To help you better understand how Hispanic consumers feel about social care, and in turn, how you can best relate to them, I’m happy to share new data that NM Incite released during their January 17th webinar: Reinvigorate Your Customer Service with Social Care to Build a Consumer-Centric Brand.

Building on Nielsen research conducted in early 2012, which identified Hispanics as one of the most social and digitally active demographic segments, NM Incite’s recent State of Social Media Customer Service study shows that Hispanic social media users are 21% more likely than the average U.S. social media user to use social care. In fact, over 57% of active Hispanic social media users have asked a question or voiced a complaint/issue to a brand or company using social media (e.g. Twitter or Facebook), compared to 47% of the general population.

Hispanic social care users also more frequently engage with brands for service-related issues compared to the general social media population. Nineteen percent (19%) reach out on a daily basis, 30% seek customer care weekly, 16% a few times a month, and the remaining 35% once a month or less.

Moreover, Hispanic consumers are nearly 25% more likely than the general social media population to prefer using social care compared to traditional channels such as a call center. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Hispanic social media users assert that they would rather Tweet at a company or post on a brand’s Facebook wall, compared to picking up the phone.

In addition to high usage rates and stronger preferences for social care, Hispanic consumers are also nearly 21% more likely than the general population to recommend a brand or company after their social care experience, creating a strong incentive for marketers that want to leverage positive word-of-mouth.

Hispanic consumers are most likely to comment on or ask a question about a company’s product or service on Facebook, followed by Twitter and YouTube. However, compared to the general social media population, Hispanics show a significantly stronger preference for Twitter and YouTube, with 26% of Hispanic consumers saying that are likely to reach out to company’s Twitter handle, compared to 13% of the general population.

Overall, social care is a more frequent, important and impactful part of the Hispanic consumers social media persona – which demonstrates the importance of offering and delivering quality social care for companies or brands that want to target this growing and valuable demographic segment.

Facebook remains the top social network, but new social media sites continue to emerge and catch on

Facebook remains the most-visited social network in the U.S. via PC (152.2 million visitors), mobile apps (78.4 million users) and mobile web (74.3 million visitors), and is multiple times larger than the next largest social site across each platform. The site is also the top U.S. web brand in terms of time spent, as some 17% of time spent online via personal computer is on Facebook.

The number of social media networks consumers can choose from has exploded, and too many sites to count are adding social features or integration. Facebook and Twitter continue to be among the most popular social networks, with Twitter’s unique audience growing substantially year-over-year on mobile apps (134%) and mobile web (140%).

Mobile is still the trend

Data shows that the proliferation of mobile devices and connectivity are helping to fuel the continued growth of social media. The computer remains the predominant device for social media access, but consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web increased 63% in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

How does the continued growth of engaged social networking consumers play a role in your marketing plans for 2013?

So what are people saying? The overwhelming majority of social media conversation about these two shopping day anomalies was driven by consumers sharing deals and talking about deals. 3% of all Black Friday buzz and 4% of all Cyber Monday buzz were driven by general consumer enthusiasm for the shopping days. Interestingly, while there was no negative buzz about Cyber Monday, 10% of conversations about Black Friday were negative, driven largely by consumer complaints about crowds, violence and lackluster sales. The top shared link within Black Friday buzz was the Amazon Black Friday Deals page, which offered Black Friday deals for a whole week rather than a single day.

So, what does all of this mean for retailers? With 2012 Black Friday store sales down year-over-year (according to The New York Times), Black Friday online sales up 21% (according to IMB Smarter Commerce), increasing negative Black Friday buzz, and higher-than-expected Cyber Monday sales (according to IMB Smarter Commerce), perhaps retailers should think about shifting their marketing and advertising budgets toward more online and mobile-friendly initiatives next year. That said, there is still a strong loyalty among Black Friday fans given that the top positive driver of social media conversation focused on enjoying the shopping experience (even trumping “saving money” as a topic of choice).

Through our own work with clients on the topic of social customer service (or what we call “social care”), there are three questions we consistently hear across industries:

1. Are consumers really turning to social media for customer service?
2. What is the impact of positive/negative social care performance on my brand/company?
3. How should I begin to implement or enhance existing social care efforts?

