All posts tagged brand

Nordstrom’s Mint Save

Posted by Omri Duek on March 4, 2013

[disclaimer: the post below contains rampant personal advocacy for Nordstrom and Mint.com, which may not be – but hopefully is – shared by my employer]

As social media analysts, we sometimes struggle to balance our consumer relationships with brands online – on the one hand, we have clients and prospects we would not care to disparage; yet on the other hand, as consumers (and occasionally influential social media participants), we feel obligated to post about our experiences like many others.

Late last year, Nordstrom decided to terminate its relationship with Mint.com – my favorite personal finance tool – causing a fair uproar in social media. As you can see from my posts shortly following the change, I was not a happy camper…

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.

SOCAP International Conference Stresses Using Social Media for Customer Acquisition and Loyalty

Posted by Mark Asay on November 1, 2010

We all know consumer spending is down, Jack Neff wrote in Ad Age, “Packaged goods are supposed to be recession- resistant staples people can’t do without. Yet things have been different in this recession. People have proven they can do without, or at least spend less.” (http://adage.com/article?article_id=146675)

In this economy, it is critical for brands to retain every one of their customers and use them to influence competitors’ customers to switch brands. It is in the social media space with its existing channels that brands can have an impact of achieving customer retention and new customer acquisition goals, as well as integrate Social Intelligence into Marketing and Sales strategies to achieve this broad sweeping goal across the enterprise. This was the overall theme of the SOCAP (Global Community of Relationship Experts) International Conference this year; how you can integrate your marketing efforts and social media monitoring software tools to gather new customers and build loyalty campaigns and then share best practices across organizations: PR, Customer Service. And integration is not simply sharing of software; it is literally customer service taking on traditional marketing roles, PR taking on traditional sales efforts, albeit through different channels. And to this point, marketing recognizing the strength in the knowledge base of existing organizations, especially at a time when companies are running lean across the board, and utilizing these groups.

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