Over 44% of adults now use the web to share grievances about products, with companies expected to interact with companies online and get a speedy response. [Source: The Rise Of The Social Customer]

However many companies are still struggling with the planning and execution of social customer service. Why is that? There are multiple reasons but one of the key reality is that providing good customer service on social channels has a unique set of challenges which makes it far more difficult than passive social listening or social marketing with light engagement.

Key Challenges of Social Media Customer Service

To understand the challenges of customer service on social, you need to consider these factors.

1. Lack of Native Support by Social Channels. Social Channels were not created with customer service as a primary use case so they lack the process and support needed by organizations to effectively manage service operations
2. Multiple Social Channels and Properties. Each social network or channel has its own interface, terminology, data structure and restrictions e.g. Facebook pages are a very different species than Twitter
3. Robust Monitoring Needs. You need to monitor keyword mentions anywhere on social web (indirect mentions). You also need to monitor conversations directed at you on your own social properties. And you need to do both in near real-time
4. Response and Tracking Across Multiple Channels. You need to have the mechanism to respond to conversations AND track and measure these interactions
5. Governance. Customer service activity volume can be high, making it difficult to coordinate the efforts. You need the appropriate policies, process and team – and the right online tools to facilitate the team work, collaboration while providing the governance controls such as audit, logs and performance management

Our recommendation is for you to start with your business needs and goals and work on a plan which includes the right metrics, product and team. Calibrate the plan based on your goals, scale, budget and social media maturity.

As you can see, many of the stand-alone social monitoring or social media management products simply do not have what it takes to tackle social customer service.

In our next post, we will talk about a checklist to help you with the operational and product needs for social customer service.

Image Credit: Jason Davies

The fact is that if you do just keyword based listening, you are missing out on an important piece of the puzzle. How? First of all, not all conversations of interest may contain the keywords that you are listening for. Many conversations take place on specific social channels such as Facebook pages where the keywords are irrelevant – the channel itself provides the context.

In order to get a 360 degree view of your business on social you must, in addition to the keyword based listening, listen to and track the social channels where your target audience are. The benefits of this approach range from discovery of issues, customer feedback, better customer and competitive intelligence.

This concept can be extended to included ratings and reviews sites and businesses with local franchises as well. However, the focus of this post are the major social channels such as Facebook pages, blogs, Linkedin groups, Youtube channels, which provide over 90% of the conversation volume.

These channels include:

1. Your brand channels (on and off-site)
2. Competitor’s channels
3. Industry channels (e.g. influencer blogs, LinkedIn groups or FB pages).

For each channel you should track the stream or the feed from the channel as well as understand the bigger picture view of the activity on that channel. The measurements for each channel are at two levels: channel level summary and the ability to drilldown and analyze at a granular level i.e at the post and user level. The analytics should include text analytics to provide topics and sentiment information.

Here are a few examples of how metrics and text analytics from Facebook page can enrich your social intelligence.

The ability to drill down to the posts and comments and to filter and search enables you to process the data efficiently. The capability to interact with the user activity allows you to be proactive.

Here’s one more example of social channel tracking. This screenshot is from MutualMind social insights and it shows social engagement for a given blog feed.

Social channel intelligence is a valuable source of business information that should be used in conjunction with the keyword based listening. Keyword based listening may provide a false sense of security that could be highly misleading. Unfortunately there are social media monitoring vendors that charge by volume of keyword mentions and therefore have an obvious self-interest in promoting that. At MutualMind we believe that social listening is not complete without full social channel measurement – that reflects our all-in-one social listening and management approach.

Isn’t it time to deliver on the promise of social media ROI?
This partnership is a great example of how two leading companies with complementary skills can join forces to offer unique and compelling value to brands. The beauty of this solution lies in the demonstration of value social media for brands through analytics and real-world business results.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release.

Integration of Advanced Social Analytics, Engagement and Community Platforms Enable Measurably Greater Return-on-Customer Metrics

Collective Bias and MutualMind entered into an OEM/Technology Integration Partnership producing the next generation social community-based analytics and engagement platform for global brands and retailers.

“The key to harnessing the power of social media for brands is to figure out how to optimize interaction with social communities and tie results to sales data,” said Casey Petersen, Director of Social Media Analytics of Collective Bias. “This partnership is the beginning of a long-awaited solution for brands engaging in traditional social media monitoring to connect social media postings and shopper media insights with in-store activity and net sales growth.”

