At present this functionality is in test phase with a small number of Facebook’s closely affiliated brands (read brands that spend millions in advertising with them!) but if successful could be extended to encompass the same functionality that Bricks and Mortar offers provided 2 weeks ago. Facebook has a habit of testing functionality way in advance, and in December they were obvioulsy enthused by the results.

Why is this relevant? Well, brands can now monetise their existing Facebook community as long as they have a direct online retail element. It means that we have the opportunity to start pushing online redeemable vouchers to Facebook fans and test how engaged specific communities are and how open they are to sales opportunities. So, what’s the ROI of your Facebook communities? Quite a big deal, I’m sure you’ll agree.

There’s no time table for when Ecommerce Offers could become publicly available. When it does come into force, coupons will be free to run, but brands will pay Facebook to show their Offers to more people (just like FB ads). Do you think this finally offers brands the ability to monetise their Facebook communities?

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The LinkedIn community of 161 million professionals has been designed from the ground up to connect industries and individuals and make them more productive and successful. It appears a natural extension of the brand to allow its users to show off their skills and knowledge through the functionality of SlideShare, dubbed ‘the YouTube for slideshows’ (catchy.) LinkedIn’s thinking is that ‘presentations strengthen your professional online identity’ and that they help you spread and discover professional knowledge.

Combined, the sites boast more than 136 million monthly unique visitors, an impressively large community of professional eyes and ears. But, what does this marriage mean for the various parties concerned?

What does it mean for the current LinkedIn community?

Good news really. There will be increased functionality within LinkedIn to allow users to further show off their skills and knowledge through presentations – great for those looking for a job or to connect with prospects. According to LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner: “These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn.”

What does this mean for LinkedIn shareholders?

On a year to date basis the LinkedIn stock is up more than 60% and that was before the acquisition news – the news for shareholders continues to be rosy.

LinkedIn stock is soaring

What does this mean for Slideshare users?

Since SlideShare’s founding in 2006, users have uploaded more than 9 million presentations. The big question is will we see this content used by LinkedIn advertising in much the same way that Facebook sponsored ads work? Rashmi sought to reassure SlideShare users that they had their interests at heart when she stated: “The SlideShare you have come to know and love will remain a place where you can continue to upload, share, and find presentations that help you grow professionally.”

After such a big financial outlay LinkedIn must be looking for way to further monetise the SlideShare offering. Stay tuned for further news.

Of course LinkedIn have created a slideshare to celebrate why they are so perfect together! 

LinkedIn and Slideshare

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There’s no denying the consumer demand for quality shareable video content. And while it can be tempting to think of copy as the core content marketing tool for your business, the 100 million social actions taken on YouTube every week, pay homage to the brand awareness and conversion capabilities of quality video content.

Before getting bogged down in enormities, we’ve pulled together a selection of altogether more bite size tips to help you create successful YouTube videos.

1. What’s in a name?

In a nutshell, everything. It’s your video’s first call-to-arms and it needs to captivate and inspire the viewer. Give the video a catchy headline that summarises the video’s content and make it short and snappy. Long headlines lose interest. And don’t forget to pepper with optimised keywords to help the search algorithm match your video to relevant search queries. This is equally true of the video’s description – try to incorporate relevant keywords into the first couple of sentences and make sure the description gives a concise, relevant explanation of what viewers can expect to see.

2. Nail that thumb

YouTube selects the exact mid-point frame of a video and uses this as the thumbnail. This is the first thing a viewer sees before clicking through to the video and it’s also the image that features in Google search results, so it needs be visually engaging. As reported by Digital Telepathy, Yobongo saw a 70.9% increase in conversions when they changed their video thumbnail. YouTube will always give a small selection to choose from and a simple play with video editing software will enable you to modify the mid-point frame to make it more powerful.

3. Content is king

Does the video engage, inspire, inform, entertain? If it falls flat on all four fronts, then no amount of post-production will plaster over this. Keep it short, shoot in HD quality and always view it through the eyes of the consumer.

