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 »

Inspiration is an essential part developing and coming up with new ideas. If you are looking to be inspired and catch a glimpse at the future, you should visit the Stanford Design EXPE09 at Stanford University from June 1^st- 6^th.On behalf of the ME310 and CS210 teams at Stanford University and our team at the University of St. Gallen, I would like to cordially invite you to the podium presentations on June 4^th from 08:30am – 1:00pm and the subsequent design fair at the Stanford University Campus.Student teams will be presenting their product prototypes and concept ideas that they have worked on for the last 10 months in cooperation with corporate partners such as Audi, Autodesk, Panasonic, Swisscom, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo!.

Not your typical student project

The cooperation with corporate partners gives students the opportunity to work on real-world problems while learning how to successfully run their own design and engineering consultancy. The results are definitely interesting and inspiring; the following video resulted from a project with Nokia in 2006/2007 which showcased the future of “Open Internet Communication Culture”.

Another great example is a prototype that was built in 2006/2007 that re-imagined the center-console of a car as a massive touch screen. Some pictures of the prototype, the Pangea Interface:

 

Too futuristic? Not really. In March 2009, a similar concept was introduced in the new Tesla Model S, the much anticipated electric car.

If you would like to have a glimpse at the future, you are invited to the join us at Stanfor Design EXPE09. More information and registration is available at http://expe.stanford.edu/The preliminary program for the day:HSG310: Design Thinking & Business Innovation, University of St. Gallen

• BASF: Total Packaging Design for Printers
• Lonza: Harvest the creativity and the knowledge of the scientific community
• Swisscom: Services for Enabling Home Networking Adoption

ME310: Project-Based Engineering Design, Innovation & Development

• AUDI AG: HMI 2020 in collaboration with TKK (Helsinki, Finland)
• Autodesk Inc.: Exploring the Opportunities for Collaboration between architects, manufacturers, and contractors in collaboration with UNAM (Mexico City, Mexico)
• Foundation of Finnish Security and Safety Industry Development: Intelligent Fall Protection in collaboration with TKK
• Naked Green: Leveling the playing field for Alternative Fuel Vehicles in collaboration with TKK
• Panasonic: Making Dental Care More Fun & Effective in collaboration with HPI (Potsdam, Germany)
• Panasonic: Supporting Social Bonds and Friendship with Wearable Technology in collaboration with PUJ (Cali, Colombia)
• Robert Bosch GmbH: A Sensor System for 3D Measurement and Reconstruction in collaboration with UNAM
• SAP AG (Germany): Innovating the Work@SAP Experience in collaboration with HPI
• Telefonica (Germany): Mobile Pursuit of Vital Signs in collaboration with PUJ

CS210: Project-Based Software Design, Innovation & Development

• Microsoft: Making satellite imagery available for climate modeling
• Yahoo!: Improving the Internet Search Experience
• Facebook: Making the Facebook platform a more viable option for the enterprise
• John Gardner Center: Identifying opportunities for and implementing software to improve after school programs for youth

As you can see, these student projects from around the world are definitely not your typical student project. A large part of my activities at the University of St. Gallen are around a course called “Design Thinking & Business Innovation” that we have setup in a cooperation between Prof. Larry Leifer, Director at the Stanford Center for Design Research and Prof. Walter Brenner, Director of Institute of Information Management. Our students will be there as well, presenting their conceptual prototypes

Let’s get in touch!

If you are planning to visit the Stanford Design EXPE please drop me an eMail at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com . Together with Sushi Suzuki, Ph.D. student at the Stanford Center for Design Research, we would like to give you a behind the scenes look of the design research and teaching at Stanford University. You should also have a look at the new course website at http://me310.stanford.edu/

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Bill Buxton, principle researcher at Microsoft and author of the Book „Sketching User Experiences“, has recently given an inspiring talk at Microsoft’s MIX09 conference about design and the return on experience.

I highly recommend his talk to everyone who is involved in experience design (which are a lot of people even though they are not initially aware of it) because he clarifies once again what experience design is all about and shows practical examples with a focus on developing software applications.

I have summarized some statements of his talk below, the video of his talk is embedded below as well, enjoy it.

On experience design and the current economic situation

You couldn’t be in a better profession in the current economic climate because by getting the experience right you get this return on investment which will not you let survive but drive economic development.

On the novelty of experience design

Is experience just a new name? Same old stuff in new clothes? No, it’s a refocus of attention, it is what successful products always had but we never called it that.

Industrial designers very often talk about the things but when it’s actually the experience that is induced by this thing that is the true product of you. It’s not the screen, it’s not the graphics – it’s what they prompt.

On the focus of experience design

Any product, service, online thing or object you make – you have to know what is the nature of the grin, or the adrenalin or the smile or the love that you are trying to provoke from your users.

 

For a better viewing experience you can use the full screen feature or watch the talk at the MIX09 website.

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Customer Service is an essential element to deliver remarkable customer experiences and several trends are changing the way companies can offer a remarkable customer service. I personally believe that we still haven’t seen the full impact the web will have on customer service but small companies and startups provide a glimpse how the future of  cost-efficient “online customer service” might evolve. For an example take a look at www.getsatisfaction.com and check out the profiles for O’Reilly and Seesmic (a Californian Startup).

I am sure that in the next 18 – 36 months we will increasingly see that large corporations use the web to drive down costs for customer service  while at the same providing the same or an even improved customer service experience.

One approach to provide online customer service are online communities. These have emerged around companies and their products together with discussion forums have long been a source for customers to get answers to their questions without the need to interact with the company directly.

One example is crackberry.com, an independent site about the BlackBerry smartphone that has already 30% of the visitors that the original Blackberry.com site has (see compete.com statistics). From my own experience the crackberry.com forum is a really valuable and helpful source for customer service.

While many of these sites are independent and do not represent an organization, companies increasingly understand the potential of online communities to offer customer service. 

The New York Times has published an article titled “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” which explains the story, motivation and success factors of a online community for customer services that has been created by Verizon.

Mr. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service.

[…] Verizon needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

There is also a statement from Verizon about the success of the experiment.

At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

Read the full article “Customer Service? Ask A Volunteer” in the New York Times.

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Hugh Dubberly, founder of Dubberly Design Office, has collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development and published them in an eBook called “How do you design?”.

His view of the scope of design reflects the motivation for this collection.

 

 

This collection is highly valuable because it helps to reflect how we are solving problems and how we might achieve different outcomes by adopting and following different processes.

You can find more information at the DDO website or download the book as a PDF directly.

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