Advice From a Reluctant Social Media Convert

A few months ago I started to occasionally Tweet. As the head of marketing for Amdocs, I felt it was important to get out there and learn what the kids were buzzing about and what my marketing team was using as a critical new tactic. I soaked up everything I could about social media, reading books, scanning blogs and even attending Webinars! Hopefully I’ve overcome the learning curve and am less ignorant about this important paradigm shift in how we communicate, entertain, learn and increasingly conduct commercial relationships. But since it’s challenging to rapidly get up to speed in this dynamic world, I thought I’d share some thoughts and some real-life examples on how service providers are embracing social media to create a deeper connection with customers.

I see service providers today using social media in two forms – from the “outside in,” where they create tools and applications to support the social networking lifestyle and drive brand loyalty and the “inside out,” where they use social media as a low-cost tool to directly communicate with the customer, to enhance collaboration, and to enable targeted marketing campaigns.

Outside-In

Service providers are incorporating social networks into handsets and applications to meet consumers’ demand to network with friends. For example, 3 UK has launched two phones that are designed around social networking. The first, INQ1 was designed around Facebook, and two more have just launched with Twitter functionality. Verizon is launching a FiOS TV app store “Widget Bazaar” and the first two applications created for it were for Twitter and Facebook.

T-Mobile USA wants to turn its MyFaves calling feature into a social networking experience, a possible attempt to expand a service that currently allows customers unlimited calling to five numbers. "I want it to be more than just voice," said Cole Brodman, CTO at T-Mobile, to the blog GigaOM. "I want it to be a lens to our social networks." T-Mobile wants to begin pushing it out next year and it could help to increase data revenues.

Geo-aware social networks add even more to the mix. In December 2008, Vodafone Australia launched Pocket Life, a geo-aware social network. The service allows users to automatically update friends on their current location and syndicate status updates and recent activities to Facebook and MySpace. So now you can use GPS to create a route (say, for mountain biking or hiking) and share it with your friends over the network.

Inside-Out

Companies are using social network tools to feed into customer service and as a tool to reduce and control churn. This “social CRM” approach is powerful. It enables instant and direct feedback, support, and community self help, to greatly reduce support costs and improve user satisfaction by leveraging the knowledge base created by millions of subscribers.

A good example of this new social CRM paradigm is taking place at Comcast. A support rep, Frank Eliason, has been appointed to help customers out via Twitter. Here he can monitor customer issues and respond to customers directly. Often, Mr. Eliason simply refers customers to Comcast’s e-mail support address, but he is instantly available and now customers now have a direct, preferred and familiar channel to voice issues.

Outside of our industry, Virgin America’s vice president of marketing, Porter Gale, shared a story on how Virgin America invests in creating good will among its customers by simply publicly acknowledging and supporting them across the channels on which they are actively communicating. She cites an example of a passenger on a flight who recently graduated from medical school. The passenger was excitedly tweeting about her notable accomplishment and referenced that she was on the service flying @virginamerica. Instead of responding with a simple congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team re-tweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (ahh, the benefits of offering inflight Wi-Fi.) To her surprise, this tweet triggered an immediate response, “Row 11 is going to buy her a drink.” And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.

Social media marketing and social CRM will only grow in prominence as the world becomes more networked. Here at Amdocs we call this era tera-play — this is the era in the too-distant future when more than 1 trillion devices will be connected to the network. And with this device proliferation, social CRM will force us to evolve our traditional CRM strategies and to ensure they integrate with a number of systems and applications. Beyond CRM, service providers should be looking across their operations to understand the potential impact and opportunity of this new way to connect. It requires the industry to develop new strategies – from marketing to device management – and get hip to the way “the kids” and us old-school consumers (me being one!) are changing the face of communications, entertainment, and commerce.

Mike Couture is head of global marketing for Amdocs, where he leads the company’s global team of marketing professionals in the areas of market research and insight, product marketing, marketing communications, corporate marketing, regional marketing,and account-based marketing.