1-9-90 rule, which describes how to visualize the ratio of contributions different participants will make in an online social community. In most communities, about 1 percent of the population post, about 9 percent respond to posts, and 90 percent just read the posts. To return to the cocktail party analogy often used to characterize the dynamics of social media, at a party you have several different types of people in the crowd. There are some who are interested in others and interested in sharing, and aren’t shy about doing so. They are driven by a need to contribute. Some other guests, as they come in the door, spot those gregarious folks who have a crowd around them. Although they aren’t the type to lead the crowd themselves, they enjoy hanging with the 1 percent who do, and they’re good at responding to or riffing off what the crowd leaders are saying. And then there is the rest of the party, and you could think of them as the audience. They come to the party to be entertained, to rub shoulders with and to listen to the 1- and 9-percenters. This is not only the way a party comes together; it’s the makeup of a healthy online community as well.

Two things are important to understand about the 1-9-90 dynamic.

Sometimes, of course, when you venture down the social business path, you have to show upper management some results. Good community management software will help you monitor the health of your community and discern what is and is not working, providing reports that include various community metrics, benchmarking, and influencer reporting along with analysis on how to maximize your investment. Lithium’s software, for instance, will compare your community’s performance to the attributes of other communities, drawn from a data pool with more than a decade’s worth of data. In addition to an analysis of your overall community, you can also get a handle on how successfully you are cultivating your super-users. You’ll have quarterly community success checkpoints to compare to previous periods, allowing you to measure and refine your community strategy as you accumulate experience.

Using Facebook to Its Fullest

What if you can’t afford an online community? Maybe you opt for a Facebook fan page. But if you do this, you need to consider adding a software tool that transforms fan discussions into actionable content that ripples throughout the organization: product development, relationship marketing, brand management, and public relations. Customer interactions, conversations, and relationships are what transform customer relationship management (CRM) into social CRM. Companies such as Get Satisfaction and others like it have adapted their successful conversational and peer-to-peer support model specifically for Facebook, allowing brands to engage social customers directly. This kind of software collects and organizes all social knowledge (questions, feedback, concerns, and praise) found inside Facebook into a central platform that can be shared and leveraged across all customer-facing channels to help a company become more customer-centric.b

And Then There Is Twitter

Although opinions have varied on whether Twitter has any real use or sustainability, much less as an application for enterprise businesses, as of this writing over 100 companies are actively using this microblogging tool to improve their customer service, and whether Twitter itself persists or is replaced by similar networks, our research shows that customers are turning to Twitter over traditional contact-center channels because they find that:

One great example of a company putting Twitter to productive customer service use is Carphone Warehouse (CPW), Europe’s leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, operating more than 2,400 stores in nine countries.c CPW observed a range of issues in the content it monitored on Twitter—complaints, such as negative in-store customer experiences, customer service requests, links to posts on third-party sites like ComplaintCommunity.com, and links to complaints on Facebook. Particularly worrying were links to third-party anti-CPW Facebook groups. What CPW wanted was to participate in the crowd, learn from its customers’ reported experiences and conversations with other customers, and then use this insight to improve its services and product offerings.

One of the things that CPW learned by using Twitter is that unhappy customers will post comments in their own blog and tweet about it to their followers, including a link to the blog post that goes out to the world, in effect pushing their own blogged complaint out to a much wider audience of other customers and potential customers. Using RSS feeds, CPW began picking up these kinds of tweets and trying to turn them around within an hour. Using the Direct Message function in Twitter, CPW would contact the customer and ask him to e-mail CPW with his contact information and more details about the problem. Not only could CPW resolve a customer’s issue directly, they could also detect when a problem tended to occur more frequently, showing up on many posts in the Twitter cloud. Using this crowd-sourced knowledge, it could update missing information on CPW’s Web site, alert CPW’s channel operations department with respect to the misunderstanding in the CPW store, amend details on the order confirmation e-mail, and notify contact centers and headquarters about which credit/debit cards can be used online and in CPW stores.

CPW found that social media provide a certain immediacy when dealing with customer issues. So the company uses Twitter to deal with first-line customer queries about handset setup, repair queries, stock availability, and delivery issues. When it tweets out an answer, it knows that many others (sometimes hundreds of people) will see it and benefit from it. Every time CPW points a customer in the right direction via Twitter, it educates thousands of others as well. For example, when customers want to know whether a certain town has a CPW store, CPW tweets them a link to the store locator. In one case, a European was on a train in the United States. The customer sent a tweet to CPW asking how to remove a SIM card from his iPhone, and CPW tweeted the customer a solution within minutes. (In the “Twitterverse,” geographic boundaries are no longer a barrier to service!)

Customers frequently comment or complain about companies on third-party sites, and CPW uses RSS feeds to carefully monitor many of these sites. At Complaint Community, for instance, a customer posted the message:

I have just been into Carphone Warehouse to collect a Bluetooth earpiece for a work colleague. When I arrived at the store, I saw the Motorola Communications set for her model advertised in the shop at £29.99. When they scanned it at the register, the price came up as £59.99 … I have looked at the Carphone Warehouse site and still cannot find details on who to contact to rectify my complaint and hope that Complaint Community can help me.

Within hours, a CPW customer service employee e-mailed the customer directly, to ask if he could help and resolve the situation:

Hi. … I work for Carphone Warehouse. I am the Online Help Manager for them. Thank you for your open and honest feedback. In the first instance, let me apologise for the experience you have had. I am currently looking into it based on the details you have provided and will be back in touch shortly. If you wish to contact me directly in the meantime, please feel free to do so by e-mail.