4.  No comment

While it can be tempting to disable YouTube comments for fear of video vandalism, these are a valuable means of gauging consumer sentiment and understanding what works well and what doesn’t. Just remember to set email alerts up so that offensive comments can be quickly spotted and removed.

5.  Spread the word

Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, VEVO, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Digg, Delicious. There’s no end to the social networks ready and waiting for your video content to be shared across. And there’s no end of social networkers ready and waiting for video content to share.

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CNET – Why Instagram just made the lives of Facebook’s IPO bankers a lot easier

Guardian – Facebook Instagram takeover

It also begs the question, how can brands utilise the service to drum up acquisition and engagement of fans. Currently the vast majority of the most popular Instagrammers are celebrities. There are a mere 7 brands in the top 100 most followed Instagram users and this goes someway to indicating Instagram’s main quandary, how do brands make the most out of Instagram?

1. instagram – 1,119,118
2. mtv – 444,581
3. starbucks – 415,555
4. burberry – 270,532
5. eonline -  263,544
6. victoriassecret – 230,527
7. billboard – 150,200

Current functionality presents more opportunities for consumer engagement than it does for acquisition.

Engagement

Competitions are an ideal way to emphasise the UGC element of Instagram. Brands can ask their communities to challenge themselves creatively, submit an image under a competition hashtag and then reward the best submissions.  There’s the potential to run competitions directly in Statigram, using tags to find the most stunning and creative shots.

Why not try using fan images for branded profiles, there are a number of apps out there that allow brands to aggregate Instagram images by topic, what better way to thank and recognise your fan community than by creating a mosaic of their content as your cover photo on Facebook or Twitter profile background? Instarium is a great way to see the potential of groups of Instagram images.

For fashion retailers the Instagram seems tailor made for showing off products in store in an appealing and simple way to core consumers. The Levis Brazil Instagram takes every opportunity to show off the latest styles…

E-commerce

Finally, should the branded imagery you create on Instagram prove popular enough, you might turn to Instacanvas to monetize that opportunity.  The e-commerce site turns your Instagram images into canvases that the public can buy. We all love a new revenue stream where appropriate.

Search and account management

Should you want to find particular images of your products or services that consumer may have Instagrammed you can’t go far wrong with Heroku.

Finally, what is the best way for brands to manage a large Instagram community and a multitude of images? One of the best Instagram desk platforms out there at the moment is Statigram.

Statigram (Photo credit: Felipe Vergara)

Even through this is a billion dollar company, it’s still very much in its infancy, after all it was only founded in 2010!  Facebook is bound to have big plans for it, especially around the integration of Instagram into the Facebook platform, as yet this is woefully under utilised.  Instagram itself isn’t making the most of integrating its functionality with that of Facebook – just take a look at its Facebook page. We’ll be sure to update you with the latest opportunities as they present themselves.

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Those clever bods at Conversocial have recently compiled a new study: Top US Clothing Retailers on their Customer Service Response Times on Twitter (based on their revenue listing in 2010) there’s a great summary on The Next Web, however what we think is most compelling is the insight that customer queries/complaints comes from consumers on the go. The trend of  customers in store tweeting from their mobiles is growing and emphasises the importance of swift and concise responses. After all when potential customer are that close to a purchase, can you afford to miss the opportunity?

Conversocial analysis of clothing retailer response times

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Successful social customer service, however, treads a fine line; if the brand takes too long, or instead chooses not to respond, then what begins as an isolated incidence of negativity can quickly snowball.

Never is this truer than in the eye of a PR storm.

A recent example of this is Claire’s Accessories’ decision not to respond to fan accusations that the company has copied multiple jewelry designs from independent firm, Tatty Devine.

This is the second time that this type of allegation has been thrown at the brand – and the second time the brand has chosen not to engage with the large volume of fans addressing the issue on Twitter and Facebook, with a number of fans accusing the company of going as far as deleting their Wall posts.

As a result of widespread Twitter speculation the story has spilled over into highly visible online news sites; the search legacy of which will provide a subsequent impact in sentiment for the brand.

