Apendix C
Hands-On Exercises
As Dave’s college physics professor often declared, “You won’t learn if you don’t do the homework.” Appendix C contains all of the review and applied exercises recommended throughout the book.
Note: You will find a printable (PDF) version of Appendix C at www.ReadThis.com.
Chapter 1: Social Media and Customer Engagement
Review each of the following, taking note of the main points covered in the chapter and the ways in which the following resources demonstrate or expand on these points:
- Search the Web for “Dell Hell” to understand what happened at Dell and how it inspired other companies to start on the social journey.
- Read the Nielsen Norman Group’s report Social Media User Experience.
- Review Starbucks’s My Starbucks Idea ideation application:
- Read the Altimeter State of Social Business 2013 report to understand how companies are responding to the needs of their social customers.
www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/the_state_of_social_business_2013
- Look at the blog of Peter Kim, on the topic of social business:
- Look at the work of Jeremiah Owyang, focused on the topic of social technology and collaboration applied to business:
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Define the basic properties, objectives, and outcomes of social applications that connect your customers to your business and to your employees.
- Define internal processes that enable efficient resolution of customer-generated ideas.
- Map out your own customer engagement process and compare it with the engagement process defined in this chapter.
Chapter 2: The Social Customer
Review each of the following, combining the main points covered in the chapter and the ways in which the following resources expand on these points. Then tie each into your business or organization:
- Paul Greenberg’s “Social CRM Comes of Age”
- Jeremiah Owyang’s list of social CRM tools
www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/12/08/list-of-companies-providing-social-crm
- The Edelman Trust Barometer
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Find examples of where your customers are behaving like the new social customer today. What are they telling you about what they want and expect?
- Find examples of bloggers or other social participants who are influential in ways related to your product or industry. Was it easy or hard to find these people?
- Review the tools and platforms you use today to manage customer information and customer interactions. How socially aware are they? Where are the gaps?
Chapter 3: Social Customer Experience Management
Review each of the following, taking note of the main points covered in the chapter and the ways in which the following activities demonstrate these points:
- The Temkin Group website, including the Customer Experience Matters blog
- Michael Wu’s e-books, The Science of Social and The Science of Social 2
- Chris Brogan’s A Simple Presence Framework, which we adapted for this book
- Consortium for Service Innovation website, how the practice of customer service is changing
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Arrange a meeting with senior executives in your organization to talk about their views on collaborating with customers.
- Create an inventory of your current social media programs. List home bases, outposts, and passports (see the “Three Levels of Social Activities” sidebar for definitions of each) and then define the metrics and success measures for each.
- Meet with the leadership of your customer service and product design teams, and meet with Legal and HR to review the requirements or concerns about connecting employees more collaboratively or engaging more fully on the Social Web.
Chapter 4: The Social Customer Experience Ecosystem
Review each of the following, ensuring that you have a solid understanding of the concept being shown in the example:
- Brand outposts like Coca-Cola’s Facebook page are viable alternatives to one-off microsites and branded communities:
- New Belgium Brewing’s Facebook-based mobile photo and story contest taps readily available passions and interests. You don’t have to reinvent wheels to create great social media points of presence. Check this and other social marketing efforts based on sharing and content collaboration created by Friend2Friend for New Belgium Brewing:
- Clearly articulated policies create a strong platform for collaboration and the adoption of social computing:
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- If you use Twitter or LinkedIn, bring your personal profile up to 100 percent completion.
- If your office or organization has a profile-driven knowledge-sharing application, repeat exercise 1 for your profile on that network. Then, get three colleagues to do the same.
- List your favorite social communities, and describe an application that your business or organization might offer within that community. Connect it to your business objectives.
Chapter 5: Social Technology and Business Decisions
Review each of the following and connect them to your business.
- Check out the website for award programs like Forrester’s Groundswell Awards and Lithium’s Lithys Social Customer Excellence Awards to read cases on how companies are aligning goals with strategies across different industries.
http://groundswelldiscussion.com/groundswell/awards/
http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/lithys-social-customer/idb-p/Awards
- Spend time reading Esteban Kolsky’s blog, and in particular search for and read the entries on “analytics engines.” As a hands-on exercise, create a plan for integrating social analytics into your operational (not marketing) processes.
- Review the product innovation cycle (Figure 5-1), and map this onto your business and identify the specific areas or functions within your business that contribute to innovation. Think about the Bengaluru International Airport example as you do this. How can you design in the experiences you want your customers or stakeholders to talk about?
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises to create your own social customer experience strategy:
- Define the why, who, what, and where for your current social customer experience efforts, if any. How easy or difficult was it?
- Visit with the IT, Marketing, or Operations teams that use your existing CRM data. Explore ways of incorporating social data into these processes and connecting that information to your business or organization.
- Building on your exercises in Chapter 1, define one or more internal collaboration points based on what you discovered in exercise 1.
- Building on your exercises in Chapters 2 and 3, create a workflow path for social data (for example, conversations) that carries this information to the points inside your organization that can act on it. Include a method for tracking results.
- Build your touchpoint map, and identify the critical customer experiences that create the conversations that show up on the Social Web.
- Combine the previous exercises and create a requirements list for the toolset that you will need to manage the social experience of your customers as it relates to your business objectives.
Chapter 6: Social Analytics, Metrics, and Measurement
Review each of the following, and consider subscribing to those that you find especially useful or relevant to your business or organization:
- Avinash Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor
- Kate Niedehoffer
- Edwards Deming and Business Process Measurement
- Fred Reichheld and the Net Promoter community
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Identify the primary social, web, and business analytics that matter to you.