This blog post is the first in a series of three, and focuses on analyzing who is actually using social media to reach out to brands and companies with customer service issues.

Based on findings from NM Incite’s newly released State of Social Customer Service Report, we know that nearly half of all social media users (47%) use social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to reach out to a brand or company with a question or issue. Social care use is especially high among younger age groups, and still remains significant among older social media users.

The decision to have a social media presence is synonymous with offering social care – if a customer is able to contact your company via branded Twitter or Facebook pages, then they will expect a rapid response to their questions and complaints. What’s more, even if your company does not have a branded presence, consumers may still post issues and complaints across non-branded sites, and expect the same quick and effective service response.

In addition to high overall usage rates, nearly 1 in 10 social care users reach out to a brand or company on a daily basis, an additional 21% engage on a weekly basis, and a further 21% do so a few times a month. This frequency is especially striking given that social media customer service was non-existent four years ago, and today many people engage with social care as an ongoing habit. Furthermore, compare this high social care incidence to usage rates for traditional customer service channels, such as a call center. Do consumers typically call a customer service phone number on a daily basis? In most cases, the answer is no.

Understanding that customer service interactions are inherently more frequent on social media compared to other platforms is incredibly important for brands and companies – especially because very active social care users are likely to have a far-reaching social graph as well as the desire and ability to significantly impact a brand’s perception by sharing their positive (or negative) customer experiences with others.

So what is it about social media that makes consumers want to engage with companies about service issues on a frequent basis? Perhaps it’s the ease of access (consumers already spend a significant part of their day interacting with social media), or the lack of having to wait on hold or navigate through a confusing series of phone prompts in order to actually reach a human customer service rep. Regardless of the individual motivations for use, we know that roughly one in three social media users actually prefer social care compared to phone customer service.

This high incidence and preference for social care compared to traditional customer service will have significant implications for all customer-facing companies, and raises multiple questions about scope, resourcing and employee training, and overall customer service strategy. Here’s what you need to consider in each of these three areas:

• Social Care Scope – If you are a global brand or company, do you offer 24/7 customer service across multiple languages, like KLM airlines (@KLM)? Or do you follow the example of Citibank (@AskCiti), and limit active customer service to one language during specific hours of the day? Do you provide customer service on Twitter and Facebook, or create a dedicated platform just for customer service (versus other marketing/branding initiatives)? Answering these questions takes deliberate, data-driven, in-depth analysis, and a thorough understanding of your customer’s social care needs. Companies need to assess their landscape and develop a staged plan for launching a social media customer service program.
• Resourcing & Employee Training – How do you staff and train your employees for this new world of customer service? Do you empower all employees to actively monitor and respond to branded and unbranded conversations? Or do you limit these responses to trained members of a “social care team?” Moreover, what internal (or third party) skill-sets are required to develop and ensure ongoing success of social care efforts? For example, I recently spoke on a panel at New York Advertising Week that was focused on “leveraging big data,” and many attendees asserted that their organizations simply did not have the internal resources to make sense of the huge amount of social media data they collect, let alone develop a sound social care strategy or measure the impact of their online customer service efforts. Creating internal buy-in in order to hire, train and effectively support your social care team is an essential first step, most effectively supported through a fact-based and compelling “business case for social care.”
• Overall Customer Service Strategy – Is offering social care likely to increase the total number of customer service queries because more customers feel empowered to reach out through social media? And what is the implication on lifetime customer value and ongoing cost to serve? Where should social care sit within your overall customer service offering – within operations, marketing, or as a separate entity? As an organization, should you encourage customers to reach out via social care, or still maintain an offline support presence? In the past, service operations have typically not been the most dynamic and innovative area of a business – but we’re seeing a major shift in consumer behavior that will require significant change to the way service operations does business.

 
Simply put, it’s obvious that social care is becoming commonplace among social media users. Social care cannot be viewed as a siloed effort or a passing fad – it’s here to stay and must be integrated within your company’s overall customer service strategy.

Is your company engaging in social care? What challenges or successes have you experienced?