MutualMind is a highly scalable social media analytics platform that enables service providers, on behalf of global brands, to have the ability to monitor and analyze social conversations for sentiment and other factors. The platform goes beyond text and sentiment analysis by integrating a complete social analyst workflow management capability that enables engagement, content publishing, social conversation tracking and task management.

Collective Bias and MutualMind have jointly developed a social shopping platform that gives product and retail brands an easy way to track the ROI of syndicate engaging, community-produced social media campaigns across all social properties including social networking sites, web sites and blogger community sites. In its current state, clients receive access to a customized dashboard to monitor engagement, social conversation, share of voice and sentiment, and to compare their performance versus competitors.

Here is a summary of the key areas where we have made significant enhancements in 2012:

Insights: Dashboard and Content Browser

• Share of Voice
• Redesigned and improved insights for Twitter and Facebook
• Keyword and Social Channel modes in Content Browser
• Support for threaded conversations for Facebook
• Export desired data set on-demand

Engagement Metrics and Capabilities

• Embedded and on-demand URL Insights
• Engagement stats from key channels
• Who’s been sharing your content?
• LinkedIn interactions

Customer Service

• Enhancements to task creation (task locking, conversation history)
• Task browsing, filtering and search
• Task insights: productivity metrics and reports

White Label and OEM

• Expanded site customizations in Admin panel
• Additions and enhancements to developer API
• Robust archives

Despite the buzz about social media and its adoption by brands, there still remain a number of obstacles to wider use of social technologies by knowledge workers within enterprises.

For instance, here are a few observations about how social intelligence products are being used today by enterprises:

a) Marketers and communicators are first adopters of social media and tend to ‘own’ social media policies, access to information and products (e.g. through the agencies) etc – other business groups such as customer service, R&D, HR are next in line.

b) Social products/tools tend to be specialized, access may be limited because of corporate silos, cost or both

c) The products require effort to setup, optimize, customize and personalize

d) Even if one has the access and the product has been configured, it is hard to find the time to login to the social intelligence product and navigate through it to observe what’s going on there and to make sense out of all that information

The reality is that social media listening and intelligence is a separate function, not yet a mainstream enterprise capability. Today’s enterprises realize that getting this real-time source of information to their knowledge workers is very important but they haven’t figured out a good solution, given all the challenges that we listed above.

There’s hope.

Imagine if technologies and process allowed a user within an enterprise to get access to social media intelligence without having to a) use a separate login b) leave their daily work activities c) open a separate window and navigate through a maze of pages in a third party application.

Opensocial, Activity Streams and Embedded Experiences make that happen.

MutualMind collaborated with IBM to create a solution where social media intelligence was integrated into enterprise products such as IBM Connections and Lotus Notes. The key goals of this work were:

1. Single sign-on: no need for user to separately login to third party social media product. The access permissions are established based on enterprise profile.
2. Push versus Pull: relevant and customized information is pushed to user’s workflow, whether its an activity stream item or email
3. Provided Embedded Experience such that the user can view the relevant, dynamic and interactive information within their application without having to go to a different application
4. This approach offers many benefits – users save time and effort, the information is pushed with the context to the right user and users can interact with that information right there.

Below is an example of sharing a post from MutualMind and sending it to a colleague via Lotus Notes, where it appears as an email message with stats about that post (e.g. the number of times that post was shared on Twitter), snapshot of user’s profile, and dynamic content related to the keyword which matched the post and additional meta-information such as the location. The embedded experience also allows user to take action on this post right there in the email body.

Similarly this content can also be shared via Activity Streams in IBM Connections where a social gadget provides the information and the embedded experience. The concept is powerful and changes the way information is consumed today by enterprise workforce.

We believe that this is the beginning of a new era of intelligent enterprise where information from outside the organization, such as customer feedback on a new product, is leveraged to enrich the business. These set of technologies makes it possible to blend the tacit knowledge and expertise within the enterprise with feedback and insights from the outside world.

In near future, social gadgets and enterprise activity streams will become commonplace and offer more flexibility and better user experience. Brand managers, product managers, customer service professionals, researchers and other specialized roles will be in a much better position to control what information do they get and use it effectively and efficiently.

Note: This post originally appeared at Social Business News on March 23, 2012

Easier Channel Management

We’ve simplified the way you can add social channels to your campaigns. You are no longer required to authenticate your Twitter accounts, Facebook pages or YouTube channels in order to add them to your campaign. You can now simply add any account without authentication simply by typing in the account name or copying and pasting the profile URL of the account.