- Run a correlation analysis on metrics you’ve identified, and then investigate why certain metrics are correlated more strongly than others and how this correlation might be used to further your understanding of how the Social Web is impacting your business or organization.
- Develop a basic dashboard, or incorporate one or two new business fundamentals that you identify through the previous exercises into your current business scorecard.
Chapter 7: Five Key Trends
Review each of the following, and ensure that you have a complete understanding of how social media and social technology are used.
- Dell Ideastorm
- Threadless
- Foursquare (You will need an account with Foursquare and a GPS-capable phone or similar hand-held device for this.)
- HARO
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Assess the real-time capability of your organization. How long does it take you to respond to customers online? Can you reduce that time?
- Understand your company’s mobile strategy. Is your website mobile-friendly? Are there mobile apps that you could deploy? (Tip: Look at your competitors too!) This will help you understand whether you can integrate social with existing efforts or need to develop on your own.
- Prepare a short presentation using Threadless or a similar crowd-sourced enterprise as the subject or any other collaborative business design application that you choose. Talk to your team about what makes the application work and how social technology has been built into the business.
- Looking at your own firm or organization, list three ways that your customers could collaborate directly with each other to improve some aspect of your product or service.
- Develop an outline for a business plan based on exercise 2 that involves multiple departments or functions to implement. Win the support of those people.
Chapter 8: Customer Engagement
Review the following and apply them to your business or organization as you create your plan for integrating social technology into your fundamental processes:
- 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.
- The whitepapers in Jive Software’s resources library, in particular Social Business Software Adoption Strategies.
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- 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.
- 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.
- Review your own engagement programs, and carefully examine how you are measuring or evaluating engagement and from whose perspective you are defining engagement.
- 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.
Chapter 9: Social CRM and Social Customer Experience
Review both of the following and apply these to your business or organization as you create your plan for integrating social technology into your fundamental processes:
- Review cases noted in this chapter. The principles of social CRM are sufficiently well demonstrated that they can be applied to almost any business.
- Review the general toolsets in the tables in this chapter, and take note of the order in which specific tools or technologies are applied. As with social-media-based marketing in general, the implementation process begins not with technology but rather with business objectives and strategy.
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- If you haven’t done so already, look at the social computing policy examples at the Altimeter site or those of IBM or Dell. In addition, visit the sites of firms or organizations like yours to see what they have done. Imitation—followed with an in-house legal review—is the sincerest form of getting there faster!
- Work with your IT or other applicable department to design a pilot program for internal collaboration. The exercise will challenge your organization, so choose a small project and recruit enthusiastic volunteers.
- After completing the first two exercises, prepare and deliver a starting plan for social customer experience management to your colleagues (or customers, if you are a consulting firm or agency).
Chapter 10: Social Objects
Review each of the following and connect them to your business.
- Look at the work of Jyri Engeström, beginning with this video (http://vimeo.com/4071624) and his blog (www.zengestrom.com/blog).
- Make a list of the social sites you are currently a member of (all of them). Connect each with the social object around which it is built, and then consider how your connection to this object drives (or fails to drive) your participation in that site.
- Visit your own brand or organization website and brand outposts. Is a social object readily identifiable? Does this social object connect your audience to your business?
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Create an inventory of communities applicable to your brand, product, or service. Once you’ve compiled it, join a manageable set and understand the interest areas and social norms for each. Develop a plan for how you might integrate your own activities into these communities.
- Using Google, search for a lifestyle, passion, or cause that you are interested in. Note the documents that come back, and review a subset of them. Then do the same content search again, but this time select only image results. Review the images and note the number of images that lead you to a social site of some type.
- Define three core social objects for your business or organization around which you could build or enhance your social presence. Create a touchpoint map to help guide your selection.
Chapter 11: The Social Graph
Review each of the following, and then take note of what you learn and insights you gain. How can you apply (or specify the use of) these items in your own projects and the further development of your understanding of social technology?
- Facebook Open Graph plug-ins for use in social-media-based marketing:
- Tools, papers, and resources available through membership in the INSNA and the larger discussion of social network analysis:
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Map your first-degree network in your office, and then do the same in some personal aspect of your life, a civic organization, for example. Who is in both networks? What content is shared between these networks as a result?
- Look at your friends in some of the social networks you belong to. How many of these friends or people you follow are people you knew prior to joining versus the number you met after joining? How were those you met after joining referred or suggested?
- Develop a set of specific metrics for your social business applications that involve the social graph. Create a regular report, and track these measures over time.
Chapter 12: Social Applications
Review each of the following, and then take note of what you’ve learned or gained insight into. How can you apply (or specify the use of) these items in your own projects?
- Visit the tutorials* and resource pages for the APIs and social plug-ins associated with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Foursquare, and similar platforms. Gain an understanding of the intended uses of each, and then look at the examples of how they have been used to create differentiated social technology solutions.
- Visit the websites of Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, GetSatisfaction, Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Connections, Socialcast, and Socialtext. Gain an understanding of the intended uses of each, and then look at the examples of how they have been used to create branded social applications.
- Visit SlideShare and search for presentations on “Social Applications.” You’ll find great resources for almost any type of business.
Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:
- Articulate your business objectives, and define your audience.
- Given the discussion of social applications, develop an idea for a social application that serves your business objectives and fits with your audience behaviors. Write a complete brief around its deployment. Include within this your development efforts supporting a cross-functional internal team.
- Tie this plan to your existing marketing and business efforts and to your accepted business metrics. Define your guiding KPIs and if appropriate the basis for establishing ROI.
Notes
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