Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 2: Strategy

Once you have decided that you wish to engage a company in a dialogue via social media, the first thing to do is to think a little about your strategy. If you do this you will dramatically increase your chances of being succesful.

Formulate your Argument

You must have a clear concise reason for engaging the company in question. You must be able to communicate this in a very short concise way and as a few lines or bullet points. You must do this to succesfully engage your audience and the company alike. Whenever you discuss your arguments try and do it as shortly as possible.You will be more succesful when you activate your audience by describing how it impacts them personally so try and emphasise the impact on other customers in particular.

Make clear, short requests to what you expect the company to do. It is harder for the organisation to avoid short concise requests. By doing this you will be able to stop the dialogue becoming pages of boring marketing spin that your audience is not interested in.

Make sure that your arguments and requests are clearly summarised in all social medias you engage in.

Plan your use of social media

So as to be better able to plan this you need to do and think about two main things.

1. Search for all social media used by the company in question and decide how to use it for your own means.
2. Decide on which social media you will create for yourself and for which purposes you will use that.

Advantages to utilising the company's own Social Media

1. You can hold the conversation in a public forum in front of the company's own audience.
2. You can piggyback on the company's own popularity to bring traffic to your own site where you can tell your own story. (See post).
3. You can apply greater pressure to the company to act (note only when you have a valid argument) (See Rules of Engagement)
4. You can embarass the company publically in front of their own audience if they do not act in a professional and considerate way. (See my own conclusions for If Vahinkovakuutus)
5. You can disrupt the company's own marketing messaging through utilisation an interference strategy.

Advantatages in utilising your own Social Media

1. You can tell the story entirely in your own way
2. You can have full control of all content being produced
3. You can utilise your own marketing and promotion channels to generate further interest
4. You can provide a permanent record of the dialogue and the story. This can either be something the company is proud of or is a thorn in their side.

Based upon the above criteria for using either your own or your company's social media you can make a decision how best to utilise each channel. I will post my own thoughts about how to best utilise the main channels and the advantages and disadvantaged of each in subsequent posts.

Main Strategic Tools

For the most part you will find that companies will have a presence on these tools.

Facebook group or page
Twitter
Google + (new but will become important)
LinkedIn Company Profile
YouTube Channel
Blogs.

Company's will probably be present in other channels but for the most part 95% of their audience should be present on at least one of these medias. As such i would recommend focussing on these. This is as the return on your time spent on other channels probably means it is not worth you focussing your efforts on those. Generally if a company is present in these channels then you should strongly consider making your own presence felt there.

If they are not there maybe you should still be, especially for Google +. In this way then you need to set up your own corresponding channels. In later posts i will describe how these corresponding profiles on the same channel should interact with each other and how to utiise each to its best advantage.

Should you make your presence felt in all the company's Social Media in the beginning.

Choose one channel to hold the conversation in. Facebook is good as almost everyone has a profile and you are able to maintain the dialogue in a thread and link to it. In the beginning of the dialogue you do not need to be present in the other channels.

There may be an advantage in moving into these channels later as you need to increase pressure on the company.

However by being present in these channels immediately, you may have an advantage as you can apply maximum pressure to the company immediately. By doing this though you also increase the likelihood that the company will feel like they are being attacked.

In my opinion you are most likely to get your positive response in the first few replies. After this the probability of succes will drastically drop. As such you may consider expansion of your utilisation of Social Media later if you do not get replies that you are satisfied with.

You need to Raise Attention as Quickly as Possible

One thing is clear. To increase your chance of success, you need to get as many people involved and active in regard your story as quicky as possible. This of course is the main driving factor in deciding how to utilise the social media and other traditional marketing channels in question. This is also a major reason for planning your actions first!!! The relative strengths and weaknesses of each channel will be discussed in upcoming posts.

You will need to ensure that you yourself produce good content and attract a wider audience

If you want to attract large numbers of visitors and support then you need to expand the scope of the story. People are generally not all that interested in a sustained bad cusotmer service story. You need generate content that will be of interest to people outside of the company's existing stakeholders. If you can expand outside of this target group with large enough numbers then you can apply significantly more pressure to the company.

To be succesful in this you need to be creative and think outside of the box. For my own story i turned this experience into a social media experiment. In this way i was able to attract an audience based upon the company's own stakeholders and an audience interested in Social CRM, PR, Customer Service, Marketing and Social Media. In this experiment this effectively doubled the level of traffic i experienced to my blog for example.

