Twitter is the latest trend in social media, and while it is still unclear how Twitter will influence and change people and business, it is clear that something is happening around micro-blogging that is worth a closer look. If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each other’s updates.

The tremendous growth that Twitter has experienced in the last months clearly shows that the service has traction and is increasingly attracting not just early adopters but also the average Internet user. Below you will find a comparison of traffic between twitter.com and cnn.com.

Since Twitter has a more open platform than Facebook, this increasing adoption opens up significant opportunities for businesses to tap into the online conversations of their customers and initiate micro-interactions with them.

Based on my close observation of Twitter (I wrote my first article about Twitter in March 2007), I have identified five use cases that demonstrate how businesses can use Twitter. Additionally, you can now follow the Customer Experience Labs on Twitter at   www.twitter.com/cxlabs.

The five use cases that I have identified are:

Voice of the Customer

When customers are talking, companies should listen, and while this has been difficult in the past, Twitter allows to listen to these conversations through various tools that allow to monitor online conversations. The easiest starting point is using Twitter search to search for conversations that include a certain term (i.e., your brand name). Popular brands such as Apple have a large volume of conversations, but there is probably somebody talking about your brand as well. Just open Twitter search, type in your brand name, and listen to the conversation. A more sophisticated tool for monitoring Twitter is monitter.com which allows to monitor three keywords at the same time.

Proactive Customer Service

After starting to listen to online conversations, the next step is to react to these conversations. While it is easy to say thanks to positive statements about your brand, a much higher impact is possible by providing proactive customer service when customer are complaining online. Here are some examples of customers complaining on Twitter:

AT&T…horrible service, not receiving e-mails on Blackberry, and their customer service is horrible. Oh well! Looking into verizon

I called Rogers customer service, couldn’t help me. Don’t even know if an existing customer can buy one at all, let alone price.

Intuit – What kind of customer service is that?

Acting on complaints like this on Twitter is extremely important because the nature of the system is to start conversations that in the case of complaints lead to negative word of mouth. Monitoring when customers express their negative experiences with a brand and initiating proactive customer service can restore customer satisfaction. All you need is to create a Twitter account, setup Twitter searches for relevant terms, and be ready to act when customers complain.

Recruitment

The social network and messaging features on Twitter not only allow to talk with customers but could also be used to find potential employees. Especially if you are working in a media or technology-related industry, Twitter provides an additional proactive recruitment channel and could help you find your next employee. Research In Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry smartphone, has recently started to actively recruit employees via Twitter. Two recruiters tap into the conversations and try to identify potential candidates on Twitter. To get an impression of how this is done, you can take a look at @BB_Recruiter and @eloisewalsh and see how they publish job opportunities and interact with potential employees.

Customer Feedback

Once you have established a sufficient followership on Twitter, you can use this channel to collect instant feedback about new products, services, and ideas. Twitter allows you, through its nature of near real-time conversations, to collect instant feedback about your organization’s activities. Here is one example of a survey done by Gillette:

uncrate: Do us a solid and take this Gillette/Uncrate Answers survey http://bit.ly/MxrUo

Of course, this feedback doesn’t need to be collected openly as a Twitter conversation. Inviting customers to give feedback through a web-based survey tool like SurveyMonkey or Google Docs Forms has become really easy.

Viral Marketing

The social network features on Twitter provide a potential channel to build viral marketing campaigns. The essential point is NOT TO USE Twitter for your viral marketing campaign but to INTEGRATE Twitter into your viral marketing campaign. This means that a business should not just try to run a campaign and spread the word through Twitter but actually integrate Twitter as a channel in the campaign. If you are doing an online campaign, you can simply create a link through to Twitter with a link to Twitter that includes a certain message.

This can be done by creating a link to Twitter that includes the status update and looks like www.twitter.com/?status=Check out the Customer Experience Labs at www.customer-experience-labs.com. This presets a Twitter message and makes it easy to spread the word with your campaign. Once your campaign spreads on to Twitter and you have Twitter integrated as a campaign channel, your campaign is ready to go viral. An example is the integration of Twitter into the streaming music service grooveshark that allows listeners to share their music on Twitter. Below is a screenshot that shows the Twitter link in the lower left corner.

Some Companies that already use Twitter

The following Twitter users are companies or represent companies that use the service to interact with customers. All of them are confirmed; you can also find a complete list of major companies on Twitter.

BBC http://twitter.com/BBC

British Airways http://twitter.com/BritishAirways

Delta http://twitter.com/deltaairlines

Intuit QuickBase http://twitter.com/IntuitQuickBase

Siemens PLM Software http://twitter.com/SiemensPLM

Capgemini http://twitter.com/Capgemini

Honda http://twitter.com/Alicia_at_Honda

Vodafone Ireland http://twitter.com/VodafoneIreland

Vodafone Germany http://twitter.com/Vodafone_de

Getting Started

The steps to get active on Twitter are simple and can be done without much effort. Simply register on Twitter and you can start to follow other users. If you don’t want to start with your company’s brand name, you can simply use your own name to see how your use of Twitter evolves. If that works out well, you can switch to an account that represents your organization. Nevertheless, registering your company name now is a good idea to ensure that nobody else can use it.
Finding users to follow can be done through the integrated user search or by doing a Twitter search with your brand name and following the users who are talking about your brand. Additionally, you can set up the auto-follow functionality based on certain keywords through services like http://www.twollo.com/.