In the first two parts of this segmentation series, we defined social media segmentation and discussed various approaches to take with it depending on your business. This blog post covers implementation – how do you do it?

Social media enables marketers to conduct sophisticated consumer segmentation along the following dimensions:

• Behavioral. This is perhaps the most novel aspect of social media segmentation. In essence, you can segment consumers into the stages of the Consumer Decision Journey (CDJ) based on the content of their messages. For a credit card company marketing to small business owners, for example, you can segment the market into people considering starting a business, people that recently established a small business and are managing first year risks, and into established small business owners looking for growth. By comparing your share of voice across each stage of the CDJ versus competitors, you can make fact-based decisions on where to invest your marketing resources. One auto manufacturer, for example, found that it was getting an outsized share of voice for the Consideration stage (i.e., outsized relative to its market share), but that the advantage was not cascading into the higher-level stages of Evaluation and Purchase. The learnings led to more tactical marketing efforts to spur showroom visits and identify buyers nearing a window of purchase. The technique used for this type of consumer segmentation is semantic analysis on message content and intent.
• Demographic & Psychographic. Social conversations take place across hundreds of thousands of blogs, boards and, of course, social networks. By constructing ‘panels’ of specific sites, you can isolate social media discussions to a particular demographic or niche group. This approach lends itself well to segmentation by age, ethnicity, household income and similar demographic segments. If you want to understand Hispanic moms for example, you might construct a panel that includes the top social sites that cater specifically to the segment. Analyzing conversations for Hispanic moms reveals that many women are concerned with and seek advice on raising bilingual children and on staying true to their Hispanic culture.
   
  It also works well for psychographic dimensions. A great example is looking at how Apple loyalists perceived the camera feature in the iPhone 4s. Their social discussions – gleaned from Apple-loyalist sites – indicate an intent to have the phone replace their traditional cameras. This discussion is different from the general discussion about the phone’s camera feature across all other online and social sites.
• Geographic. Social networks are increasingly going mobile. As the majority of social network interactions emanate from a mobile phone or tablet, it is possible to segment the audience and messages by geography. This can have immediate operational benefits. For example, customers are increasingly expressing their dissatisfaction with customer service on Twitter (e.g., banks, cable companies, retailers). In addition to responding to these social expressions, companies can now aggregate the messages by geography to determine if there are specific causes of poor service levels that had not been identified through traditional customer service feedback.

 
Have you used social to enhance your consumer segmentation techniques? We look forward to hearing from you.
 

A newer law passed in Australia and Thailand (and perhaps soon in New Zealand) indicates that if derogatory or defamatory content is posted on a brand’s social media page or blog, whether the brand posted it or not, the company can be held liable and subject to legal ramifications if they do not remove the post within a reasonable amount of time. Avoiding a discussion on any ethical implications this law may involve in terms of certain freedoms we may consider a natural born right, the issue of negative content on company social media outlets is something worth taking a moment to consider.

It is well known that customers want to feel connected to the brands they purchase. The entire consumer decision journey – from the initial decision through the evaluation stage to actual purchase – should be layered with positive brand interaction, whether it be direct contact with the brand, or with consumers conversing with each other about their brand experiences. A recent Nielsen study indicates that 56% of consumers use social media at least once a week to learn more about brands, products and services. So what happens when a potential customer does their social media research and happens upon derogatory content on a brand’s page, whether it’s directed at the brand or at someone or something unrelated to the brand? Negative associations tend to have a ripple effect.

So realistically, what can you do to prevent or curb the effect of negative content posted to your branded Facebook page, Twitter handle or company blog? First, understand that risks come in many forms and prepare for them; two risks include a changing regulatory landscape, in the case of the aforementioned countries, and consumer activism.

Why should you care about mitigating social media risk? There are several reasons, but put simply…

• Just one negative post about a brand can wipe out the effect of five positive posts – which affects your customers’ purchase decisions (M. Corstjens, A Umblijs. The Power of Evil. Forthcoming, September 2012. Journal of Advertising Research.).
• Next to relying on peers, social media is one of the most trusted sources of purchase information. Ninety-two percent of people trust recommendations from people they know. Seventy percent trust consumer opinions posted online (Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey , Q3 2011).
• As more and more consumers turn to social media and express their brand experiences online, the lines between marketing and customer service are becoming blurred. There’s an emerging need to move some sort of customer service into the social media world, these days referred to as social care.