Web Feed Tracking and Insights

We’ve also added the ability for you to add any RSS or Atom compatible web feed to be tracked for your campaigns. Simply paste the URL to the feed under “Brand Web Feeds” or “Competition Web Feeds”. We’ll start tracking the posts published via these feeds and provide you with social insights.

Enhanced Engagement Stats

You can view engagement stats for your web feeds and your YouTube channels on the insights dashboard now. Web feed stats include Facebook likes, Facebook shares and Twitter shares. YouTube stats include total views, comments and total times your channel’s videos were favorited.

Unified Channel Content with Post by Post Stats

One of the most exciting features we have added to this release is the ability to browse all the posts we’ve collected for your campaign’s social channels. All the posts are displayed as a unified content feed. Each post includes social network/feed specific engagement stats. You can access this data by going to the “Content Browser” and then clicking the “Channel Content” button to switch modes.

And Much More

We’ve also fixed some bugs and made some minor enhancements. We are constantly enhancing our software to serve you better and bring you the best user experience. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

LinkedIn Integration

We’re really excited to roll out full integration with LinkedIn this release. We now have a full-featured LinkedIn client (similar to our Facebook and Twitter clients) built-in to the app. You can now manage all your group discussion posts through MutualMind. This includes cross-posting to multiple groups, creating workflow tasks, responding with comments and more!

To start using LinkedIn, simply add your LinkedIn account by going to the admin area and clicking “LinkedIn Accounts”.

Then click “Add Brand LinkedIn Account” and follow the authorization flow until your account is added to the app.

You can now access the LinkedIn client from the “Streams” menu item in the menu bar.

You can compose your discussion posts by entering a title and an optional summary and then clicking on one or more groups to post to. You can also scheduled your posts to be published later.

You can easily interact with existing group discussions just like our other social streams.

And Much More

We’ve also fixed some bugs and made some minor enhancements. We are constantly enhancing our software to serve you better and bring you the best user experience. As always, we look forward to your feedback!

The slide deck below presents a comprehensive guide that provides guidance and best practices on setting up keywords for social listening and shows you how to do that in MutualMind. The tips and best practices included below will help save you a lot of time and effort and get you higher quality results so we strongly encourage going through them before you start with social media monitoring.

“Because of my complete confidence in the platform and the management team, I’m happy to help advance MutualMind’s on-going product leadership in the field of social media analytics and engagement”, stated Steve Perkins. “With new global partnerships and major brands coming on board every week, the management team, employees and I expect 2012 will be a break-out year for MutualMind.”

Steve Perkins brings a wealth of corporate expertise to his role as a member of the Technology Advisory Board at MutualMind. He has held a variety of management positions in the software industry over the past 38 years including being a founder of Sterling Commerce, where he served as President of the Communications Software Group until its sale to SBC in 2000. While at University Computing Company Steve helped lead the development of software products that ultimately became critical to the infrastructure of virtually all Fortune 500 companies.

More recently, at T. Boone Pickens’ prestigious BP Capital Ventures, Steve was responsible for evaluating the investment quality of non-traditional energy technologies where he was a minority investor in, and took active role with several of these companies. Steve obtained his BS in Mathematics at Eastern New Mexico University and MS in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.

The time is right for adding an advisor of Steve Perkin’s caliber to MutualMind’s leadership. We’re looking forward to Steve’s making a significant contribution to our company’s future. Welcome aboard, Steve!

MutualMind has moved its engineering, operations and sales functions within the ng Connect Gravity Center at Alcatel-Lucent’s facilities in Plano, TX, which also houses the AT&T Foundry Innovation Center. MutualMind has also joined the ng Connect Program as an Associate Member, which allows the company to begin to explore potential opportunities for engagement with the other 125 members of the Program.

Besides the extensive resources offered by this program, our team truly values the open and collaborative working environment that the ng Connect Gravity Center fosters.

The ng Connect Program, founded by Alcatel-Lucent in 2009, is responsible for driving innovation by bringing together technology entrepreneurs and thought leaders in an environment designed to overcome traditional business and technology barriers to success.

There are three primary elements to the ng Connect approach:

• Innovation Ecosystem: a community of organizations and individuals pioneering high-bandwidth infrastructure, devices, applications and content.
• Innovation Environment: empowers this community of collaboration with an environment of physical and virtual innovation spaces and leading edge tools and techniques.
• Concept Development: helps service providers create, evaluate and validate service concepts in a very agile way — delivering tangible results faster.

We have big plans for 2012 and being part of the ng Connect program is a promising kick off. Stay tuned for more news and announcements about our upcoming partners and clients.