Benn Achilleas' blog

Some brands are actively scared about using their social channels to provide customer services, but they don’t realise the opportunity they’re missing.

In general the thinking goes something like this:

• If we let people leave negative remarks, then they will put off other potential customers.
• It’s impossible to solve every problem through social channels – so why try?
• If someone has to answer all the queries, that will mean having to hire more staff.

Let’s look at each of these in detail.

A key mistake made by brands when they first enter the social sphere is to forget that they’ll need a way to measure the tangible success of their efforts. Effectively brands leave themselves unable to measure the ROI of their social activity and as a result it can very easily become a wasted effort.

When you first engage through sites such as Facebook or Twitter it’s very easy to be fooled into thinking that a million online followers is an end to itself, but if you haven’t at the very least considered a future strategy for turning your new online friends (followers and fans) into *real* customers, it’s highly unlikely to happen on its own.

Just as with any other marketing campaign, clear objectives should be set right from the start that can be clearly measured and analysed in order to tell you exactly how successful your activities have been.

A lot of people talk about blogger outreach but what does it mean and how does it add value? Here’s an overview of what it involves, what you should expect and some tips on how to get the best results.

At its simplest level blogger outreach is the integration of blogger relationships into a Social CRM strategy. By building long-term relationships with relevant and interested bloggers it’s possible to open up a whole new means of broadcasting your message to niche audiences who are actively interested and engaged. In addition, word-of-mouth recommendations from bloggers can be very influential, especially if they have a faithful readership that trust and follow their opinions.

However, it’s worth noting that blogger outreach is one of the hardest aspects of Social CRM to get right as a poorly thought-out strategy can easily backfire and possibly even damage your brand or reputation online. Bloggers can be savage and merciless in exposing ill-informed or overly tactical approaches, and this is why (most but not all) PR agencies often get it wrong.

As a near-constant social media user it’s interesting watching the gradual shift to an increasingly connected lifestyle. We’ve clearly passed a tipping point in terms of how willing people are to openly share their personal lives online, be it their holiday snaps, favourite restaurants or even the minutia of their daily lives.

For the purposes of Social CRM though, we’re only just crossing over the edge of the New Frontier as people begin to wonder just how comfortable they really are letting companies get involved with their online lives.

Thus far the majority of web users have happily come to accept how services such as Amazon and iTunes are able to track their usage in order to not only tell them about other products they might enjoy but also what other users with similar tastes are purchasing.

Watching the crowds at Heathrow and St Pancras waiting for planes and trains respectively got me thinking about the way brands communicate when there’s something wrong. In each case, the news was filled with disgruntled passengers bad mouthing their chosen travel companies, frequently because of the lack of information that they had been given.

According to Econsultancy’s latest Social Media and Online PR Report, 76% of companies don’t have an ROI figure for their social media spend.

This means that – shockingly – fewer than 1 in 4 companies actually know when their social media activities have been worth the money they’ve spent on them. Even more amazingly, only 7% of firms actively integrate their television and radio campaigns with their social media activities.

There’s no question that when it comes to Social CRM and accurately measuring the success of all your online activities some metrics are essential and some are entirely misleading.

It can be hard sometimes trying to explain this to clients whose starting point is that they want to get 100,000 fans on Facebook or 50,000 video views on YouTube, without having thought through what these numbers really mean and how valuable these “followers” are. If you get too focused on these numbers you can end up following the “stupid metrics”.