And we then moved into some examples from customer service: some good, some bad and one just ugly. A ‘Good’ example, Zappos is great at microinteractions. Another ‘Good’ example that shows how you can make effective use of Twitter. Dell is an example of ‘bad turned Image by JMC Photos via Flickr 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

There are some well know examples of businesses working with consumers on co-creation in this way: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s Ideastorm being among the most well known. Whilst the use of Twitter is a great and fantastic example of how and online community can work with social networks to maximise participation, it is better if there are multiple ways of allowing people to engage. Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr One powerful use of online communities is to help get new ideas into a business; taking advantage of the fact that many (if not most) of the

Example: If you want to use social media as an efficient way of resolving customer queries, for example, you probably want to measure the number of unique customer problems you have on the site, the number of problems that are solved by other members of the community. You can then put an equivalent cost that it would have taken to service these queries through other channels and measure the actual reduction in, for example, call centre costs that you witness over time. Image by Marco D via Flickr For any brand getting started in social media , the most important

We’ve written before about how brands can use Twitter , and there are many examples of brands who are seeing quantifiable benefits from their use of Twitter. Dell’s $3m in revenue from one Twitter account is just one example. The clients that we work with at FreshNetworks , for example, would need more pay Twitter for additional services. Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr Reports today suggest that Twitter is planning to roll-out a range of new premium features that it hopes will appeal to a corporate market.

Great examples are: Comcast Cares or Dell Customer Advocate Team – teams dedicated to provide assistance across the web. Tags: Social Media Voice of Customer ComcastCares Dell join_the_conversation Son “Join the Conversation”, we have all heard these words. Makes sense, right? And if

Dell’s Online Communication Policy  [link] For example, if I trashtalk Widget company, a community member might point out I am a competitor and then send me to my own companies public guidelines. Managing staff who participate in social networks. This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on.

There are some great examples of brands using social media that we use a lot at FreshNetworks . We’ve looked at some such examples before with how organisations can use Twitter . The cases of Dell, Starbucks, Nike and others are great stories and there is much that we can learn. Image by communista_unicorn via Flickr Not because they necessarily get everything right, but because they show what works for them and why, and they help to give ideas and inspiration to others.

It’s really helpful to look at what some good examples of what companies are doing with their listening skills: deflecting customer anger, researching new products, or correcting mis-information. Chapman's experience is one example of the ways customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled consumer with a broadband connection can ignite a crisis. (It Chapman, for I think the point is that they are reaching out, listening, and then acting .

Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. d rather pick my battles (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example) and fight them well rather than have my social finger in too many pies (all the above plus MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut etc.) There are different ways to engage online, the most popular I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place.

Pipes is an example of a custom syndication mechanism. Custom syndication can augment other elements of a social networking system, especially for a user group that is highly specialized in goal and purpose. Social bookmarking Social bookmarking functions promote the development of shared information collections among networked groups. Collaborative filtration Collaborative filtration gives users the ability to vote submissions (bookmarks, feeds, entries, etc.) popular feed-based example of this is Digg . We did an internal exercise recently that produced a list of the advanced features we think are crucial for a successful enterprise social media platform.