We wrote last month about the Zappos story , about how they have used customer service to extend and enhance the customer experience and how this has had a positive impact on sales, satisfaction and growth. This example highlights the power of customer service - of listening to and then rewarding customers. We know the real benefit that a brand Image by LiminalMike via Flickr Both in terms of the insights and ideas you can get from them, and also the way you can amplify word-of-mouth and build loyalty with them by listening to what they say and responding.

For Zappos customer service has always been a critical part of the brand, indeed early on they made the deliberate decision to divert their marketing budget to customer service. They allowed customers to do things like try and return products for up to a year, only list stock that’s in their warehouse, encourage customers to call them about nearly everything, and they invest in ’surprise’ free overnight shipping for most customers. Image via CrunchBase Zappos is a well-known social media case study.

Earlier this week we wrote about Thomson Holidays and how a blogger can impact your brand reputation and how with social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one. Earlier this week I was running a ‘masterclass’ in social media and customer service at the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference 2009 . Image by JMC Photos via Flickr The session looked first at the different types of social media that businesses use and the reasons for and benefits of this.

Details Magazine Buy Reprint Idea in Brief HBR.org > January–February 2010 Rethinking Marketing by Roland T. Rust , Christine Moorman , and Gaurav Bhalla Because companies can now interact directly with customers, they must radically reorganize to put cultivating relationships ahead of building brands. Read the HBR In Brief Print Email Purchase Article Text Size Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size

to find the most influential people in the market and consumer research areas to follow. You can read more of our recent research posts from making online research better to one on simple, effective market research . The full list of market researchers to follow on Twitter is below (in alphabetical order) and you can vote for the top ten by commenting on the Research Reinvented blog. Research Reinvented have polled the Twitterverse (I hate that word!) Rather ingratiatingly I’m one of them and now get to wait to see if I make the top 10.

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Often customers don’t know what they want. Image by Darren Hester via Flickr Of course, it is not always this simple.

Yesterday we posted about statistics from MarketingSherpa showing that a lack of knowledge hampers social media marketing , with 46% of firms who had not adopted social media marketing citing a lack on internal understanding as their main hindrance. Another set of statistics from MarketingSherpa paints a more positive outlook for social media agencies. In September 2008, just as we were recognising the full potential of the economic downturn in which we now find ourselves, they surveyed almost 400 firms asking them about their marketing spend for 2009. Which lines would increase and which lines would decrease.

via: Mobile RSS Email Alerts Bios: Dion’s Bio Pick a blog category Collaboration Convergence Enterprise Web 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Innovation marketplace Prediction markets Hype Identity Active Directory Google Accounts Identity 2.0 LDAP Live ID openid Lightweight Service Models Mashups Enterprise Mashups Situational Software Network Effects Open APIs Products Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Ajax SaaS SOA Business Process Management Global SOA Governance Orchestration

Stephen Collins and I and a bunch of Twitterati got into a discussion about social media marketing campaigns and whether they should exist earlier today. Stephen followed up with a blog post called “ Social Media, It’s not actually about selling anything ” (actually about social media marketing) which of course is questionable on a number of levels. First, marketing is not sales. We don’t sell items through marketing, we sell concepts, ideas. Spin and spam if we’re bad.

But data from TNS shows that use of social media and social networking in the country is widespread, making it the fourth largest market in Europe for social networking behind the UK, Germany and France. These statistics are impressive and firmly place Russia as the fourth biggest market in Europe for social networking. It’s in these markets that I would expect to see We’ve posted in the past about the use of social media in Russia, when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launched a video blog . The January Web Index for TNS shows that two leading social networks