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Brand Advocate After 60 Minutes Inside Zappos.com

Posted by Ellen Enrico on November 21, 2011

A couple of months ago, I published Advocacy is the New Loyalty; describing the power of advocacy as hyper-focused on the customer voice. I occasionally shop at Zappos.com, but last Friday, I became an advocate of the online brand after witnessing the people and unique culture behind the company.

The Story

I had a couple of hours to kill between the end of the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas and my flight back to Seattle. My colleague encouraged me to spend that time taking an insights tour of Zappos.com headquarters located just 11 miles from the Las Vegas strip. I tried calling (and tweeting) @Zappos to make an appointment but did not successfully reach a live person. I decided I would jump in a cab anyway and see if I could just pop in.

Communications Privacy and Information Security in Social Media

Posted by Molly Ward on January 11, 2011

Communications privacy and information security, like other social issues, have been radically impacted by the advent of the Internet and social media. New technologies for sharing and interacting, conversation and connection, have destabilized traditional relationships of producer/consumer, private/public. Visible sits right in the middle of these issues for a whole range of clients. It’s critical to us that you understand that Visible is aware of the challenges presented by this relatively new communication paradigm. We take the legal and ethical standards of our industry—both codified and implicit—very seriously, respecting the privacy of our clients and their customers and keeping their data secure.

Thankfully, we’re not the only company wrestling with these issues, and we’re careful to stay abreast of the insightful thought-leadership coming from the likes of EFF, WOMMA, Groklaw, and. . . Martin Kjoster.

Social Servicing: Supporting the Long-Term Health of Your Brand

Posted by Mark Hanley on November 19, 2010

Many companies are beginning to realize they need to take a more strategic view toward the intelligence they gather from social communities, realizing that this insight not only can transform their approach to customer service, but also support brand health over the long term. As a result, “Social Servicing” – understanding and addressing the needs of customers online and determining how to measure those efforts to make informed decisions as to when and how to invest in additional resources and scale on a global basis – is getting more focus.

Many global brands seeking to support and develop the long-term health of their brand are beginning Social Servicing programs as one of their leading forays into social activation. For most, customer servicing is one of the first business groups within the enterprise to begin social activation. Customer servicing programs can leverage social servicing into the business goals already in place. Most often the most successful programs are created from teams of existing service professionals already well versed at handling customer relations and adding the social channels to the more traditional channels already being serviced layering in social as part of their servicing solution. As businesses establish their online presence through easily recognizable and increasingly active Twitter handles, forum and social channel presences Social Servicing becomes normalized and the opportunity for Social Servicing to expand into new channels and to go beyond one to one customer interaction grows. Over time, this practice becomes increasingly important to the business and its reputation, organizations likely will need to increase the number of staff devoted purely to this function, especially across multiple markets. Customer service professionals are also going to want to have better ways to analyze the influence of each author to understand the bigger picture of their efforts and establish uniform criteria for issue resolution and escalation. To that end integration and usage of API’s is becoming a key component.