At F8, Facebook.com ’s developers conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, announced the use of plug-ins designed to embed its social networking service into third-party sites. As the FinancialTimes.com reported, “The initiative is designed to put people at the center of their web experiences by providing more meaningful connections.”

Companies might like the idea because –with the more than 400M members, Facebook’s plugins could drive a lot of traffic.

The “Like” Button

How does it work? Let’s say a Facebook user was on a website. They would be able to click on a “Like” button –on stories or products they want to share with friends. Their friends would see a pop-up window that shows their friend’s activity on the site and allows them to share comments.

As the NewYorkTimes.com story said, “It would, in essence, allow Facebook friends to enjoy those sites together.” If you want to follow some additional great coverage of F8 and other tech news, check out @benparr – he’s got the goods.

Focusing on the Big Picture of Social Business

As many of my readers know… I am very focused on the customer-facing aspects of social media. That means that I always have a keen eye towards wondering what each of the new developments will mean to companies and their ability to enhance or at least maintain their customers’ experiences — i.e., in particular their ability to deliver a quality brand-equity enhancing experience –otherwise known as customer service.

While the idea of the plug-ins theoretically sounds like a great idea… it could also lend itself to a PR nightmare. Let’s say for instance, that someone is sharing about something. And let’s say that a number of those people weighing in on that shared product or service are not too happy. What could happen is a spiraling of unhappy customers sharing their unhappy experiences.

So what can companies do as they adopt the Facebook (FB) “Like” button? Get a little satisfaction.

What do I mean by that? For many companies, their Fan Pages or in this case,  extended fan experiences are or will become a company’s “other” homepage. Companies are finding that these “fans” or customers  spend a significant amount of time on FB and thus are possibly a great way to engage their most social customers.

More Engagement Means Doing Less of “The Ostrich”

What I predict will happen, is that, as more and more companies are embedding these “Like” buttons — not only will they increase engagement… they are likely to also increase the amount of feedback. While many Facebook-type initiatives are started as a PR/Marketing effort, the social net has become a place where consumers can scream very loudly and to millions about their disdain for a company’s products, service and overall attitude towards customers.

This addition of inter-connectivity or third-party FB “Like” buttons doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t adopt the “Like” button. But it does mean that you need to be strategically ready to handle the additional customer service issues that are likely to explode.

And note that adding a “Like” button IS NOT the cause of more customer service issues. If the issues are there, they are being talked about — at the watercooler, at the cocktail party and somewhere on the internet. So its not about whether you adopt the “Like” button, its about whether you take your head out of the sand and stop doing the “ostrich.” Stop pretending that your company, its products, its services and they way it handles customer issues isn’t being talked about. It is. Start thinking strategically about how you are going to handle them.

Don’t Under Estimate The Need For Customer Service Interactions

Customers view your Facebook Fan Page-type interactions as another channel to interact with you on. And they assume that you– the brand –will be there to answer their questions, acknowledge their ideas, etc…   But companies who are not planning ahead often underestimate the need to provide service & support via the fan page-type initiatives.

I’ve worked with many PR and Marketing professionals who didn’t anticipate the amount of Customer Service they ended up doing when they interacted with customers via social media. By not planning ahead and supporting all you social media channels properly, you can essentially alienate your most social customers.

Facebook Fan Pages have roadblocks that make it hard to serve/engage customers. For instance:

• The Wall has no search function (This translates into  costly, repetitive responses)
• Information on the wall has no permanence–as engagement/activity increases the wall “turns over” faster.  (This means there is (limited exposure of valuable content to fans and companies are having to answer the same questions over and over — inefficient & ineffective… (In addition, This means that there is limited value to internal teams/systems to garner that value information and feedback to make changes, improve products and services, etc…)
• The information is “locked” inside of Facebook — ( That means no SEO, and you can’t use that information other places ([brand site for example])

What is a Company to Do? Getsatisfaction.com

Here’s what I think the real news is: Get Satisfaction has partnered with Involver to solve these problems by building an app that recreates Get Sat within the Fan Page. What does this combo provide? Here’s a couple of advantages:

• Allows users to search to see if question has already been asked (benefits both company & customer).
• Since the information is stored in the Cloud, the Fan Page content can be syndicated to other places (search engines, community on a brand page, etc…)

If Facebook is part of your social media business strategy, then you’ll want to think strategically about how all of your functional disciplines are affected. (Note: I did not say functional departments. I am encouraging clients to move away from functional silo’s and think in terms of social business.

