Brian Weigand, Alice.com
Samantha Gammell, Oscar Mayer
Justin Levy, New Marketing Labs
Frank Eliason, Comcast

One of the panels at BlogWorld this year covered social media success stories and brought together four individuals with extensive knowledge on using social media to create rewarding campaigns. Here are a few of their remarks about how they are using social media.

Brian Weigand from Alice.com said that they’re using social media to tie everything back to purchases and reaching out to mommy bloggers. They have many different blogs that they’re very active3 with, including Facebook and Twitter as part of a campaign geared towards lead generation and customer retention.

Frank Eliason talks about how people get into social media – it’s all about passion. Companies need to teach all their employees how to use social media. Frank is NOT passionate about the product. He’s passionate about the people. Cites that Zappos is a great example – they’ve taught their employees how to get out there with social media. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is passionate about culture. Don’t try and be something you’re not. Be yourself and you’ll be well known.

Frank has a “one-tweet resolution” at Comcast. There are a few things out there that will help to generate ROI in social media. Frank can learn a lot more about a company in seconds with Twitter. Recalls a story where during a hockey game that went off the air. Frank looked on Twitter and found out that it wasn’t just Comcast, and affected other broadcast companies as well. He put the message out on the 800 number and other areas and this helped save Comcast time and money.

Frank thinks that Twitter is good for reaching out people before anything goes wrong. But he acknowledges that every social application has different uses and purposes. He started using Twitter by simply listening for two months before actually engaging. With forums, they don’t interfere because it could destroy or demotivate the community. With Facebook, Frank thinks that it’s a good tool to check up on friends but it’s not a good place to meet people.

Samantha Gammell says that the Oscar Mayer weinermobile is to better engage the consumers. Having this be online is just a natural extension of the offline promotion. They realized that there was a lot of love and excitement over the weinermobile, but they wanted to set some goals beforehand. They set up a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr and YouTube account and just recently, a Facebook page.

Justin Levy recently bought into a high-end steakhouse where he realized that his business partner has previously been spending about 80% of his allotted marketing budget on a newspaper advertisement that wasn’t really targeted towards the right audience. Justin felt that the better way was to try and compete against the larger steakhouses like Ruth’s Chris by trying to secure the website placement on the first page of Google. Instead of losing money by 20% a month, Justin indicated that the restaurant reserved its course and now has become more profitable by 20% each month.

What is the value behind getting ranked highly in Technorati? Who cares?

Justin Levy responds that with one of his clients at New Marketing Labs that valued the high ranking on Technorati, they didn’t care about the ROI of having the high rank. What they cherished was the fact that people were paying attention and the awareness. The client was more concerned about establishing themselves as a thought leader.

How can I justify having my team monitor Twitter after-hours?

Frank Eliason says to track what is being said over a period of time to see if there’s a pattern and then also look at the blogs that mention your product or company.

Brian Weingand said that it’s good to get everyone involved and Justin Levy states that it’s now a 24 hour news cycle. Sometimes in brands, you have great passionate people – with Frank, he did everything all on his own without permission just to show that he cared about the customers and that soon spanned to be a team effort.

How have the social tools helped transform the story you tell?

Samantha Gammell talked about how social media has helped contemporize the brand of the weinermobile and has enabled the company to expose more people to it through their connections to digital influencers.

Make sure that your brand has personality before you try and bring it to life. It’s not always going to be a natural fit.

Is being first at something a good thing?

For Frank Eliason, Comcast was not the first in the market. He said that the trick is to learn from those that came before you and learn from what you can to take away. Find out what you and your team will do better. The rules in this space have not been written yet. The reason why Frank has succeeded is that he helped Michael Arrington out and a blog post was written on TechCrunch with people offering their support on Comcast’s customer service. Everything is a learning process…always learn and evolve.

Brian Weingand said that if you’re first, then you’re really an authority figure in the space. Being first allows you to establish a mindshare and can make you a leader in the topic.

Justin Levy says that you can be the leader as well. He thinks that you have this unique opportunity but won’t have any case studies to reference in the industry, but you’ll be able to speak about your thoughts at conferences and events all centered around what you’ve done.

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I have written many articles on Twitter, Tools for Twitter and Resources to make you more effective. You see, it is not about me but about you. It is about you and how you can leverage Twitter for your business to make you more effective.