After replying directly to this e-mail, the customer immediately went back to Complaint Community and posted a positive message about the help he had received:

I have been contacted by a helpful customer services manager … from Carphone Warehouse … I must say I am incredibly impressed, as I didn’t expect this level of excellent customer service from such a huge organization.

One thing very important to remember about social media is that once customer complaints are “in the cloud” (i.e., sent out on Twitter or posted on a Web site), they become part of a permanent record. They will always be searchable, so getting customers to update their original complaint will help a company regain positive brand sentiment. In this CPW case and others similar to it, not only will a customer get the help they need, but hundreds of other customers will likely be witness to it.

aJosh Bernoff (with Cynthia N. Pflaum, Emily Bowen, and Angie Polanco), “Persuasive Consumers Are Socially Connected,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 17, 2009, available at: www.forrester.com, accessed September 1, 2010.

bGet Satisfaction launched March 10, 2010, under the leadership of CEO Wendy Lea. Get Satisfaction provides a “Crowd Service” tab on a brand’s fan page, where customers can begin four different types of wall discussions: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem, or Give Praise. When customers post a question, the Get Satisfaction search engine finds similar threads to give consumers instant answers to commonly asked questions. Customers can respond to any thread (i.e., voice a similar problem, suggest a remedy, emerge as an advocate in response to another’s complaint, or offer a new twist to a product suggestion). Community members can also make their experience heard by simply clicking “me too.” Representatives of the brand can also participate, to offer response and establish themselves as a brand that “listens.” By inviting this type of community participation inside of a community platform like Facebook, a company can get real-time market feedback, generate new product and service ideas, and encourage peer-to-peer support and advocacy.

cNatalie Petouhoff, “How Carphone Warehouse Uses Twitter and Social Media to Transform Customer Service,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 26, 2010, available at: www.forrester.com, accessed September 1, 2010.

The move from messages to conversations will tax many marketers and swamp some.

Before customers connected, advertising ruled. Now that customers talk to each other, it’s the customer experience that counts.

Social Media: Power to the People!

Yochai Benkler

Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Sinclair [Broadcasting Group], which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election—including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa—informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its 62 stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections.

The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair’s Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as “blatant political propaganda,” was promptly fired. … The story of Sinclair’s plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. … By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while 17 Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode.

Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs—Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo.com, Chris Bowers on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A “boycott-Sinclair” site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs. Chris Bowers on MyDD provided a complete list of Sinclair stations and urged people to call the stations and threaten to picket and boycott. By Sunday, October 10, the dailyKos posted a list of national advertisers with Sinclair, urging readers to call them. On Monday, October 11, MyDD linked to that list, while another blog, theleftcoaster.com, posted a variety of action agenda items, from picketing affiliates of Sinclair to suggesting that readers oppose Sinclair license renewals, providing a link to the FCC site explaining the basic renewal process and listing public-interest organizations to work with. That same day, another individual, Nick Davis, started a Web site, BoycottSBG.com, on which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers was the way to go, while another site, stopsinclair.org, began pushing for a petition. … By 5:00 A.M. on the dawn of Tuesday, October 12, however, TalkingPoints began pointing toward Davis’s database on BoycottSBG.com. By 10:00 that morning, Marshall posted on TalkingPoints a letter from an anonymous reader, which began by saying: “I’ve worked in the media business for 30 years and I guarantee you that sales is what these local TV stations are all about. They don’t care about license renewal or overwhelming public outrage. They care about sales only, so only local advertisers can affect their decisions.” This reader then outlined a plan for how to watch and list all local advertisers, and then write to the sales managers—not general managers—of the local stations and tell them which advertisers you are going to call, and then call those. By 1:00 P.M. Marshall posted a story of his own experience with this strategy. He used Davis’s database to identify an Ohio affiliate’s local advertisers. He tried to call the sales manager of the station, but could not get through. He then called the advertisers. The post is a “how to” instruction manual, including admonitions to remember that the advertisers know nothing of this, the story must be explained, and accusatory tones avoided, and so on. Marshall then began to post letters from readers who explained with whom they had talked—a particular sales manager, for example—and who were then referred to national headquarters. He continued to emphasize that advertisers were the right addressees. By 5:00 P.M. that same Tuesday, Marshall was reporting more readers writing in about experiences, and continued to steer his readers to sites that helped them to identify their local affiliate’s sales manager and their advertisers.

By the morning of Wednesday, October 13, the boycott database already included eight hundred advertisers, and was providing sample letters for users to send to advertisers. Later that day, BoycottSBG reported that some participants in the boycott had received reply e-mails telling them that their unsolicited e-mail constituted illegal spam. Davis explained that the CAN-SPAM Act, the relevant federal statute, applied only to commercial spam, and pointed users to a law firm site that provided an overview of CAN-SPAM.

By October 14, the boycott effort was clearly bearing fruit. Davis reported that Sinclair affiliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled advertisements with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. Within a brief period, he collected more than a dozen volunteers to help the advertisers. Later that day, another blogger at grassrootsnation.com had set up a utility that allowed users to send an e-mail to all advertisers in the BoycottSBG database. By the morning of Friday, October 15, Davis was reporting more than fifty advertisers pulling ads, and three or four mainstream media reports had picked up the boycott story and reported on it. That day, an analyst at Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. Mainstream news reports over the weekend and the following week systematically placed that report in context of local advertisers pulling their ads from Sinclair. On Monday, October 18, the company’s stock price dropped by 8 percent (while the S&P [Standard & Poor’s index] 500 rose by about half a percent). The following morning, the stock dropped a further 6 percent, before beginning to climb back, as Sinclair announced that it would not show Stolen Honor, but would provide a balanced program with only portions of the documentary and one that would include arguments on the other side.

Source: Excerpted from Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 220–223.