Social Customer Experience: Engage and Retain Customers through Social Media

Social Customer Experience: Engage and Retain Customers through Social Media builds on the prior works of author Dave Evans. As an update to Evans’s earlier book Social Media Marketing, the new Social Customer Experience connects the early cases presented in 2010 with significant, contemporary examples, key concepts, and best practices associated with the adoption of social technology by global brands. This latest edition offers a blueprint for transforming your organization’s disparate social initiatives into a unified social experience strategy. Most people know that social technologies are transforming business, but few understand how those changes are happening across the organization. Whether in marketing, communications, customer care, digital media or product development these changes shape the way in which business manage the experience their customers have with the brand. Filled with practical examples of what to do, and illustrated with cases taken from real companies, Social Customer Experience fills in the gaps for companies who want to do more with social than just listen and experiment.

Part I lays the groundwork by explaining the three waves of change that combine to form social customer experience: social technologies and their impact on Web 1.0 digital infrastructures; social customers and their impact on marketing and support operations; and the new discipline of customer experience management that is reframing the old sales-and-service-centric ways of thinking about how companies relate to customers. Part I concludes by defining the social customer experience ecosystem, both on and off your own web domain.

Part II, “Your Social Presence,” puts you on the ground, with tactics and examples for how to apply social technologies and achieve your business objectives, how to measure and analyze social data and show business value, and how to implement a best-practice approach to avoid common traps and pursue proven opportunities.

Part III digs deeper into the five building blocks of social customer experience: organization, platform, content, people and tools. What’s a social experience organization look like? What systems need to be in place? How do you get the most out of the social “objects” – content and other assets – that are the byproduct of great social customer experiences? How do connections between customers – the social graph – come into play? And what applications will you use – literally, what will you empower your customers to do? Part III answers these questions in the practical, method-driven style of authors Dave Evans and Joe Cothrel.

Social Customer Experience features detailed exercises that show you how to translate learning into action, hands-on tutorials using today’s social media tools and platforms, and compelling, modern case studies from organizations of all sizes—from the Fortune 500 to nonprofits and mom-n-pop main-street shops. As a bonus, the book also features resources and references to connect readers with the current thought leaders and sources of timely information.

If you’re interested in business, and how business is being reshaped by social technology, Social Customer Experience will show you a path to a new relationship with your customers, customers not only buy your products and services but get more out of them and go on to become partners in your business–selling, supporting, and innovating on your behalf.

Dave Evans is VP, Social Strategy at Lithium and author of the bestseller Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. Evans has served on the advisory board for ad:tech, and the measurement and metrics council for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Joe Cothrel is Lithium’s Chief Community Officer and has worked with more than 300 companies using online communities to create productive relationships with customers, partners, and employees.