 
How can you start mitigating social media risks?

• Monitor social media channels. Take an active role on your channels. Do research to understand what your consumers are talking about. Discover risky situations or negative experiences before they spin out of control.
• Identify brand influencers. Whether you like it or not, you’re bound to have influential social media gurus that either advocate for your brand or become a brand detractor. Institute social media research to find these individuals and engage them. Find your detractors and help solve their issues, and find your advocates so you can help them amplify their reach and passion for your brand.
• Formulate a crisis plan in case a person’s post sets off a negative social media windstorm. How will you respond? In what instances will you take the conversation offline? In what instances will you perhaps ignore a type of comment? What processes will you put in to place to discover backlash occurring on social media?
• Develop social media guidelines for your company. While employees can be your best advocates, in many instances their posts can have an unintentional negative impact on your brand.
• Openly display your brand’s social media rules. Even if negative comments do pop up, unrelated to your brand, explaining that you do not condone those types of posts may go a long way.

What kind of risks have you encountered?

Customer service performance constitutes one of the key dimensions of brand health, and directly impacts customer acquisition, share of wallet and loyalty. Gauging customer service performance used to require private feedback loops with an inherent time lag. But those days are gone. Today, customers tweet publicly and instantaneously about customer service experiences they have in any channel (in-person, phone, email, online and social media – known as social care). They are also brutally honest about their feelings. Unlike traditional surveys that poll a consumer’s service experience and include a spectrum of satisfaction, tweets are predominantly binary and convey either highly positive or negative emotional views. Analyzing these posts unveils a simple and transparent barometer for how your company’s customer service is doing across the board. The Customer Service Sentiment (CSS) score, developed by NM Incite, gives companies a score that reflects the level of positive sentiment customers have toward that company’s customer service efforts. The higher the score, the more satisfied the customers are with their experiences.

Now, on to the results. For this analysis, we sampled tweets for 13 of the top financial services players to calculate their CSS scores. Surprisingly, the results reveal a significant gap between the strongest and weakest performers. This was a bit unexpected given that products and services in the financial services industry are often viewed as being commoditized. Discover, Ally, TD Bank and Citi all had a CSS of greater than 50%, with Discover topping the set at 79% positive mentions. At the low end of the spectrum was a major bank with a CSS of only 24% positive mentions, representing a gap of 55% vs. the top performer.

Despite a somewhat negative perception of banks among consumers, it turns out that some brands are actually driving a highly positive brand image via customer service.

RT @aghannamarie: Thank you Karen @askciti . You were polite, professional & very helpful. Customer service like this is what everyone s …

— Citi (@AskCiti) January 20, 2012

Digging deeper, the public nature of Twitter allows us to go beyond the positive/negative split of CSS and determine the number of followers for each Twitter handle that posts a message. At a high level, this provides insight into how many followers are being exposed to customer service mentions, adding another layer to the impact of these scores. Across all the financial services companies in our analysis, we found that the average customer service mention was broadcast to over 1,800 followers, confirming the notion that an angry customer can have a serious impact that may ultimately turn a customer service problem into a marketing problem for brands. As a next step, we were able to look at the average follower counts broken out by positive vs. negative tweets, which shed light on another interesting disparity between companies.

Brands with the most positive CSS scores also appeared to have a much higher average follower count for positive tweets vs. negative tweets. On closer examination, it became clear that this was being driven by banks “re-tweeting” positive mentions to their generally large follower base. This in turn appeared to create a disproportionate improvement in the overall perception of the bank’s services. Conversely, some of the brands with more negative CSS scores were actually being undermined by influencers who had a large Twitter following and were on a mission against the company. These negative influencers were proactively seeking out posts that mentioned a negative service experience and then re-tweeting them to further their agenda.