Ensure the longevity of your story

As mentioned above if you add content to your story via media such as blogs you ensure that not only does the story survive but that it is also relevant for others. As such the fact that your story will continue to attract traffic will apply more pressure to the company in question. They are less likely to act unprofessionally if they know that their story will survive and be found and read long after the dialogue is over.

Where do you want to steer traffic?

This is a tricky issue. You obviously want your audience to be active and to participate and be visible to the company you are trying to have a dialogue with but you also want to be able to tell your own side of the story and activate your audience. As such.....

Do not attempt to drive all of your new traffic straight to the company's own social media.

This may seem contrary to your goals but remember, for audiences reached through channels other than the company in questions own social media, they have not heard your side of the story you have not been able to influence them so that thay may feel like they want to act. For example it is very difficult to get someone to act based upon 160 characters in Twitter. They need more information to act upon.

As such I recommend steering these new audience to a location where you can outline your own side of the story and a media that you can control. In this experiment i used a blog. Once they have read the story then they are more likely to be activated in the discussion. In this way you can then steer them to the company's own social media where ideally you would like them to make their presence known to the company.

Analyse your own Performance

Use tools that will help you get statistical data about traffic volumes, referring sites/urls and locations, shares, likes and retweets that will help you meausure the success of your own campaign and let you know how successful you are at generating interest. Blogger for example offers these as default functionality for all blogs. In this way you will also be able to measure how much interest you are able to generate from the company's own social media locations. All of my upcoming channel posts will give information about how to analyse these channels also.

Interlink your own blog to the company's social media at every opportunity.

Whenever you have an opportuntiy, use your blog to drive people to the company's social media and conversely ensure that your social media is at the top of the company's social media's feed. In this way you can ensure a good flow of traffic between the two and the probability of activating visitors increases. This will also undoubtedly add more pressure on the company to act positively to your requests.

Focus on Improving Numbers Visible to the Company

Blog stats are only of value to you in terms of improving your marketing efforts and channel performance!! That is unless you make them visible to the company. Numbers that may affect and influence the company's behaviour and response to you are for example, number of twitter followers you have, number of comments, likes, mentions on their own/your social media. Number of members of your facebook group. Traffic generated to their own website through your blog. These are things the company should be looking at through their own analytics and these are the things you should be attempting to influence. Bare this in mind when measuring your own performance. The company will measure the risk to them through data visible to them.


What if a company decides not to engage you?

This is a serious conern. In my own experiment If vahinkovakuutus broke contact for a period of several days. I think they believed that i would just disappear. As a strategy to force them to re-engage i expanded my use of their own social media so as to start to interfere directly with all of their messaging.

In practical terms i commented and added my own material to all of their social media posts. I kept to the rules of engagement however and did not write any negative comments but merely asked the audience had they heard bout my story and linked to the blog.

I also blogged about it and put it out on Twitter. After two days If vahinkovakuutus, Finland re-engaged me.

What if a company decides to block you from their social media?

As above if a company blocks you it will look bad upon them as long as you have followed the rules of engagement. The simple strategy is to create another profile and continue to post. Also write about it and post that information via your own social media. This negative publicity will hopefully result in the company returning to dialogue.

What if you start to lose your audience?

Unfortunately if you lose the support of your own and/or your company's audience then you are in serious trouble. The ony advice i can give is to try and stop doing anything that you may have done to alienate them and apologise publically. However if you continue to lose support and especially if the audience start to publish content against you then i am afraid it is over. This is the time to stop. It sucks for you but the probability of being successful if this happens is almost zero. This is because the company will believe the people are on their side.

Social CRM Company Engagement Framework Part 1.The rules of Engagement

The purpose of this framework is to guide individuals who wish to engage companies in a dialogue related to a particular conflict or service request. Usually this framework will be employed after conventional channels and dialogue has failed or broken down. This is due to the additional effort required by the customer to implement this framework over and above that required by the companies own conventional channels. The idea is that by moving the conversation to a public arena i.e. a social media run by the company then this will further empower the customer and increase the likelihood of a succesful outcome for the customer.

This framework has been constructed based upon lessons learned through the engagement with If vahinkovakuutus a Finnish insurance company in relationship to travel insurance claim that If refused to pay.