Similarly, supermarket chain, Tesco, also chose not to respond to online customer complaints, when the company withdrew its support for Gay Pride. User experience company, Webcredible, found that in the post-Christmas period, 66% of tweets surrounding the chain largely related to Gay Pride and were negative in sentiment.

While an explanation or apology might not fix the problem, it certainly goes some way towards showing the customer that a brand is not only listening, but learning from its mistakes.

If you would like to find out more about the way social media is reshaping the relationship between customers and brands, then immediate future MD, Katy Howell, is speaking at The Social Customer 2012 conference in London on March 29.

For details and to find out how to claim immediate future’s exclusive 10% discount contact info@immediatefuture.co.uk.

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Consumers are increasingly turning to social to solve queries and resolve grievances

If you would like to find out more about the way social media is reshaping the relationship between customers and brands, then immediate future MD, Katy Howell, is speaking at The Social Customer 2012 conference in London tomorrow, 29 March 2012.

For further details and to find out how you can still claim immediate future’s exclusive 10% discount contact info@immediatefuture.co.uk.

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Pair this with the fact that 46% of consumers expect great customer service online, not to mention 78% of consumers as reported by Parature, believe social media will become the prominent method for consumers to communicate with companies and something has gone awry.

As Econsultancy outlines, this may be largely impacted by the legacy of ageing CRM systems and the office – and contact centre – culture of prohibiting social media usage during work hours.

Perhaps more impactful is the fear that social customer service is somewhat of a Pandora’s Box of unknown resourcing requirements that can make it difficult to know where to start.

To make navigating that Pandora’s Box a little bit easier, we’ve outlined three key considerations, to help get your brand started on the right course.

1.     Set your service levels

Before committing to social customer service, it is important to put a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place. Your contact centre may operate Monday to Friday between 9-5pm, but your social platforms never sleep. You need clearly defined operational hours and these need to be visibly displayed on any platforms customers engage with; the Twitter bio and the Facebook info sections can be utilised for this.

2.     Get a handle on resourcing

Consider the resourcing implications and handling times. Use a monitoring tool to audit your online customer conversations and this will give you an estimate of the volumes you can expect. The handling time will vary by platform but you will need to gauge the resource needed to handle an individual customer interaction on social media to help you build up a more solid picture of the head-count you might need to manage it. You will also need to consider whether your PR and marketing teams refer enquiries into your customer care team, or whether your customer care team engage directly. If this is the case, then additional training will be required.

3.     Set expectations

Finally, consider the outputs. At the very least social customer service should offer a mechanism for funnelling additional customers into the contact centre; at best it is a very visible means of turning detractors into brand advocates.

If you would like to find out more about integrating social media into customer service, then immediate future Principal Consultant, Katy Howell, is speaking at The Social Customer 2012 conference in London on March 29.

For details and to find out how to claim immediate future’s exclusive 10% discount contact info@immediatefuture.co.uk.

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According to a recent study by Sitel, 15% of 16-24 year-olds in the UK use social media as their preferred channel for resolving customer service issues; while 7% say that venting on social media is the first thing they do when faced with a faulty product.

This compares with only 8% of 25-34 year-olds who cite social media as their preferred channel for customer care; and drops off to just 3% for the over 35s.

In the accelerated world of social media the need for fast customer response times is amplified, particularly by younger demographics , born and bred on social media and with high expectations of quick reactions and – where possible – resolutions from brands.

Judging by the low statistics, social customer service is still very much in its infancy. Which can only mean one thing; it’s going to get bigger.

The current volumes of online customer complaints are a mere fraction of the levels they will reach as the 16 year-olds of today – not to mention every generation to follow them – come of age.

Customer care through social channels will shift from a nice-to-have to a critical necessity.

If you would like to find out more about the way social media is reshaping the relationship between customers and brands, then immediate future MD, Katy Howell, is speaking at The Social Customer 2012 conference in London on March 29.

For details and to find out how to claim immediate future’s exclusive 10% discount contact info@immediatefuture.co.uk.

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