The New Age of Digital Customer Service. Does it Scale? - Golf Ecommerce Business Tales from ‘98

Posted by: Tim Reha | Wednesday, November 18, 2009 | 0 Comments |

Are you tired of the hype out there covering obviously un-scalable first wave social media as customer service systems built using Twitter?

From my perspective, social media often becomes a customer service channel weather a company likes it or not. It is simply too easy to fire off a bitch session over Twitter at AT&T because their network is over sold and drops calls. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that your “followers” will feel your pain and can reply with their same “lack of” customer service opinions. Thus, corporations need to look at streamlined work flows, training and technology that will intelligently distribute inbound conversations and route them to the correct domain expert within the organization.

I find that the “social media” customer service tools are lacking compared to enterprise level multimedia contact centers on the market. I have to give “Frank” and his team who created “Comcast Cares” presence on Twitter http://twitter.com/comcastcares @comcastcares credit because they are trying to do a good job with first-gen tools. The…

Filed under: Ecommerce • ShopIgniter • Social Media • Enterprise Social Media Tools • Social Ecommerce • Social Media Intergration • Social Media Strategy Reviews • Social Media Tools • Social Networks • Twitter

2009 Seattle Wine Awards - Integrated Digital Marketing Case Study

Posted by: Tim Reha | Tuesday, November 10, 2009 | 0 Comments |

Dear Palm Springs Ad Federation Members,

Thank you for hosting me as your guest for the Social Media event. I wish we had more time to spend together at the event and really enjoyed the experience. Below are a few slides from my 2009 Seattle Wine Awards digital marketing and social media case study for your review. I will annotate the slides with a podcast over the weekend and will post the new information here.

Many folks asked me about how to setup streamlined work flows and the internet dashboards. I am available to help you setup your digital marketing and social media technology and services.  Please feel free to contact me via email at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

The key to Twitter is understanding how to leverage analytics to understand your audience, their conversations and sentiment. There are a number of data points that are measurable on Twitter. I will dedicate time to cover each of the below areas in different blog posts and add new measurable metrics in the future.

-Followers
-Unfollowers
-Updates
-Page Views
-Inbound Links
-Bounce Rate
-GeoTargeting
-Click Tracking
-Re-Tweet Tracking
-Search Traffic
-Trend Analysis
-Name / Brand Mentions

Followers

There are a number of metrics and strategies to leverage for Twitter followers. Here is a short list of metrics.

-Amount of Followers
-Quality of Follower Targeting (Are they really in your target audience)
-Follower Uptake Rate Graph
-Follower Drop Off Rate Graph

A good strategy for an event like the Seattle Wine Awards is to add a lot of new followers because these folks will often look at their new followers and take a look at their profiles. I created a custom branded Twitter background with Ticket Sales information and added a link to the Twitter Profile…

Filed under: Social Media • Social Media Analytics • Social Media Strategy Reviews • Social Media Tools • Social Networks • Twitter

Twitter Search is Still Broken - Even with New Front Page Design!

Posted by: Tim Reha | Wednesday, July 22, 2009 | 0 Comments |

UPDATE: July 2 29, 2009

Today Twitter launched a new home page with a big focus on Search. This move firms up their strategy to become a real-time search engine and put’s them even more in the acquisition cross hairs of Google and Microsoft. Yahoo is out of the game with their Microsoft Bing deal, also announced today.

The main issue I have found is that Twittter Search is still Broken!

Here are sample searches for a number of events that we had our guests tag with a unique identifier “#eventname”, so members could search for Tweets from the event at a later date. As you will see there are a ton of missing results. A lot of people put effort into making posts at the below events and they all should write to Twitter and tell them to fix this mess.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wtia - Washington Technology Social Media Event. Zero results!

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23seawineawards - Seattle Wine Awards. I recorded and saved 450+ from this event, see below. Twitter now lists just two!

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23iabcseattle…

Filed under: Social Media • Social Media Strategy Reviews • Social Networks • Twitter • Real Time Events

Audi’s Slick Intergration of Social Media into their Website

Posted by: Tim Reha | Tuesday, July 14, 2009 | 0 Comments |

The Audi USA website has a slick social media integration using flash.

http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en.html

They set the stage using the notion of barrels representing diesel fuel, noting that they have clean diesel oil burning engine technology. After the introduction movie plays, the screen switches into a slick flash interface with barrels dropping. Each barrel is a different color representing connectivity to Twitter, Flickr, News (Blogs RSS), and YouTube. When you click one of the colored barrels a post from that web service is displayed in the window.

MY NOTES:  My guess is that they have a filtering system on the backend to manage each post that they allow to be featured on the website. Otherwise, there would be attempts for users to game the system with potentially damaging content.

MOBILE TEST = FAIL  I tested the site on my iPhone to see what the mobile experience was like. Here is where Audi fails. Since the site is built on Flash technology and the iPhone does not use flash, the site shows up as blank! 

SOLUTION: A solution is to use a script…

Filed under: iPhone • Social Media • Social Media Intergration • Social Media Strategy Reviews