Why influencers matter for customer retention

Recently,while monitoring Twitter I discovered a thread from a person working at a large customer; he was asking questions about alternative solutions to one of our products.

I reached out to the account team and informed them of this conversation; they jumped all over it and quickly found out this person was “just” a systems admin. A comment I got back was “We have executive sponsorship, so we are good.”

This comment made me realize there is a fundamental mindset shift that needs to occur. The shift is to understand and embrace the role of “The New Influencer” and to realize that a single person can shape the perception of your brand at a moment’s notice.

These “systems administrators” are likely some of the most connected in the organization, understand the power of a tribe and how to mobilize it. They will organize grass roots support and build a persuasive argument for why things need to change.

If you are of the mindset that your product is secure because you have top down support, I encourage you to monitor the conversations taking place about your products and services. Here is a great post on a variety of tools that will give you an idea of how many are talking, what are they about and what is the tone of the dialog.

There will be a high price to pay for ignoring these conversations and thinking everything is ok because you have a small group of supporters. The price could be that you find yourself being replaced by another solution.

Address negative comments head on.You may make a new friend.

The most difficult part of my day is determining when to engage with those making negative comments.

Some are certainly not worth touching either because of the sheer tone of the comment,context in which it was made or if it is a conversation I don’t want to lend any credo to .

On Twitter when I see a negative comment I always look at the person’s profile to get an idea of how valid the claims are based on their role and experience. When the comment is a @reply I follow the conversation to understand the context and who else is involved.

Recently, several comments made by an individual that were very hasty and did not reflect well against our products or company. I was torn on how to respond. If this person could make these statements then what kind of response would he have if I jumped in and replied.

Well, I replied and I was glad I did. I simply asked this person, why do you feel this way?

He replied with his situation, surprisingly in a very friendly manner. I was able to share some insights that addressed the root of his frustration and he quickly changed his tune and was much more upbeat. Turns outs that all he wanted was to be heard.

The lesson I have learned from several of these interactions is to not be fearful of the repercussions of engaging, but to be fearful of what may happen if you don’t. These comments, tweets and blog post stay in search forever so make sure when a customer finds these they also see your comment next to it.

How executive sponsorship accelerated adoption of social media

“Executive sponsorship” always makes its way on the infamous list of “critical success factors” for almost any project. While everyone always agrees it is essential, getting the sponsorship is no trivial task. Especially for something relatively new.

I recently experienced the power of “executive sponsorship” when it came to integrating social media into the way we do business. Our executive’s recently began encouraging employees to participate in social networks on behalf of the company, with some guidelines of course. This created a surge in activity that I can only describe as a tidal wave of pent up demand to share.

Yammer exploded from the few of us who were already twittering, to a vibrant conversation of people who would never talk to one another on a daily basis. Internal blogs are popping up left and right, and the number of new Vignette employees on twitter has almost doubled.

I ran a little experiment to gauge our employee’s willingness to use these tools and see what kind of traffic can be generated thru these channels.

Via Yammer and my internal blog I asked if people will either re-tweet the original @vignettecorp tweet, update their status on Linkedin to say “is seeking participants for a survey on the usage of social media http://ow.ly/dEJ"” or post to Facebook to promote a survey we are doing on social media trends.

Using Hootsuite, we were able to track clicks and in less than two hours we had over 200 visits to the survey coming from social networks. I am waiting for the survey completion rate to get an idea of how many visits actually completed survey.

This tells me a few things. Internally it shows people are getting information from Yammer & blogs and are willing to act on behalf of the company. I also now have some data to demonstrate the impact social networks can have for driving traffic and building awareness. This will help when I present to CFO.

So what was the tipping point? I narrowed it to a series of events that were the clam before the storm, so to speak.

1. We defined social media guidelines and got approved via legal. (thanks to @jwacthel @gerardodada)
2. A role was created within the company to evangelize using social media internally and externally. (that would be me)
3. Our SVP, Products & Marketing stood up at our annual sales kickoff and announced that we will be shifting our marketing efforts and investing more online.

These events activated the ground swell of employees who are already using social networking tools and encouraged those who were not to begin experimenting.

Question: Are you using twitter for customer support?

We are discussing the role twitter can play for customer service/support.

Our support team is wondering how you balance driving participation to a developer community with giving people quick answers.

Have you started using twitter for support? If so what is working and what have been some of the lessons learned?

“Who is "I" can you dump the logo?

As I move from using social media for personal reasons to applying it to Vignette,I plan on sharing lessons I learn along the way. This first lesson learned was learned thanks to @Jimpeake.

One of my first actions was to take over the company twitter account which was initially set up to connect people at Vignette Village. After Village the account was rendered to re posting press releases and links to articles on Vignette.com. We had about 45 followers, 30 updates and 2 replies. This was hardly a tool that encouraged two way communications. My goal was to change that, so I began tweeting.

After taking over the account, I changed the name from @Vign to @Vignettecorp to be more consistent with other twitter accounts we will launch as well as new tools, like FriendFeed. Here is where the lesson was learned.

I posted a tweet that said,

“I created a FriendFeed to aggregate industry content as well as our social networking activity. Feel free to subscribe. http://ow.ly/4v0”,

Jim replied “@vignettecorp Who is "I" can you dump the logo? Follow @scottmonty of Ford to see how it is done. :-)”

My initial response back to Jim was to introduce myself @dirkmshaw the “I” behind the logo and thank him for sharing his perspective. As with most people I have encountered on twitter he was friendly in his response and offered to share any insights he had.

This exchange made me take a step back and think about a couple of things. First, focus on what types of things will be posted from this account and what tone will be used. The second was to come up with some ways to humanize a corporate account where people are seemingly interacting with a logo.

My actions from this were:

Focusing tweets: @vignettecorp will retweet and post links relevant to our audience, answer questions about our software and connect with others in the industry. The tone will always be we and not I.

Humanizing the logo: Each person followed gets direct message introducing myself as the human behind the account. This seems to be going well as I get a response from almost every person, and typically a follow on my personal twitter account.

I would love to hear any feedback or lessons you have learned in managing a corporate twitter account.

Tweet it forward

Turn on the news, go to a cocktail party or look at your twitter stream and the chatter is likely about people losing their jobs. Re-tweeting and posting to Facebook are ways you can help others get a job in tough times.

My twitter updates go to Facebook,(whether people like it or not), a person I chat with only via Facebook commented about how many of my updates are retweet’s of people looking for people, or people looking for work. My response was, it is one way I can aid others seeking jobs in this current market, and shared with him how many people are out there doing the same thing. He was totally shocked and compelled at the same time.

Jeremiah Owyang has been doing research on how people are finding jobs in a recession, a visitor to his site suggested that “Twitter in Europe or Asia this is the primary method of job seeking –unlike the highly wired online job market in US”. Although, Jeremiah states that he did not ask the location of the question to verify, it is quite amazing (not surprising) to see twitter show up in a list of ways people are finding jobs. This shows the power of the network.

What this also shows is how easy it is for you to chip in and help. If you see a job posting or a person who is recommended by a friend, simply forwarding it along to people in you network can change someones day.