This research pinpoints some key takeaways for brands. While the initial research is specific to Financial Services, the principles can span industries:

• If monitored on a continuous basis, the CSS metric can provide a cost-effective, real-time snapshot of a company’s customer service efforts that can be benchmarked and measured against over time.
• Once CSS tracking has been set up, deeper analysis of the tweets can then be used to identify and track service performance at the level of individual issues.
• There is an opportunity for brands to become savvier and start amplifying positive mentions to a wide audience through re-tweeting. Taken even further, the opportunity can become an imperative in situations where there is an adversary focused on amplifying negative service experiences.

 
Are these opportunities being leveraged at your company to improve brand health? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

In a recent article in American Banker, Sean Sposito looks at the growing trend of banks tapping social media to drive their marketing and customer service efforts. Noting that, “The practice has only recently filtered into the financial services industry, and the largest players in the past several years have just grasped the benefits it could have for business,” Sposito touches on two critical use cases deployed by some of the world’s biggest banks:

• Product Innovation: BBVA Compass is a pioneer in mining social for product and service enhancements. According to John Wessman, BBVA Compass’ executive vice president and chief marketing officer, BBVA gets “daily insights into consumer reaction to the bank and its competitors. The software we use has sped up BBVA Compass’ reaction to other trends, as well. Over the past two months, the bank has started to consider raising the cash back rewards on its credit cards because one of its larger rivals was receiving positive sentiment on its benefits.” (By the way, I couldn’t help but mention that these insights do happen to come from NM Incite.)
• Improve Marketing Efficiency by Merging Data Sources: American Express recognized the need to merge traditional market research metrics with social media research and analysis. Christopher J. Frank, Amex’s vice president of its global marketing insights group, stated that “you look at consumer confidence intervals. You look at the overall mood. And we wanted to make sure that we really understood that, and not just from the American Express point of view, but what is on the minds of our customers.” Social media provides an avenue to quickly get a deeper understanding of your consumers – really know their needs, behaviors and wants – so you can confidently develop your marketing strategy.

Kudos to banks leading the charge in social media research. In addition to product development and the ability to devise, implement and alter marketing strategies in real-time, we think there is a 3^rd opportunity for banks to leverage social. The previously (and sometimes currently) “paralyzed” bank marketer is all too familiar with “I hate Bank XYZ, F*** them, I can’t believe how terrible and impersonal their service is!” popping up on Twitter or the company’s Facebook page. Companies that aren’t geared up for effective social care – a system for companies to regularly provide customer service through social media platforms – will suffer at the hands of the angry consumer and the depth of the consumer’s social network. In fact, McKinsey research shows that one negative post on social media can counteract the effect of five positive posts – so implementing effective social care is critical to the bottom line. Just imagine a world where social media could not only help mitigate negative sentiment, but actually grow and promote positive sentiment  to enhance brand reputation, deepen customer engagement, and even lower costs.

It’s critical for Financial Services marketers to embrace social to win in an industry facing ever-changing regulation, limited product differentiation, and a weakened economic environment. These are three clear opportunities among others I’m sure. I’d love to hear about other examples of how banks can tap social to drive competitive advantage.
 

Let’s say you want to benchmark your brand vs. competitors and vs. itself so you can track brand health over time. Your initial findings show dramatic spikes in buzz for your brand, suggesting certain promotions are working. Months later you want to invest more in this research and analyze this data for qualitative insights, but wait, where are the messages? You realize that fifty-percent of the data you were basing decisions on was SPAM and generated by bots, 3% of the messages were duplicates of each other and 10% had absolutely nothing to do with your brand. Lots of social media data for the analysis? Yes. Relevant, trust-worthy, reliable findings? No.

All the data in the world is meaningless unless you know it is clean, reliable and accurate. You need the reassurance that what you’re collecting won’t skew your findings and result in poor decision-making. To help, we put together a short guide of what to look for when evaluating your social data options. Social media’s big advantage is that it represents authentic consumer expressions. However, there are a number of data issues to watch out for. Let me take you through some pitfalls and how to work around them.

How do I know what true, quality social media data looks like?
To be a serious marketing player in social media research, you need to ensure you’re getting the best combination of reach and accuracy. Reach means pulling in every single piece of content possibly available. Accuracy means balancing the breadth with relevancy. Here are the critical questions you should ask a company:

• How is the data collected? Is it all machine-based or is there a human element?
• How flexible is the data-mining technology?
• What type of SPAM detection filters are employed?
• Does the data come from third-party sources?
• How are new sites detected? How quickly are they brought online?
• How flexible are keyword searches and search filters?

