Digital CPG Blog

Social customer service could develop in a number of ways this year:

• More brands creating specific customer service communities, to resolve disputes away from their main social channels.
• Greater use of apps to address specific issues for customers.
• Greater integration of technologies (such as P2P) to support customer service and ‘self-serve’ customer communities.
• Simpler segmentation on Facebook and Twitter (learning from Google Plus).
• Advances in monitoring and geo-targeting to allow brands to respond quickly and locally to resolve customer issues.

I agree that customer service online will continue to expand greatly. Marketers often believe that consumers want to engage, but we talked earlier this month about how they really just want value. Offering great customer service will become a big part of social and will be a differentiator.

Gen Y moms want more than just the basic tenets when purchasing products. In essence, they want to be part of something larger and like they are contributing to positively changing the world on those social, environmental and health factors. Here’s how to capture their global do-gooder interests:

• Engagement is key. Don’t just market your wares, engage your customers — online and off — around your efforts. This group wants that dialog online, so be accessible and embrace your customers for their opinions, congrats and complaints. But these women also crave real-world connections, so mobilizing them to join your brand in taking offline actions builds sustained loyalty.
• Walk the talk. Authenticity and transparency are tantamount. If you are just getting onto the green spectrum, don’t fret (you are moving in the right direction), but be transparent about where you are and where you want to be. Getting your own house in order through your business practices, product development and charitable efforts builds trust.
• Market with meaning. People in this demographic consume information constantly and at a rapid pace. Incorporating relevant, useful educational content deepens the brand/consumer connection and gives them something to propagate as a way of adding value to their lives and the lives of their peers.
• The power of incentives. Moms are still the primary budgeters and spenders in the household, so deals and incentives are effective tools; but they also grew up in the gaming generation. To resonate with these tech-savvy women, consider incorporating gaming mechanics into your marketing. Tying the incentive to offline action, such as making positive lifestyle changes, adds some social currency to the deal.
• Impact is paramount. Coupling attractive rewards with competitions, challenges and pledges that tie to meaningful action can generate extended engagement. Making that action measurable and trackable satisfies this generation’s desire to make a global positive difference and measure the impact.

How has your brand brought social and environmental causes into your online marketing efforts?

Here’s the latest on Twitter ads from AdAge (and see our opinion on it all below):

Twitter is “enhancing” its promoted tweets feature, the company announced in a blog post today, to help make sure users don’t miss promoted updates from the brands they follow.

For those brands who choose to buy into this the new feature, Twitter will place the brand’s tweets at the top of a user’s stream — only on Twitter.com for now — so that no matter when the user logs in or refreshes his or her screen, the latest update from a brand the user follows will appear at the top of the timeline. Typical tweets are easy to miss if users aren’t looking at their screen. The paid tweets will only appear once and can be dismissed from the timeline with a single click.

Twitter said it will limit the amount of ads a user may see in a given period of time, but it hasn’t settled on a specific boundary. Insiders say users could see as many as four or five ads in a session, provided they already follow the brands placing sponsored tweets.

Initial testing will include about 20 marketers, including Virgin America, Sephora and Starbucks, which will each be bidding to push their ads into a user’s timeline. That means a marketer could be bidding against no one, or against 20 other brands if there are enough users who follow that many companies.

Brands bid on a per-engagement price and only pay when the user engages with the promoted tweet — in other words, the tweet costs money only when users click, reply, favorite or retweet the tweet.

I personally think Twitter ads are quite successful. When I see a promoted tweet, it always stands out and perhaps because of the succintness, brands seem to be offering relevant and meaningful offers and information. It doesn’t seem intrusive nor does it seem to be an ad – something more intimate and in between.

Have you experimented with Twitter ads

Pepsi is going to try. They just introduced  a “social” vending machine that lets users buy beverages for friends by delivering a code that can be redeemed at any such machine.

“Our vision is to use innovative technology to empower consumers and create new ways for them to engage with our brands, their social networks and each other at the point of purchase,” said Mikel Durham, chief innovation officer at PepsiCo Foodservice. “Social Vending extends our consumers’ social networks beyond the confines of their own devices and transforms a static, transaction-oriented experience into something fun and exciting they’ll want to return to, again and again.”

Hm… perhaps this would work well in schools, but if I were going to buy something for my friends, I don’t know that I would buy them a pop over offering to grab a coffee. Perhaps not every experience needs to be social?

What do you think – is this going too far or is it the next big thing?

Not everyone agrees that social commerce has taken off – or will. We talked recently about how Forrester said that commerce would not be driven by Facebook.

And while we disagreed, we also know that a Facebook like is not social commerce. Here’s another synopsis on why social commerce has not quite made it to the big leagues yet, and what you can do it about, from Ad Age’s Judy Shapiro:

Agree or not — no one can debate that social commerce has not really happened yet no matter how cool Mashable or TechCrunch describe a new marketing technology. Is it too much to ask for these technologies to be designed to sell something — anything? Or, how about, just for a change, we stop chasing the ever elusive “Producers” or “Influentials” or whatever we call them and we get down to the business of actually selling them stuff online? Why does it seem like “cool” marketing technology and “commerce” are mutually exclusive?

I can’t say for sure but here’s an observation — marketing technology is rarely built by marketers. Most often it is built by entrepreneurs who know how to make it cleverly cool, but who don’t get the commerce/ social link yet. This means we end up with technologies which marketers then must contort into measurable programs (a huge challenge right there) that they hope they might actually drive a sale (at some undefined and hard to measure future point in time).

That’s a real pity because, well applied, the real beneficiaries of commerce ready marketing technology are not just big companies, but lots and lots of smaller e-tailers (translate this to lots and lots of market potential).

Some of the cleverest tech companies are recognizing the huge market potential of merging local, mobile and social to drive commerce. Take these two examples. First is the recent deal between Addoway, the online trusted “social” marketplace and Reply/Buy, a mobile platform that lets users actually purchase product via phones. These companies have come together to curate a user experience that makes m-commerce almost frictionless (hooray). Or, take the example of a company called Big Door. This is a tech company that creates mini toolbars based on gaming theory so every action lets visitors earn points redeemable for products. It’s the first toolbar I have seen that drives commerce forward (double hooray since most mini toolbars just enhance the share function).

I agree with Shapiro that it will be the user experience that next defines the next era of the social web, not the utilization of Facebook.

“A recent Grocery Manufacturers Association study found that 62% of shoppers search for deals digitally before at least half of their shopping trips. While traditional media still plays an important role in shaping purchase decisions, marketers need to add proactive social marketing programs to their promotional strategies,” argues a new report from BzzAgent.

The study shows that social marketing most definitely affects loyalty, with one case study reporting a 37% increase in program membership, a 55% increase in loyalty transactions and a 75% growth in dollars spent per cardholder.

Those are some pretty impressive reasons to integrate your social strategy with your loyalty marketing. You can learn more and download the full report here.