MindComet

The importance of defining the value proposition of social media

Getting social media in the door to business leaders is difficult. To them, Social Media is this very nebulous thing. They’ve heard of it. They’re probably on Linked-in. They might be on Facebook. However, many of them don’t understand the value proposition of social media.

Simply put, a value proposition is what makes you better than your competition. Wait. Social media has competition?

Well, in business it certainly does. Social media is competing for a share of the budgetary pie, especially in the current economic environment. If I sell a social media project to a client in 2009, most likely, they got the budget for it by cutting something else. Selling social media through the “everybody else is doing it” factor, just doesn’t cut it. So what, if everyone else is doing it! People want to know how it will specifically help or save/make them money. Clearly defining the value proposition of social media is imperative.

Take for example online support forums. Social media is directly competing with salaries for support technicians and managers, rent, and expenses for phone systems and workstations.

Here is how I’d define the value proposition of online tech support forums

“It is a fact, proven by organizations like Dell and Pitney Bowes, that companies who provide online support forums will save money through reduced support staff headcounts and decreased call center facility overhead by reducing support call volumes. One method to reduce call volume though online support forums is to allow customers to support each other. This new model of support allows organizations to resolve a higher volume of issues by simply scaling up support forum infrastructure instead of the very expensive route of scaling up staff and facilities. Another method of savings, which has the same benefits as the first, can be achieved by allowing users to search through an online archive of solutions, and provide self-service support. This is a feature that phone support systems simply do not offer.“

Do you have any value propositions that you would define for social media?

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 19, 2009

Pitney Bowes is getting sexy with social media

Pitney Bowes, the manufacturer of postage meters and other mailing related products and services, may not be a sexy brand, but they’re acting sexy by embracing social media.

So what are they doing that’s getting me so excited?

For one, they’ve setup a customer support forum to guide users through a variety of problems. The most common of which are issues related to postage increases. When the USPS raises it’s rates, Pitney Bowes customers are required to reprogram their machines, which results in increased call volume. Pitney Bowes was smart, realized the potential of online support and now allows customers can submit their requests online. The beauty of this is that customers can search through previous support requests for answer to their issue. This self-service model has resulted in a 30% decrease in call volume to the Pitney Bowes call center.

Secondly, they are asking their customers three questions about how to improve Pitney Bowes in a section they call the “Think Tank” and allow users to vote on the ideas.

1. What Else Do You Want Your Mailing Machine To Do? 
2. What kind of software or web service would help your business? 
3. How can we make the PB.com website work better for you?

This section doesn’t really have high participation yet, but it’s exciting to see them implementing suggestion box functionality. I’d be interested to know if any user submitted ideas have made it’s way into the Pitney Bowes product or service line.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 17, 2009

Marketing dollars shift in response to economy

2009 is here, along with new budgets that reflect both our weakened economy and a shift in marketing tactics. Technological advances and increased scrutiny of corporate spending have precipitated two significant shifts in marketing budgets.

The first of these shifts that we're seeing is budgets for costly offline print and TV campaigns being redirected to online efforts. So, why the shift? As I mentioned earlier, corporate spending is increasingly being scrutinized and CEO's want to know that they're seeing returns on their investments. Traditional campaigns are expensive and the advent of services such as TiVo and DVR are driving up the already high cost of TV impressions. To make matters worse, tracking the results of offline campaigns is difficult, if not impossible. Online provides more affordable and measurable channels for marketing.




In addition to the online shift of marketing dollars, we're also seeing a dramatic change is how that money is spent online. Until recently, banner ads were the focus of many online marketing budgets. However poor click-through and dismal conversion rates have marketers looking for new avenues, specifically, online video and social media.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 06, 2009

Feb Florida community events

List of February social media and technology events for Florida

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Feb. 04, 2009

Twitter support, your problems are far and wide

I recently posted about the lack of response from Twitter Support. I am unhappy to say that my issue has not been resolved yet. And as I’ve gone deeper and deeper down the Twitter support hole, I’ve learned just how broken the support department at Twitter actually is.

Most everyone is aware of the Twitter hack that happened earlier this month.  My understanding is that it was due to security flaws in their support queue. Happily they fixed the issue by replacing their support queue with a new system called Zendesk ( they blog about this change at Twitter Blog: The Zen of Twitter Support ) and more recently rolled out Get Satisfaction for support as well.

I applaud the team for making changes in response to a problem, but, in my opinion, they really made a mess of things. Let me explain how.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 30, 2009

I’m now the community manager for doterati!

doterati, Central Florida’s interactive marketing, media and technology association, recently held their 2009 board elections.

I’m happy to say that I was elected community director! This is a very exciting position for me as it is inline with some career goals that I have at MindComet.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 16, 2009

TweetBacks by Dan Zarrella is flawed

Dan Zarrella has been hard at work with a service called TweetBacks. Essentially, it searches the Twitter public timeline for the URL of the page that it is installed on. Based on the amount of chatter on the web, this product has proved to be very popular.

There are currently two ways that you can use his implementation; One is a hosted version and the other is a non-hosted version as a word-press plugin.

Both versions are flawed.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jan. 13, 2009