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

think you’d have to be really really clear that you are justified in sacking a customer for a Twitter comment before you asked them to move on. How NOT to do Customer Service on Twitter Crucial Paradigm is a post from: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy Technorati Tags: crucial paradigm , customer service , Twitter ...Tags: Sometimes you get frustrated and really let loose. Sometimes you just say WTF and walk away.

Zappos is a well-known social media case study. Very impressive statistics, a good business model and a really good example of using social media. 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 Image via CrunchBase The Las Vegas shoe retailer was founded in 1999 selling shoes online.

shouldn’t have been surprised - victim number one was the entire Customer Service department. Yep, they had been using their CSR PCs to create secondary accounts to attack members - customers - who were criticising them on their official, primary, Customer Service profiles. Not surprising - it goes a long way to protect the company from fallout if/when staff do ignore the social media guidelines in place.  Managing staff who participate in social networks. This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines,

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.

Measuring ROI is an important topic in social media, all the communities that we build at FreshNetworks have very clear ROI cases. That’s why this week’s Required Reading is a great presentation on Social Media ROI from Egg Co . This is very similar to the way we work with clients at FreshNetworks, and the examples in the presentation show how this approach to ROI can show the real impact social media can have. Image via Wikipedia On Friday we posted about an experiment running on one of our online communities , comparing paid and organic

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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.

In our last post we looked at why every business needs a social media policy . But if you’re writing your social media policy for employees, what should it include? Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Image by late night movie via Flickr And the fact that the most important thing for any business is to have a policy in the first place.

With the publication this month of the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ‘ Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions’ , it seemed a good moment for me to write about the thorny subject, and have a look at some of the controversy around the measurement of ROI in social media. The ROI within social media has long been a bone of contention, and seems likely to become ever more so, with the equally lightning spread of both social media use and savage budget cuts. I’ll ll return to the IAB’s publication later, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at the background into which it appeared.