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Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

March 11, 2010

Posted in Uncategorized

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

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Goodbye Call Center, Hello People Power – The giffgaff Experiment

March 8, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media Industry, Social Media Trends

giffgaff is a UK-based mobile telephone service provider that runs off the O2 (Telefónica Europe) network. Basically, what it offers is a pre-paid SIM card that you pop into your (unlocked) mobile phone. At giffgaff’s Web site (http://www.giffgaff.com), you can order a giffgaff SIM card and add money to (a.k.a. “top-up”) your existing card. What you can’t do at the site, though, is contact a customer service representative. Not by phone and not by online chat. Instead, the company provides support nearly exclusively via Web-based self-service and its customer community. giffgaff’s FAQs, question and answer area, and discussion forums are its primary customer service mechanisms.

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Ricky Gervais (Unintentionally and Eloquently) on Facebook vs. Customer Communities

March 4, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media Industry

While driving yesterday to pick up my sister at the airport, I listened to a delightful interview on the radio with Ricky Gervais. About halfway through the NPR interview, Gervais said:

“But, I think I’d rather do stuff that makes a big connection with a few people than a small connection with loads. I’d rather this be a few people’s favorite show, than, you know, millions and millions of people’s 10th favorite show. Because what’s the point otherwise?”

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Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

March 2, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Measurement & Reporting, Social Media Trends

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either.

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Walking out the Door with the Twitter Password: A Few Words on Social Media Maturity

March 1, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media Industry

In three unrelated instances over the past few weeks, I heard three different people pose more or less the same question: “If the person at your company who manages your Twitter and Facebook account leaves the company, what do you do if they forgot to tell you the passwords?”

If you’re the one tasked with setting things straight, you’re definitely facing a challenge. Who wants to track down and call up a former colleague to recover a password? Sure, most people would be helpful (if, in fact, they actually remember the passwords). But there’s also the possibility for ex-employees to cause mischief.

The real problem, though, arose before the employee left the firm. The organizations in the scenario above never should have let it get to this point.

So why did it happen?

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A Recipe for Not Getting Your Community off the Ground

February 25, 2010

Posted in Best Practices

Ingredients:
• ½ Tbs old-school business mind set
• 7 oz. siloed business units
• 2 tsp fear of the unknown
• 1 cup over-analysis

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There’s No Place Like (the) Home (Page)

February 22, 2010

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media Trends

If your customers (or partners or readers or users, etc.) are important enough to your organization, your home page will include a link to your customer community. Linking to your community from your home page not only makes it easier for people to find your community, it also makes it easier for people to find each other. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes the symbolic statement that you highly value your customers and their perspectives – the good, the bad, and the ugly – by supporting their candid discussions, collaboration, and networking, and by being part of the conversation yourself.

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About Us

Welcome to our site!

Impact Interactions helps you succeed in using social media to build stronger business value through interactions with your customers, prospects, and members. We've helped many leading organizations like Cisco, SAP, NetApp, AARP, Intel, The American Chemical Society, and others realize measurable results using online communities and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Contact us to learn how our experience can help you succeed!