Social business means that you are considering how all social interactions affect your company — every single person, department and especially how they manifest in your customer’s experiences.

If you want to learn more and join an interesting discussion TODAY on social business, check out the Facebook Social Engagement Hub Webinar.  Here’s a link to it:  http://bit.ly/SEH-GetSat

It’s at 11 AM PST TODAY. I’ll be there. Will you?

Luv to hear your thoughts about these new developments on Facebook and how your company is leveraging them.

Learn. Share. Grow.

Dr. Natalie

Follow me on twitter — www.twitter.com/drnatalie

GetSatisfaction.com Newest Addition: Involver

From all the posts, comments and tweets, we all know that customer service needs to shift. Is social media the way the shift will happen? That remains to be seen, although there are already hundreds of companies going in this direction.

Would love to hear your thoughts and comments!

If you are still wondering if there is an ROI, check out this presentation on slideshare.net:

ROI of Social Media

Learn. Share. Grow!
Thanks for tuning in!

Dr. Natalie

Follow me on twitter:  www.twitter.com/drnatalie

Here’s is a candid interview with Sean O’Driscoll of Ant’s Eye View:

Learn. Share. Grow!

Thanks for tuning in! Dr. Natalie

www.twitter.com/drnatalie

You can learn more about Sean at http://www.antseyeview.com/blog/

and follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/seanodmvpt

At Dreamforce Marc Benioff announced  Chatter. As both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing apps, Chatter is designed to help you connect and share information securely  in real time.

I talked to Mike Krigsman and Dion Hinchcliffe about their thoughts around the user adoption issues with Enterprise 2.0 collaboration software and platforms, change management and Knowledge Management challenges organizations face when trying to use all the social interaction data within their company as well as externally. This is part 1 of the interview:

Learn. Share. Grow!

You can follow Mike and Dion at:

http://twitter.com/mkrigsman and read his blog at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/

http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe and http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe and http://hinchcliffeandcompany.com/

and ZDNet is at: http://twitter.com/zdnetblogs

Fractal photo source:  flowtv.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/fractal.jpg

Michael shared with me the impetus for the invention. At Rockfish Interactive they build websites that pull in social media elements, one of which is Twitter feeds. The development of the Tidytweet was instigated when a site that was pulling in a certain hash tag which had been spammed. That spam ended up on the client’s homepage. So Michael came up with a monitoring engine. They quickly realized that this would have value to other people and they began to expand their development of the idea.

I asked Michael about the concept of moderating Tweets. The trend in social media is to allow people to state their thoughts, openly, honestly, authentically and genuinely. This means that if someone makes a comment on your website, your community or in Twitter, the protocol is not to just take it down because it is embarrassing. Rather the protocol is generally to allow it to stay posted. And the company is left to decide to respond and interact with the feedback.

Michael said that if someone was to do a search on a particular hash tag, that information is still in the cloud. Some of which the company might not want. What TidyTweet does is control what makes it to the client’s  web page. They filter out bad language and clear attempts to maliciously destroy a brand. Michael says that is NOT an attempt to discourage honest dialogue in the cloud. Rather if someone is bent on ruining a company by continually posting horrible things, then that’s the point at which companies might consider this product.

