10 Feet Tall and Bulletproof

Posted on December 5, 2012 by

Ever heard the song with the lyric “until I’m 10 feet tall and bulletproof”? While I’m not Texan, I did go to Texas A&M University and even many years down the track… some of the words of those country and western songs still ring in my head.

Is it any different when we have a bad customer experience with a product, brand or even the employee of an organization?

Sometimes it is the good things that stay in our minds, I will never forget the Qantas employee who smiled at me when I stepped onto the 15-16 hour LA-Melbourne flight with my young son and said, we know it can be tough to travel with children, please let us know if there is anything we can do to assist you. Wow! I was an economy passenger. I’ve done the trek many times and my son is a well seasoned flyer… iPad, snacks and some other entertainment and he is barely noticed. I won’t mention the name of the other airline who refused to clear our trays when he desperately needed to use the toilet, but we won’t be flying with them ever again. No, we don’t forget…

Unplanned events happen, they are a fact of life. One of my old email taglines read: “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”  It is how a company handles those events that defines them as a brand, wins customer loyalty.

The (http://levick.com/insights) formerly known as the bulletproof blog covers unexpected events and how they are handled. They have some pretty interesting stories on their blog. These guys can certainly help you out if things have gone according to Life instead of to Plan, but there are a few things that every organization should make sure they have in order to keep this from happening.

DO: Have a Social Media Policy and make sure your employees know about it
DON’T: Assume no one will notice or that something will go away on its own
DO: Employ a social media monitoring/listening strategy
DON’T: Delay, response time is imperative
DO: Respond on the medium where the complaint is visible
DON’T: Respond incognito, always disclose if you are from the organization. 
DO: Establish channels that you can use to communicate your message to your audiences.
DON’T: Ignore other channels just because you aren’t using them to broadcast your message.

Fact is, I’ve never met any 10-feet tall, bulletproof companies and while they might live in the forest with unicorns, I am pretty sure they don’t exist.

Posted in Customer Care, Customer Experience, Social Media | Leave a comment

How does social collaboration change our expectations?

Posted on October 1, 2012 by

It’s been only 8 years since the launch of Facebook, in that time so much has changed!

In today’s world there are two areas of social collaboration public and enterprise.

Obviously not an extensive list, but just a few of the key players.
Public  - Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pintrest and Klout
Enterprise – Oracle Social Network, Chatter, Yammer, Jive, IBM Connections

Public Social Collaboration
What does it mean to customers?
Customer’s no longer tolerate waiting on the end of a phone line to speak to someone who knows nothing about their preferences as a consumer. They want to engage in multi-channel, tailored transactions and be recognized for their unique preferences and brand loyalty.

Customers are empowered. They can speak out about their appreciation or frustration in their brand interactions acting as either the free advertising or creating a PR situation for companies caught unaware.

Enterprise Social Collaboration
What does it mean to employees?
Employees can benefit through shared IP, mobility and ease of recognition.

All too often, employees in large organisations discover that some aspect of their work has already been done, valuable lessons already learnt and they have been unable to capitalize on that knowledge simply because they did not know of its existence.

In an increasingly mobile world, employees want to be able to have access to vital information no matter where they are, they don’t want to wait to share a customer visit report or update their team on project developments when they are in the office… They want to grab their iPad or their smartphone and share that in a way that isn’t going to be lost in a pile of email.

Social collaboration allows contributions to be recognized, not just by immediate teams, but across organisations, driving change and motivating others to provide input.

Companies are recognizing this and are constantly reviewing how they can improve internal collaboration, capture and share IP and show that this activity has associated ROI.

What does that mean for your Inbox?
I’m no email ninja (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/01/09/10-steps-to-become-an-email-ninja/), but using enterprise social networking means I don’t need to be. Communicating internally via email becoming less prominent as  systems of engagement move into the foreground. These systems allow enterprise users to collaborate around specific topics, share information with defined groups and link these findings with opportunities or business processes. This keeps key information out of the inbox and in a secure environment. It also means your inbox is no longer filled with unimportant details and it means your inbox is easy to keep an eye on so that when the important messages from customers or those who would be hit your inbox, you can see them!

Enterprise communication is moving from systems of record to systems of engagement: http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory

Posted in Customer Experience, Social Media, Social Networking | Leave a comment

Yesterday, Today and Far-Far Away

Posted on September 15, 2012 by

I recently bought a new t-shirt from threadless and I loved the imagery:
1) A pyramid with “Yesterday” underneath
2) A modern square looking building with “Today” underneath
3) A round Star Wars Death-Starish thing with “Far-far away” underneath

They might not have meant to emulate the Death Star, I’ve just been watching too many Star Wars DVD’s lately.

