Entering into the world of Social Media can be a bit like opening Pandora’s box – there’s a lot of great things that can happen, but you may also encounter some negative feedback.

Knowing how to deal with this effectively can define your reputation throughout the online world, and if handled badly, could cross over into some real world negative press. Mashable has posted a great summary that you should keep to hand in the event of any negative feedback. The key thing to remember when considering your plan of action with social media is that, it isn’t just your friends, followers or customers who will read or find out how you behave online; it’s everyone. Social Media is a publishing platform for conversation, and everyone can overhear it. Keep this in mind when defining and crafting your Customer Experience for the social media space.

How can you augment your mood?

How often do you manually dial up or down different emotions? When was the last time you looked at emotions as something tangible and manageable rather than an out of control force of nature? Deric Bownd’s stumbled upon the Moodagent iPhone app, where you can adjust mood dials to find and play music to how you’re feeling, or how you’d like to feel. Check out the video below.

Mood Agent Demo

Has your customer experience ever been elevated by music? Do you plan your customer experience bearing in mind other sensory experiences rather than just what your customers see? How do the sounds, smell and touch of the service or goods affect how your customers perceive your Customer Experience.

In the age of Social Media, there is some confusion over which platforms, tools and services can be utilised for business, and what is just best left alone.

There has been a mix of good and bad reviews around using Twitter as a business tool. Is it the right place for a brand to join in the ‘conversation’? Or is it just a bunch of people talking about what they had for lunch? Twitter has some great successes (such as Best Buy’s Twelpforce) and some failures (see Habitat UK).

Here is a great insight into how a large consumer facing organization has planned, built and implemeted a Social Media program.

This is a essential viewing for those looking for case studies on how to start thinking about how to implement your customer experience in launching your social media program. Take note of the key point that although listening to consumers is great, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.

Watch the case study video here

Thanks to Andy Sernovitz for the link.

You may like to think that you chose the juicy, succulent surf ‘n’ turf because that’s what you felt like having…but can you honestly say it was your choice? Did it look the most attractive meal, or the most attractive selection on the menu? The Guardian has a great write up of the strategy behind the plotting of a menu, how restaurants push consumers to the more expensive items, and hide the dogs (unpopular and unprofitable meals) in “menu siberia”.

How do you direct your customers to your higher priced goods or services? Do you offer an explicit consumer journey, or subversive like restaurant menu’s?

Read the original Guardian post here

Ever wondered what all these gurus, brands and organisations are doing on Twitter? Everyone has an end goal for using Twitter as a marketing tool, but there are so many different strategies. Which is the most effective, and which best suits your organisation?

Jason Falls, over at Social Media Today, has created a great summary of the different styles of marketing on Twitter, along with examples of accounts and the pros and cons of the various strategies. The four styles vary from what most people consider true conversation between consumers and brands to just spamming followers with a message. Jason lists the four styles as:

The UK institute of Customer Service has just released its bi-annual review of how Customer Service in Britain in faring. For this part of this report, they asked respondents their views on Call Centres. You can read the full blog post here, where they have attempted to qualify the top 3 annoyances (presented below).

Unsurprisingly the current trend of outsourcing to Asia has led to the customers complaining about Dealing with staff outside the UK (17.5%). Despite organisations sending their staff on extensive language and cultural training, do UK consumers still find the difference too much to bear? Or is that they perceive the call centre to be based too far away to understand their problems. Or the perception that an off-shore call centre presents – a cost-cutting strategy by an organisation where profit margins are prioritised above the Customer Experience?

Jon Picoult can.

The Founder of Watermark Consulting compared the stock performance of companies with Forrestors Customer Experience Index to demonstrate how Customer Experience investors outperform those who failed to invest. Meanwhile, Bruce Temkin commented that his previous research work, entitled Customer Experience Boosts Revenue, echoed Picoult’s post – research which examined the difference in loyalty following company financial performances.

Bruce Temkin comments on a report over at Customer Experience Matters about the concept of Cognitive Fluency, an encapsulated by the idea that : “it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard”.

Through numerous psychological studies, it has been found that clear, legible type leads to increased honesty and openness, whilst questions presented in harder to read text leads to increased time processing the answers. Bruce covers the rest of the findings, including some experiences with Forrester Reviews.

CNN have the full list of the 2010 Top 100 Best Companies to work for. The message here is Happy people give you Happy Customers.

When building a great Customer Experience, focus first on building a great employee experience. From our first book Building Great Customer Experience, we developed the seven Philosophies for building a great Customer Experience.

Philosophy four is:

Great Customer Experiences are enabled by inspirational leadership, an empowering culture and empathetic people who are happy and fulfilled.

It is no surprise to see Google at number four, a relatively young company compared to others on the list, who have become famous for their free meals, free laundry and most of all global domination of the search engine market.