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At an event for Social Media Week London last week, a question was raised over whether responding to people on Twitter and similar social media sites would encourage more customers to air their complaints in public. In my opinion, the answer is that it probably does, particularly if people see others being responded to effectively. However, this should not be a reason to ignore disgruntled customers. People will still have their grievance, whether or not they choose to voice it. If the alternative is having an annoyed customer that walks away in silence, it is much better to have one that shouts from the rooftops and offers up the opportunity to open up a conversation. People who vocalise their problems provide a way for companies to gain insight into the problems their customers have, and it is likely that if one customer has had a negative customer experience, that there will be a lot more in a similar situation. With the information being out there, it is up to a company to find a way to harness it to improve the customer experience they offer.

Another point raised was about placing this kind of customer service in context with other business priorities. Within many companies resources are limited, so it should be these priorities that decide where resources are used. If it is a choice, should the customer who rants on Twitter be prioritised over the customer who has been left waiting for 10 minutes on the customer service phone line? The challenge is understanding what levels of communication are appropriate for a particular company, how these should be implemented, and how these can fit in amongst other concerns.

In response to NMA article, 21 January 2010

Peter McCormack, co-founder of McCormack and Morrison, makes some interesting points in his opinion piece in published in NMA 21st January. If brands are truly throwing away their traditional marketing campaigns in favour of third party channels such as Facebook then I would agree it is unwise – but only ‘today‘. Because today you cannot connect the dots and establish the identity of twitter’ers and other anonymous users of social networks, but that will not always be the case.

There will come a time when total transparency exists online and your anonymity will be lost. Every transaction, every interaction via the web leaves a trace and slowly but surely analytics tools are bringing these traces together. Data analytics tools are powerful now and it won’t be long before we will be able to identify the patterns that connect LinkedIn profiles to tweets, Spotify, Amazon, dodgy blog, dating and dare I say porn accounts.

Beside the implications for individuals that total transparency highlights, there are enormous implications for marketers. The issue raised by McCormack that marketers, by turning there backs on traditional marketing methods and putting all their eggs in one anonymous social media basket are making a huge mistake needs revising. The distinction he makes between a well managed CRM campaign and the use of a Facebook page is surely wrong? Doesn’t a well run CRM campaign include social networking? Where does advertising fit in as surely offline advertising presents the same profiling issues that anonymous social networking does?

I read a paper recently about the future of the postal service and it predicted the end of letter postage within 10 to 15 years. Email will have almost completely replaced letters in that period and yet has only been in existence for 15 to 20 years. What will social replace?

McCormack is right to raise the data ownership question at the centre of his point. If brands handover ownership of customer data to third party sites in the same way that consumer goods have to the supermarkets in the grocery space they are in making a big mistake. In today’s world I am not sure that they have to providing they have a clear measurement strategy as part of their strategic marketing plan.

Sanitary napkin jokes aside, there’s plenty of excitement about Apple’s newly announced iPad. The hyperbole is flowing thick and fast : “magical, revolutionary, unbelievable”, not surprisingly most of it is coming from the Apple camp. Admittedly, it’s a cool device and you know it will be well-designed, well-built and easy to use…it’s from Apple after all. I want to like it, I really do, but as with many Apple products once you get past the initial ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and look at the practical user experience, the flaws start to emerge. Read more about: Apple iPad – a bridge not quite far enough?

Everyone has their childhood fears of which some stay with you in adulthood, mine’s that of earthquakes, so much so that since a young age I’ve feared visiting San Francisco. Haiti on the other hand has always been on my ‘radar’ as a place where slavery is rife, as if that’s not bad enough; Haiti is then hit with a devastating earthquake. The horrific effect of the Haiti earthquake however has woken the world up to the plight of the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the humanitarian efforts to bring this devastated country back from the brink have been in effect worldwide. One of the fastest ways donations have been received towards the relief efforts, has been through mobile phones – simply by sending a text from our mobiles to a specific number. Read more about: Mobile technology: speeds up and increases response

It’s coming up to 9 months since I got an eReader and in that time barely a month has gone by without a new development in either the eBook or eReader space. I have been watching these developments with interest – recent events to note are the UK Kindle release and the growing dominance of applications (apps) to both sell and display eBooks. Read more about: eBooks – have they made their move?

Yesterday I mentioned five tips on some of the best ways businesses can help promote trust in mobile security. Here are some more pointers when logging in to a secure area of a site e.g. banking:
Read more about: Tips on logging into secure areas using a mobile

Several years ago, I was involved in an international project that focussed on security when using mobile devices and how trust could be enabled in users. At that time, very few users were accessing the mobile internet on a regular basis and consequently, it was very difficult for them to envisage the dangers posed by hackers, malware and unauthorised access to both personal and business data stored on their mobile device.Things have changed since then in terms of mobile internet usage as a boom seems imminent, fuelled by the rise of 3G, smartphones and affordable data package tariffs. Indeed, all around us smartphones are becoming ubiquitous with a spike in smartphone adoption predicted as users come out of contracts and seek a better deal for their money. Read more about: Security of the mobile internet

When searching for the best Top 5 applications (apps) for the iPhone, I often found reviews based on the personal preferences of their author and how well the apps were addressing particular user needs. This made me want to have a different perspective by creating my own Top Apps list based on how well apps use the iPhone capabilities to meet user requirements. For example, which app best used the new digital compass feature of the iPhone. Read more about: Top 5 iPhone apps using iPhone capabilities