Social Media Jungle: Don't Get Lost; Get Educated

Posted by Mei Lin Fung on December 15, 2007

5 comments | 2788 reads

Here's some sensible advice from G at Spatially Relevant telling the story of how a business was helped to take advantage of Face book.

" A coordinated effort to social media
By G
This truly begs the question of how do you effectively use social media for a given company or product? Here is an excerpt from a Forrester report by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff which I have been thinking about and collecting data on ...

http://spatiallyrelevant.org/2007/12/15/a-coordinated-effort-to-social-media/"

Not only that, the author cites Charlene Li of Forresters executive brief on Social Media which has some terrific charts that help you think more clearly about WHO is out there and WHAT are they doing and HOW you can exchange VALUE with them. The executive brief is publicly available - follow the link in G's blog.

Don't get frustrated about how to work with Social Media:

Get Educated about what people are doing that builds the new 21st century brand.

TV Ads and Bill boards are SO YESTERDAY!

It's really "Back to the future" with Social Media where the Internet is a way to reach people and genuine HUMAN value exchange is the highest prize in the global web.

Happy Holidays everyone !

Mei Lin

Mei Lin Fung

Mei Lin Fung, www.isoe.com blogs on ebCEM – evidence-based Customer Experience Management. The Service Leadership Transformation Program developed in an innovative public private partnership with Avaya and Oklahoma State University received the Phillip Crosby Golden Medallion in 27. Her curriculum has been implemented by Microsoft Telesales in China, and Johnson and Johnson in Asia. She designed the first US Department of Labor approved Contact Center Apprenticeship Program in Oklahoma. Blog: Learning to Earn Customer Trust by Mei Lin Fung

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5 comments »

Jon Gatrell

December 16, 2007

Thanks for the quote and comments....

Mei Lin - you may want to check out Chris' content @ Social Customer Manifesto . Added you to my reader - glad we crossed. good content.

Cheers!

Some other elephant in the room post which may be of interest:

Social Networking Bench
A Community's Place

Vandana Ahuja

December 17, 2007

The 5th P of marketing-Participation

Internet as the way to reach people and genuine human value exchange as you say is one of the greatest offerings of the collaborative web, which has probably given marketing it's 5th P after product, place, price and promotion.
5th P of marketing

Mei Lin Fung

December 17, 2007

Chris Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto and P for PARTICIPATION

Jon and Vandana

What great contributions, your voices are strong.

Chris Carfi has led the way for many of us -

....and Participation is the oxygen for Social Customers - our power is in our participation.

Jon - tell us more about Social Networking Bench and A Community's Place. Are you familiar with the work of John McKnight and "community asset inventory"?

I want to invite you to the discussion at Wikipedia for the entry on CRM - I'm participating under the name MLFungwiki

Let's put Participation front and center on the map for CRM and CEM in 2008!

Mei Lin Fung
Blog: Professionals Earn Customer Trust

Graham Hill

December 17, 2007

Who's Participating?

Mei Lin

I am not quite sure we are ready for the 5th P of Participation quite yet.

Although it is a great idea, most customers just want great products that do what they say on the tin, available through their channel of choice, at reasonable prices, exactly when they need them. They don't actually want to participate, certainly not in anything so banal as a relationship. They just want to consume the products and to enjoy the benefits of doing so.

I think we in business are not seeing the real elephant in the room: that customers are generally not interested in us, our companies, our products and our 'brands' enough to want to participate. Look at your trolley full of shopping next time you are at Safeway. Do you really want to participate with the manufacturers of the toilet paper, the washing powder, or the bottled water in your trolley? I thought not.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager

Mei Lin Fung

February 1, 2008

Watering Holes vs Water Coolers

Blogs Becoming Regular Reading for Business Travelers is the title of a recent article in the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/business/29subblog-web.html?_r=1&scp=1...

Graham makes a good point about customers not participating with individual companies (eg washing power, toilet paper) - yet the agglomeration of blogs for business travel is something that business travellers are interested in. This article in the New York Times which requires a subscription so I have extracted a couple paragraphs

" One of the newest sites useful to business travelers is BoardingArea.com, a portal created by Randy Petersen, the frequent-flier program expert and founder of the online forum FlyerTalk. BoardingArea is essentially a directory to blogs that address issues of interest to business travelers.

According to Forrester Research, in the second quarter of 2007, 21 percent of business travelers who use the Internet read blogs, not just ones about business travel, but also those involving sports, business, finance and other topics. “This indicates that organizing a portal for business travel blogs, especially with good content, means the site has potential,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, travel analyst for Forrester, a research firm. "

So in the Social Media Jungle we have new watering holes for gathering, different from the water coolers inside a single company.

Mei Lin Fung
Blog: Professionals Earn Customer Trust

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