In order to work with Twitter efficiently, you can install a desktop client like TweetDeck, which offers a lot of functionality (i.e., user search, keyword search, URL shortening) and makes Twitter really easy to use.

Spread the word

If you like this article and find it helpful, I would appreciate it if you spread the word tweet about this article.

Posted in branding, marketing, trends | Permalink | 17 Comments »

Did you ever think what your life will be in 2019? How will your company change in the coming 10 years? Will you still be working at the same company?

While it is impossible to predict the future, it is possible to envision the future and understand the factors that might influence work and life in the coming years. Personally and Professionally.

Microsoft just published a series of videos where they envision the future of work and life in the year 2019. From their websites, the Microsoft Office Labs:

Take a step into the future and get a glimpse into how technology may transform the way we live and work in the years ahead. Explore some of our concepts for how leading edge technologies might be used in real world settings – such as health care, manufacturing, banking and retail – over the next 5-10 years.

Here is the video that summarizes the different future visions.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage ">Video: Future Vision Montage </a>

Other concepts

Other concepts that are shown on their site (some of them are already a little bit older) are about using Touch Walls, Health Future Vision, Manufacturing Future Vision, Banking Future Vision and Retail Future Vision.

What is the value of such "predictions”?

First of all, these are not predictions. The future is not predicted but created – these videos should merely act as inspiration and vision to help understand what the influencing factors are.

The point is not to say that “this won’t come true” but instead “how could this come true”. Understanding the emerging technologies and evolving trends through experience prototypes provides the basis to not just image additional scenarios where these technologies might come into our lives but to actually realize them.

What are the trends that might impact your personal life, your professional life and your organization in the future? If you have never thought about it, then maybe times of economic and financial uncertainty are exactly the point where you should do this.

Image courtesy of MichaelMarlatt

Posted in customer experience, future, trends | Permalink | 1 Comment »

Trendwatching.com has published a list of top 15 questions AND answers about the most common trend-related questions. In their trend report "Top 15 Trend Questions. And Answers" they address some of the most pressing trend issues their readers are facing.

Here are the 15 questions:

• Q15: “How do I spot and apply trends?”
• Q14: “What are good trend resources?”
• Q13: “What will be the next Facebook or Google?”
• Q12: “What’s next for <insert demographic/tribe>?”
• Q11: “So how does PERKONOMICS relate to…?”
• Q10: ”What trends are affecting <insert your industry/sector>?”
• Q9: “How do I know a trend isn’t just a fad?”
• Q8: “When is the right time to act on a trend?”
• Q7: “What are the trends in <insert emerging market>?”
• Q6: “Who sets trends?”
• Q5: “How do I become a (better) trend watcher?”
• Q4: “How much influence do trend watchers have?”
• Q3: “What is a trend’s life cycle?”
• Q2: “What’s going to be big in 2009?”
• Q1: “How is the financial crisis going to impact my business?”

 

Additionally, you can check their top 5 five trend watching tips or my list of resources to spot the next consumer trend.

Read the full report.

 

Photo courtesy of ccsdteacher

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Spotting the latest consumer trends has become a major task in many corporations and more and more companies offer services that help in understand consumers and identify the next big thing that will have an impact on future products and services. I have already written about some websites that offer latest insight in consumer trends and just recently found an article written by Malcolm Gladwell about cool hunting and the search for the latest consumer trends. Even though the article is already 10 years old, the principles are still valid. If you have read his book “The Tipping Point” you will recognize a few of the case studies in this article.

The article still has a few interesting take aways:

This is the first rule of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what’s cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains the triumphant circularity of coolhunting: because we have coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie, cool changes more quickly, and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie.

The innovators do get their cool ideas from people other than their peers, but the fact is that they are the last people who can be convinced by a marketing campaign that a pair of suède shoes is cool. These are, after all, the people who spent hours sifting through thrift-store bins. And why did they do that? Because their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing. A company can intervene in the cool cycle. It can put its shoes on really cool celebrities and on fashion runways and on MTV. It can accelerate the transition from the innovator to the early adopter and on to the early majority. But it can’t just manufacture cool out of thin air, and that’s the second rule of cool.

The key to coolhunting, then, is to look for cool people first and cool things later, and not the other way around. Since cool things are always changing, you can’t look for them, because the very fact they are cool means you have no idea what to look for. What you would be doing is thinking back on what was cool before and extrapolating, which is about as useful as presuming that because the Dow rose ten points yesterday it will rise another ten points today. Cool people, on the other hand, are a constant. [...] Their non-cool coolhunter just didn’t have that certain instinct, that sense that told him when it was O.K. to deviate from the manual. Because he wasn’t cool, he didn’t know cool, and that’s the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one.

Read the full article.

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Not just trendwatching.com observed it, also Wired magazine dives fully into this trend with their special report titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“. While the report at trendwatching.com is full of examples, this article in Wired analyzes a few case studies with more detail.

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)

Wired also included an analysis of the countless business models leveraging the priceless economy and came up with six broad categories:

Freemium: What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.

Advertising: What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.

Cross-subsidies: What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.

Zero marginal cost: What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.

Labor exchange: What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.

Gift economy: What’s free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

Read the full article here.

Posted in business model, innovation, trends | Permalink | No Comments »