Part 1: The Rules of Engagement of Social CRM from the Customers Perspective

Operating in the Target Company's Own Social Media

When engaging a company on their own social media the following guidelines should be applied.

1. Only engage a company in this way when you have a valid argument. This is not a strategy for just venting your anger or trying to get some revenge.
2. Do not alienate your audience! Remember that when you are communicating with a company on their own social media, their audience is also your audience. You should be attempting to win them over with a valid argument. By gaining their support you will put additional pressure onto the company in question. As such do not do or say anything that may risk you having the audience turn against you.
3. Remain calm do not show your anger. Undoubtedly in this kind of situation you are experiencing feelings of anger and hostility. Displaying these will not help you at all. Do not post offensive or derrogatory comments about the company in question. If you do, you risk being percieved as an angry customer who justs wants to have a rant.
4. Try to avoid opinions and stick to the facts. When you add your opinion to much you increase the risk of alienating your audience. Let them make up their own minds. This is difficult i know.
5. Express how the experience has made you feel. This, if done in the correct way, will help garner support for your cause and generate sympathy from the audience. It makes it easier for them to empathise.
6. Express and highlight how the company's behaviour impacts their other customers and stakeholders. This adds weight to your own personal story and argument and further distances you from being perceived as an individual upset and angry customer.
7. Outline your arguments clearly and concisely. When you do this is it very difficult for the company not to answer you as this will reflect badly upon them if they refuse to engage you.
8. State clearly what you expect from the company and what actions you require for them. Numbering these helps (in a long thread for example). Ask them directly to respond to each. In this way you can avoid the conversation being taken of topic.
9. Attempt to control the conversation as if it were a debate. If a company does not directly answer your concerns, questions or requirements pull them up on it and request that they answer the questions directly and if pushed ask them to answer yes no.
10. Do not allow the company to steer the conversation away from your requirements. This is a diversionary and delay tactic. They know that at some point in time you will get tired.
11. Do not allow the company to steer you away from their social media and into hidden channels. You have failed already in these hidden channels. This is just a way for the company to get rid of you. If a company attempts this it will reflect badly upon them not you.
12. Do not give up until the dialogue is really at an end. Badly run companies or companies with something to hide will ultimately continue to avoid the questions. If you keep pulling them up on this you should be able to to garner more support form their audience and add additioal pressure to the company.
13. Be prepared that the company will not meet your expectations. In this case you still win. You have lost nothing but your time. As long as you had a valid argument, if the company does not resolve this issue for you then it is them who ultimately will come out of this worse. Even if you are financially out of pocket you still would have been even if you had not engaged them through social media. As a customer you had nothing to lose so try to think of it that way.
14. If the company does meet your expectations and resolve the case through social media let them know your gratitude. Post this publically. In this way it will help the company appreciate the value of serving cusotmers in this way and also let others know that this kind of strategy can be applied succesfully with this company.

Operating in your own social media

As part of this framework it is a strong advantage to adopt your own social media related to the engagement process. This is so as to tell your side of the story, preserve a record of the dialogue that you are in control of. In affect you are running your own campaign from where you can publicise your story and garner further support by leveraging your own socail media. More about this in a later post.

When utilising your own channels, it is more acceptable to be biased and slightly more opinionated. After all you are trying to push out your marketing message related to this story in the same way that a company uses their own media to push theirs. By being more oppinionated you will also generate more interest and discussion around the subject. This is also to your advantage.

As well as the rules of engagement from the aforementioned section, you should also be aware of the following.

1. Again avoid alienating your audience. How you behave in these channels is important you do not want to be seen to act in a way that is underhand, coercive or in a way similar to that of the company you are trying to engage. You should not profit financially from the engagement process other than for any compensation you are attempting to get from the company you are engaging. If you do this will damage your argument and own image.
2. Show gratitutude to all who participate and engage them in conversation. Anyone who comments or replies to you deserves a thankyou or a return comment if posting on a blog for example. Of course dependent upon the media you are using.
3. It is ok, not everyone has to agree with you. Do not attack people who disagree with you but engage them also you can learn about why they feel that way. By having an open dialogue with a real discussion you will actually draw more attention to your story. If you are receiving a lot of negative feedback you can use this to evaluate if you should continue your engagement process or not.
4. You need to behave in a the same way that you are expecting your engaged company to behave. Your actions need to be transparent and you need to be trusted. You must set an example.