Who's job is it to serve the customer anyway?

An astute colleague asked me recently: "How long before social media becomes customer service? Will we have to keep dealing with customer queries all day?" She had a point.

Once you get to the nitty gritty of it, social media work looks very much like a customer service job. Once someone tweets you: "Hey, my XXX just crashed on me! Help!" If you're the social media person representing the company, you'd better bet you'll need to respond with a "Sure, let us help you with this. Could you provide this information..."

And yet, would you entrust a regular customer service person to handle your social media aliases?

There's much to be said about the blurring lines between communications, marketing and customer service. In a perfect world, they shouldn't be separate entities. Unfortunately, that's not the way most companies are organised.

So today's social media practitioner finds him/herself on the firing line of customer service. Of course, there are ways to manage the flow of enquiries and information. Setting up a separate alias to handle customer service, and having that managed by the customer service folks is one. But customers still see whatever presence you have online as an official channel of communication with your brand.

And that means, your messages and tone need to be consistent.

And that the customer comes first.

And that it's not a good idea to piss of the customer by not responding, or responding in a generally unhelpful manner.

Unfortunately for us working on Social Media, this means we will HAVE to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty. At least every once in a while.

As if we've not already got not enough time...

The latest earthquake in Chile has cut our day down by another 1.26 millionth of a second.

image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory

According to a report on National Geographic, the impact of the earthquake rocked the earth so hard that it shifted slightly on its axis, causing the shortening of the day.

I'm not a scientist, so I won't bother with the calculations. What bothers me is that the days are getting shorter. Time to focus on the most important things!

I think Google Buzz may finally be IT.

The buzz today is about Buzz. Google's, that is. The last greatly-hyped about Google experiment - Google Wave - didn't quite get the raving response we'd have expected and past social networking experiments - Orkut and the Open Social project - didn't quite scale up to the heights of Facebook and Twitter.

But check out Buzz...

...I think it's got it all. Here's why:

Gmail user base:

An old news story from the Financial Times I found puts Gmail's user base to be "more than 100 million". By comparison, Facebook's official page (as of time of writing) has its userbase at 400 million. But, I'd like to point out that having 100 million users (possibly) turned on in a very short period of time is miles ahead of having to grow organically one user at a time and presents a very real (instant) threat to Facebook.

The other point about having the Gmail user base is that Buzz intelligently identifies connections you've made (by looking at who you've emailed) and takes away the most painful part of setting up a social networking account - finding friends! In fact, if you've already been regularly emailing your friends, you'll soon be buzzing them too, I presume.

Mobile Apps:

Clearly, the next wave of social networking is going to be mobile. Apps that let you share where you are, update while standing in queue and generally be as little of a nuisance as possible while giving you meaningful connections with the people you love is what mobile is about. Checking-in on foursquare or posting a quick picture on Facebook via your mobile device means you won't forget to do it when you get home or be faced with the tedious task of uploading dozens of photos and organising them when you get home.

What's interesting is how Google has launched Buzz simultaneously into its mobile Google Maps app and taken advantage of the GPS feature on most phones to make geo-locating buzz(s?) something easy and contextual.

Simple and Natural

The third reason why I think Buzz will be a success is because of how elegant the system is. People have compared it to Twitter & FriendFeed - calling Buzz out on some very similar features. But there's nothing wrong with a little copying here and there, I say, especially if the system works.

And yet, the best thing is that Google's services help build a self-contained environment for all your content needs. Need photo uploading? Yes, Flickr will work, but so will Picasa. Video? Youtube then. BUt at the same time, it adopts open standards (thanks @paullmf for pointing out) so 3rd party developers get to use it in different ways.

Services built by others expand on Twitter's usability, but Buzz starts with them already - so that's one problem out of the way.

This is why I am not a social media guru...

... I'm a PR consultant.

Resolve to blog.

No, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. Yes, if you say a new post popping up on your RSS reader, it's real. I'm going to make a comeback on this blog.

All because KY personally challenged me.



Stay tuned!