On well run community sites, companies have established some best practices on posting as part of their welcome package they ask newcomers to read. Perhaps something similar needs to be adopted for other social media channels. Perhaps if the comments are in the tone of “I’m frustrated, please help me1” Or “I mad as heck- and here’s what would be better if…” then those are genuine dialogues companies will be impelled to interact with. Certainly no one wants to be attacked or spammed- and that kind of behavior may not be what companies in Twitter or other channels want. It’s our cloud- our community – just like we would not litter, we might consider negative spamming in the same light.

Click here to hear more about Michael views this interesting topic. Do you agree or not?

Click here to hear about Michael’s point of view on keeping websites clean….

You can follow Michael on twitter at www.twitter.com/mpaladino

And learn more about this product by following the product on twitter at www.twitter.com/tidytweet

Learn. Share. Grow.

Sean Power, Author of Complete Web Monitoring

At web 2.o Sean was kind enough to spend a few minutes with me on the necessity of measuring your social media initiatives.

Click here to learn more about metrics and measurement by Sean: Sean Power on Measuring Web 2.0 and Social Media

You can learn much more in his book, Complete Web Monitoring, written by co-author Allister Croll. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596155148/

Complete Web Monitoring By Sean Power and Allister Croll

Follow Sean on twitter: www.twitter.com/seanpower

Follow Alistar on twitter: www. twitter.com/Acroll

Learn. Grow. Share.

You can find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/drnatalie

Brent Leary CRM and Social CRM Expert

While I as attending Oracle OpenWorld, I had a chance to talk with Brent Leary.

In this interview, Brent shares his thoughts on social CRM, where companies are and where they need to go:

• How social CRM is lending itself to  mobile devices
• How smart phones have transformed into a business phones/ nearly mini computers
• How the rise of smart phones is forwarding social CRM
• The devices he uses, including a Flip Video camera, iPhone, Blackberry, Olympus OS10, a netbook…
• The hashtag communities on twitter and how they forward in-person meetings: establishing and connecting with people you might never have gotten to know…

Click below to listen to Brent’s insights: (the video is 6 minutes long, so it may take a minute to load):

How Smart Phones Are Driving Social Media Adoption

You can follow Brent on twitter- he is at: www.twitter.com/brentleary

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

Learn. Grow. Share.

Esteban Kolsky, Social CRM Expert

Esteban told me that his opinion on whether companies will truly become “social” depends upon their ability to collect, analyze and implement social feedback- from both employees and customers.

Most of the feedback in the social cloud is unstructured. So then the question becomes how does a company make sense of this unstructured data cloud?

Esteban gives his thoughts on:

• Enterprise feedback management – the old way and the new way- via social CRM
• The need for real-time responses to customer social interactions
• The differences between monitoring customer feedback interactions and creating actionable insight: sentiment, cost, the affect and the next steps of the company based based on the feedback and comments in the cloud
• The voice of the customer, customer experience and executive oversight of integrating these into business
• The business value of adding social customer interaction feedback to your company.

Click to hear Esteban’s thoughts on measuring the value of Social CRM: (the video is ~6 minutes long- so it takes a minute to load… but be patient… its worth the wait…)

Esteban Kolsky on Measuring the Value of Social CRM

You can follow Esteban on twitter: he is at http://www.twitter.com/ekolsky

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

Learn. Grow. Share.

Anil Dewan, Director of New Media, KCRW

While at the 140tc  Conference in Los Angeles, I had the honor to interview KCRW’s Anil Dewan, Director of New Media and learn how they are using social media to attract fans,  interact with them and serve them better!

You can follow him on Twitter at @AnilDewan and you can follow KCRW on Twitter @KCRW.

Here’s the interview with Anil…

Here’s a snapshot of KCRW’s website page on “how to interact with us using social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.”

KRCW's social networking website page

This gives those that are not familiar with social media clear information on how to become a social interaction fan of KCRW.

How to Connect With KCRW on Facebook

KCRW's instructions on how to connect with them on MySpace

KCRW's Twitter Page