Marketing plans can take many shapes. Depending on the company, targeted consumer, goals, and many other variables a plan takes on its own life and has its own set of actionable needs.
The beauty of social media has always been its flexability. You don’t have to burn down your old marketing plan to incorpoate social media successfully.
Things like relationship selling, media buying, and good person to person customer service can all be boosted and made more effective by the use of social media. They could also be the most effective outposts you have for reaching engaged customers to your new media points of focus.
Contests/giveaways, meet n’ greets, direct mail. All of these things can be helped and help a social media campaign.
We trust the expertise of business owners and entrapanuers. Going in and telling you to throw out everything you have been doing is counter productive and foolish. We love all the chances we have had to show businesses new ways to communicate with their customers and build their brand. New ways will be made and the old ways can be enhanced.
Chris and I have been working hard to find creative ways to bring our message of genuine communication and brand building using emerging technology to businesses in the area.
We look forward to releasing a new website that will be a good resource for social media gurus and casual technology users alike. Moving ahead our focus will be on content that is more engaging, encouraging people to explore and understand the potential social media has.
Through growth and partnership I+A is excited to see its message and impact expanding in the Kansas City area.
Talking to clients and fellow social media enthusiasts has forced us to think harder about the nature of communication. What goes into encouraging discourse amongst people with very different relationships? From business <-> customer to collegaue <-> colleague. My brain wandered to internet communication at its base and how it all started for me.
What were some of your first experiences communicating over a computer?
My story starts a lot later than some being in my mid twenties. There was a Hewlett Packard 386 sitting on my family’s kitchen table. The 2400 baud modem connected to the Prodigy online service. It was a frustrating experience, a lot of dialing and busy signals. When it worked it really drew me in. There were message boards where I learned a lot about music. It is interesting to think about now because in the early days people were just figuring it all out before everyone was fully concious of the reletive anonyminity things like chat rooms and messages boards gave you. Everything was very friendly. I would play checkers against people one winter during snow days and thought that was the most amazing thing.
One of my good friends who would grow up to start JCHost (the fantastic web host of Ideas and Angles) ran a small BBS that you dialed into through telnet. Call back verifiers, door games, and everything. The whole process was fascinating to me but not everyone shared the feeling. I got on the phone and called my friend asking him if he wanted to chat online, he laughed at me for calling him to chat. Some of those early experiences were the start of a life spent online.
What is your story? Any Gopher or Telnet stories? How did it all start for you?
A lot of people involved in social media happenings around Kansas City will recognize the name Justin Goldsborough. Justin is the social media communications manager at Sprint. We took some time to talk to Justin about his work in the social media space.
How did you come about getting interested in social media?
I’ve always been interested in technology and the role it plays in communications. My first communications jobs were working on corporate portals, Web 1.0-style. In my previous role at Applebee’s, I got to experiment with employee blogging and other two-way communications tools. We were opening the first ever Applebee’s in Shanghai and the project manager brought a handheld camera over to film the restaurant as it was being built. Then he brought the handheld back and we uploaded the video internally and gave employees a chance to comment. Employees submitted a ton of comments and e-mails about the video and a light bulb sort of went off in my head — this is how people want to communicate.
That was only about 18 months ago. A few months later I interviewed at Sprint and they brought me in to see Shel Holtz (@Shel), a social media SME who helps show companies how Web 2.0 can revolutionize their communications. I won’t go into the whole presentation, but everything he said just made sense to me. More specifically, I remember his story about a bad experience he had with an airport parking company – Park ‘N Fly. He was so annoyed he went straight home and posted a blog entry bashing the lack of service he’d received. A day later, one of the company’s employees posted to his blog apologizing and asking is she could give him some free parking. Shel explained how that totally changed the story he told about Park ‘N Fly. I remember the stat he gave…customers are 10 times more likely to stay with a brand that messes up but then engages them and apologizes.
The other point I remember Shel making was that customers don’t trust “traditional institutions” like corporations, government, etc. anymore. Instead, they trust “someone like me.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used that example when explaining to people the power of word of mouth.
Have you been asked by Sprint expressly to do this extended customer outreach?
I haven’t been asked to do the customer outreach I’m doing on Twitter, but my efforts have been supported. Social media and its benefits are on our PR team’s radar screen and my boss encourages any internal or external efforts that promote open communications.
It’s no secret that Sprint has had our share of customer service problems. One of the services our Customer Experience team came up with to help employees impact on service issues is a program called “Employees Helping Customers (EHC).” Basically, if you and I meet, you find out I work for Sprint and you have a complaint – this happens to our employees all the time, as you can probably imagine – now I can do something about it. Any of our employees can get the details of a customer’s issue and open an EHC ticket. The EHC team is amazing to work with and they often respond to issues within 24 hours. Whether it was intended or not, in EHC, Sprint has created a safe outlet for employees to engage customers online and “join the conversation.” If I don’t know how to solve your problem, at least I can refer you to EHC.
In addition to EHC, we have several PR folks who are on Twitter talking to customers. I signed on just a few months ago to post alerts about our devices and services. But a few weeks later, I read about Frank Eliason at Comcast (or Twitter folks may know him as @comcastcares). Not sure if your readers have heard the story, but basically Frank and a team of Comcast reps started engaging customers on Twitter a few months back. Comcast is another company that has struggled with customer service issues in the past.
The story I heard – from Shel Holtz, no less — was a guy’s cable went out during the Super Bowl and he tweeted complaining about how he was going to miss the rest of the game. Within minutes, Frank responded to him and asked how he could help. As someone who, like most of our 56,000 employees, is wondering how I can make an impact on our brand reputation, this story really struck a chord. And since I found Summize.com, I’ve been searching “sprint” and responding to anyone who complains about our customer service. Btw, if you ever have an issue with Sprint, don’t hesitate to contact me on Twitter — @JGoldsborough.
Have you gotten any feedback from your efforts? If so what was it?
The feedback I’ve received so far has been 99 percent positive. People are almost always thankful for the inquiry, even if they don’t want or need my help. One customer I ran across about a month ago – Darryl Ohrt, @darrylohrt — had used Sprint broadband cards for his business on a brief trip to Canada. When he got his bill, the international roaming charges showed he owed more than $1,000. He tweeted about the incident, I asked if I could help and in a day or so, his bill was resolved to his satisfaction. I remember this example because when Darryl e-mailed me his issue he explained that he was preparing a blistering blog post ripping Sprint, but that if I could help he would change the tune of the post. Talk about a marketing opportunity. You can’t flip on your DVR and fast forward through a blog post. Darryl posted a blog entry praising Sprint for listening on Twitter and it was picked up by another blog. That’s how these things travel…word of mouth. I can’t say it enough times. Now if only I could quantify how much money turning Darryl’s story from a negative one to a positive one meant for Sprint.
Another notable type of feedback I’ve seen is community endorsement. Think about the last time you needed work done on your house. Didn’t you ask your friends and family members for recommendations on whom to use? On Twitter, it’s the exact same idea. I’m starting to see people post about a Sprint service problem and one of their followers who I or a colleague has helped in the past will recommend the person contact us for help solving the issue. That type of credibility in an online community is huge; it’s a whole bunch of “someone like me’s” basically endorsing your subject matter expertise. Pretty hard to put a price tag on that type of reputation building.
What can companies gain by using emerging technologies?
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