Recently, Twitter has finally started to show its business model and realizes that one way is to help companies and brands utilize Twitter for all sorts of things. Network Solutions in fact utilizes it for customer service and community outreach and has seem immeasurable success in using it along with providing a channel for customers to reach out. You can find us at NetSolCares.

The new Twitter Guide for Business, uses this explanation for businesses thinking about signing up but asking about what it does, what they can use it for and the value/return they could see from it:

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

I have found that there are three primary ways to effectively use Twitter for Business:

1.) Customer Service – This is probably what Twitter is known the best for in business circles with companies like Comcast, Dell, Starbucks, Zappos and Etsy to name a few using this channel to communicate with customers having issues or to thank them when there are positive mentions. Network Solutions has use NetSolCares to great success and I think about how many issues have been resolved or the customer put in touch with the right person because they reached out on Twitter and we listened.

2.) Community Outreach – This goes beyond customer service to informing people abou things that will help their business and engage the broader community. This can be done on the same channel as customer service and we use this channel to post blog headlines from our various blogs in addition to putting out notices to the community about changes or issues they might be experiencing (e.g. System Downtime on Friday for new Network Solutions brand switchover).

3.) Selling those that want to be sold to – This is a challenging on that Dell Outlet does extremely well. They have often said that they make $1 million a year off of Twitter. This is because they set up a specific Twitter channel/handle for selling Dell Products.

What Ways Has Your Business Used Twitter Effectively?

I know I mentioned the “Top 3″ but I want to start the conversation and hear from you how you are creatively using Twitter with your business and gather a longer list of best practices for everyone in a future post.

[As luck would have it, as I was writing this entry, my home cable high-speed Internet connection -- the subject of this entry -- went down again. It got better, though.]

I recently had a couple of customer service experiences with my cable company, which happens to have garnered a bunch of accolades for having a strong presence on Twitter.  Okay, fine, I’ll just say it, it’s Comcast. This isn’t about Comcast, though, really — it’s just a convenient series of anecdotes on customer service in the online age.

Despite all the hype about Comcast being on Twitter, in this case, for me to go through Twitter just seemed gratuitous and superfluous. This is because I would have ended up direct messaging them with my account details, anyway, so I just e-mailed them directly at their customer support email (the one listed on their Twitter profile page).

Unless you need realtime feedback from the person having the problem, e-mail is generally more efficient than chat (text or voice), since most of your time is spent waiting for something to happen. So in this case, we see that Twitter is useful primarily for monitoring potential problems, publicly showing that you’re responding, and then directing people into a more efficient problem resolution process.

That particular issue was resolved pretty quickly — it turned out that my cable lineup had changed (like most people, the only thing I read on my bill is the number that has the dollar sign next to it), so I had to reluctantly join the ranks of digital cable subscribers.

Soon after that, though, both my broadband access and entire cable went down — I called it in, and got the recorded message that it was a known issue in my area being worked on, and was given the option to get a callback when the issue was resolved. Now, that last bit is useful, and I don’t remember having that option before, so of course I hit yes.

Not much later that evening, I got the automated call saying that the issue was repaired. Cool. I turned on my TV.

No dice.

I called the customer service folks again, and was told that the problem was still being worked on. (So why the automated all-clear call?) Then not more than two minutes later, everything came back up. So either the techs had finished up the work, or the “problem resolved” report was a few minutes out of sync with the actual fix.

This raises a point about raised expectations — you’d better deliver on them. Giving out inaccurate information in real time is as bad or worse (probably worse) than being slow, or not giving out the information in the first place. And being off by just a few minutes (or seconds, even) makes you look bad. It’s tricky.

What’s the point of all this, other than me whining about my cable? It means that even though all the individual pieces are there: Monitoring of public discussions on Twitter; e-mail support queues; having technicians in the field, CSRs on the phone, and robocallers all working off the same info — a disconnect of a few minutes will kill you. Hey, consumers are a tough crowd.

Anyway, I’m glad to see folks are trying with new tools and techniques. I think back to the bad old days, when there weren’t status Web sites or text message alerts; when a repair person couldn’t call to tell you when they were running late, or you had to spend all day camped out next to your phone. And forget about getting new phone service set up.

So, as you can see, I barely talked about Twitter. Do you have any tales of customer service with an online component that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.