I am dating myself a bit here, but I can remember a time when Alta Vista was the way to find what you needed. To search for something online, just string a few search terms with Boolean operators and the internet churned out exactly what you wanted. Provided of course, that what you were looking for was in the internet at all. Along came Google and a more intuitive method of searching evolved. Even common vocabulary changed. The catch phrase “look it up in the dictionary” or “search for it online” became simply “Google it”. Google took care of our spelling mistakes and suggested similar topics to help us wade through the growing quagmire.

In the online social world, Bulletin Board Systems were once the great place to socialize with others who actually had a computer or at least access to a data center. Fast forward to  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google+. Today there are so many ways to share who you are and what you are thinking in the public space. And with that another host of ways to try and keep track of them, some free, others not. I’ve been playing around with http://addictomatic.com for search and Hootsuite for some basic social media monitoring http://hootsuite.com/dashboard. I am just using the free version, but find it quite useful for the individual or small organization looking to grasp what social media means to them.

The bastion of private social communication has quickly become a way where businesses can make or break their reputation. What about the inside of companies? The large organizations where email has been the way to communicate? Where information is stored on file shares creating a maize of locations to search for relevant information?
Last year AIIM published a whitepaper on Systems of Engagement: http://www.aiim.org/~/media/Files/AIIM%20White%20Papers/Systems-of-Engagement.pdf that speaks of the times that are here and those that lie ahead. The challenges that organizations have is how to harness that ease of information sharing that has grown so rapidly in the public realm and bring it inside of their organizations. Organizations don’t want to share their valuable IP in a pubic space and they don’t want to loose it when teams change or individuals move on. The Facebook generation is now well into the workplace and the way they communicate within the organisation and with their peers is quickly changing the corporate landscape. Far-far away has arrived and  now we have corporate social networks.

What does that mean for Customers?

What does that mean for Employees?

What does that mean for your Inbox?

more to follow…

Posted in Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Not Everything Tastes Better with Cheese

Posted on July 5, 2012 by

I recently read an article titled “Things I learned after 40″ (or something similar) and really enjoyed the line “Not Everything Tastes Better with Cheese”. Noted: I am not 40 yet, but close enough to be curious about how my life is supposed to change. I started to think about how this applies to information technology.

Having worked on bespoke software development projects prior to entering into Product Management, I am familiar with the drive to constantly add capability and features to a product. As many have learned over time, this inherently makes the project unwieldy, the software too complex and causes user adoption difficulties. Of course RAD, Agile, Scrum et al are there to help avoid these pitfalls.

We still seem to wind up with lots of great products out there that have a mind boggling number of options that no one wants to figure out how to use. I am always trying to keep up with the newest entries into the Social Media world and was right on board joining Google+ while it was still in beta. I was glad to see something different to Facebook on the horizon and dutifully added friends, family and co-worker circles. Time passed and not many changes were apparent on Google+, except that I thought it was pretty cool to add William Shattner to one of my circles.

Last week I had a co-worker ask a G+ related question and I hopped onto my G+ page to try something out. I was pleasantly surprised at what I found there. Whereas nearly 1 year into my Facebook timeline experience, I have adjusted, but find that the number of clicks often required to find or do something has generally increased.  I instantly found my way around and felt at home in G+. Sometimes lots of extra cheese, can just make something too murky to enjoy the original flavour. Sometimes we can make software products even better by clearing off all the cheese so that we can see the other ingredients and in fact, the intended or refined purpose of the product.

G+ really have taken things in the “less cheese” direction. Things seem a lot cleaner, easier to navigate and even FUN!

Posted in Simplicity, Social Media | Leave a comment

Do you like Donuts?

Posted on June 20, 2012 by

Social Media Explained

While I can’t recall where I picked up this image of the Social Media explained through donuts, I love this image and it pretty much sums up social media today. Let me see, I have an account on everything but Last FM…

Of course I’d have to add an Oracle-twist to it… so here are my three additions:

1) Oracle Social Network (Collaborate in Context):  Hey supplier what is happening to my flour order to make those donuts?

2) Vitrue (Market): Lets tell everyone about our new donut recipe and fresh donut guarantee.

3) Collective Intellect (Monitor): Lets analyse what our customers are saying about donuts.

Personally this all makes me want to head over to my local Crispy Creme!

Posted in Donuts, Social Media, Social Networking | Leave a comment