Data Collection
Most data-mining applications work the same – they put out spiders and crawl the online world by pulling back everything they can get, but they often can’t get to everything. That’s why you need a human component to identify the sites that don’t get captured by web crawlers. Many popular sites also frequently change the way companies can collect their data, which can impact data integrity. To avoid this, you need a team on hand for real-time manual adjustments so there’s no interruption in data collection.

The flexibility of the data-mining technology also comes into play. Many platforms employ a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning that when it starts crawling a particular board, it won’t collect all the messages, just the ones it sees first until it hits its message threshold. For these instances, there should be a specialized team that can reconfigure the tool to capture all the messages.

Be watchful for and wary of companies that rely on third-party sources for data; research indicates that 80% of players in the space use third party commodity data providers. Third-parties aren’t always reliable; they can drop sources without notice, which will skew your findings. They also apply a ‘lazy man’s’ approach to data collection. They pull in as much volume as they can using collection services, not taking into consideration the relevance or reach of a source, and also possibly missing highly relevant, industry-specific sources not captured by collection services. The signal to noise ratio doesn’t look good here.

Data Hygiene
Effective SPAM detection is critical. All data collection should be using a machine-based learning algorithm. Machine-learning technologies get fed thousands of messages that qualify as SPAM. It then self-learns what different types of SPAM messages look like and weeds them out of the dataset. This detection is effective for blogs, boards and groups, but Twitter is a whole other beast. Twitter SPAM detection should be rule-based. Rule-based detection effectively weeds out messages from bots by checking a user’s profile for certain characteristics, such as no followers or a handle with no associated name.

Companies that offer flexible keyword (classifier) tools and filtering options provide an extra layer of accuracy and relevancy protection. For example, research indicates that in healthcare, 92% of cleaned messages are still irrelevant – so you need this flexibility. Not all SPAM can always be removed and believe it or not, not all messages that have your product or brand name in them are relevant, especially if it includes a common term (e.g., analysis on Snickers candy bar). Tools that use Boolean Logic allow you to get extremely specific with what you want to pull in; an added bonus is the availability to use proximity operators (you can tell the tool that you want “x” to be with a certain number of words from “z;” for example, if you want information on vanilla lattes, you tell the tool that “vanilla” has to appear with 3 words of “latte” to account for phrases such as “I had a latte; it was vanilla,” or “that vanilla spice latte was so delicious!”). And tools that allow you to apply segment filters give you even more relevance (segment filters allow you to search only on sources that are known to focus on specific topics or are comprised of certain target demographics). See figure below:

Finally, another bonus is analyst input. If there are lots of people working with the social media data on a daily basis, it’s easier to identify if some sites are being crawled appropriately or if the data isn’t entirely clean. With this constant feedback, the crawlers and machine-learning SPAM detection can be updated quickly.

How has the quality of data your company worked with affected your results?
 

• How do I segment my consumers/markets into groups that will allow me to identify their needs?
• What are the purchase drivers and the decisions made along the way?
• What is the emotional connection my customers have with my brand and how do I tap into that?
• What attributes does my brand have that are unique to the competitive set and how can I uncover this to build loyalty?

 
As marketers try to determine the role and return on investment of using social platforms to address business problems, and with the allocation of research spend now more heavily anchored on online activities, the need for more advanced and informative analytics proves to be critical. You need to be able to segment, identify and target customers effectively, and then track performance against your custom business KPI’s. While the process of research remains the same – the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis and dissemination of information to assist with decision-making – social media offers a means to enhance and improve the process.

Understandably, research analysts are almost paralyzed by the volume of data sources and methodologies at their disposable. The sheer amount of data, riddled with uncertainty on how to ensure you’re getting the best quality data and metrics provides enough instability to create the perfect storm. In the coming weeks, we’ll explore specific factors you should consider when approaching your data analysis.

In the meantime, how has your company prepared itself to embrace social media research?