The Shifting Sands Of Social Media
Social Media? Don’t we just love new things – a welter of conflicting ideas, lots of sales pitches, lots of failed trials. But hey, that’s how we learn.
We will be setting out our stall on social media very shortly, and one thing is for sure: this strategy will evolve as the sands of social media shift.
Three things are also very clear
- Social media should be part of a genuine unified communications offering so that agents can be easily switched between social media and other queues as workloads, service levels and agents skills allow/ dictate.
- Be prepared to constantly revisit your strategy in response to the fairly bewildering rate at which social media, and how it is used, evolves.
- Be prepared for an avalanche of new social media analytics tools.
If you think that effective analytics is going to be easy, take a look at this discussion at Starbucks’ facebook site, and consider the following.
Not many entries, but just consider the different ways in which Starbucks might deal with this data. Obvious? We don’t think so. In the first place, you can bet your bottom dollar they will have read it. But when is the right time to respond? Now, or wait for a few more posts first? And where to respond – in this topic, or via other means? Should particular weightings be attached to any particular post, or should they be treated equally?
This kind of topic needs not just a well-trained agent but some top marketing resource in the company to make sure that the response is right and doesn’t spark a viral horror among dedicated ‘coffee only’ Starbucks followers.
Designers of analytic packages have a real challenge on their hands. The winners will be those that allow customers the widest choice in how data can be analysed and interpreted.
We love you, Starbucks, and will watch with interest how you to respond to this.
