Before we can examine the Four Social Customer Scenarios-where your brand is, currently, in relation to your social customers-we must look at the Social Customer Engagement Models, the "where" of the social customer, within your organization. These five models were developed most thoroughly by Jeremiah Owyang, of the Altimeter Group. He wrote a ground-breaking white paper where he profiled five different models of Social Customer Management. These are the ways that brands attempt to "grab" the social customer.
Maybe your organization is using some of them right now-maybe you're using none of them. No matter; just look them over so you gain a cursory understanding of organizational approaches to the social customer, and then we'll use the Social Customer Scenarios to figure out where your organization is right now.
SOCIAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MODELS
Each of the Social Customer Engagement Models is profiled below, with their respective graphical representation, pros and cons. By reading them, you'll figure out where your company currently stands around the "where" of the social customer, and maybe get an idea where you want to go.
(All of the data for the "percentage of companies using this model" comes from the Altimeter Group's white paper on the role of the community manager.)
Model One: Organic
What it is: A model where the social customer is engaged, organically, by departments or business units, as they launch strategies (sometimes ad-hoc) to manage the social customer.
Pros: Springs up naturally, allows departments/business units to follow their natural cultural bent. Very authentic. Occasionally, success stories and/or best practices are shared.
Cons: Very difficult for any kind of central management or governance, scares the heck out of most brands. Can create severe scalability challenges and "blockages" if one team (e.g., sales) is much larger than another (e.g., customer service). Makes most I.T. managers/CIOs nervous due to inconsistent business practices against shared infrastructure (CRM or ERP systems).
Percentage of companies using it: 10.8 percent.
Model Two: Centralized
What it is: One central group represents all business units in initiating the conversation with the social customer (and relaying everything between the social customer and the executive team, as well as the other business units). This would be what happens when a marketing group, or a corporate communications team, takes ownership of a social customer strategy (or when it's outsourced to a PR firm, ad agency, or demand generation agency).
Pros: Consistency of message (or brand value promise). Marcom and communications teams typically have strong buy-in because it fits with dominant 1980-90s marketing paradigms. Easy to tell "who said what." Successes are easily visible because this type of strategy is usually implemented by high-visibility departments or partner agencies.
Cons: May cause skirmishes across business units, when other teams wish to engage directly with social customer. When outsourced, there can be drastic delays in turnaround time, and relationship-damaging scope creep (e.g., the PR firm and ad agency can become de facto customer service agents, and that was not what they signed up for). In general, people with very little customer service experience frequently end up handling engagement.
Percentage of companies using it: 28.8 percent.
Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.
This installment comes from Chapter 2: The "How" and "Where" of Engagement and the Four Social Customer Scenarios. Adam introduces the first two social customer engagement models.