Social Media and Support: Team Meeting Summary

Two minute video summary:

Current Social Engagement Journey Spreadsheet

Consortium members met in San Francisco in November to continue work on the intersection between Social Media and Support. This topic is one we have discussed a number of times over the past three years and our intent for this team meeting was to review and improve on the work done.

The group first discussed their reasons for engaging in social media, which included meeting customers where they are, assessing brand image, promoting self-service awareness, and generating knowledge.

Greg Oxton then provided some background with the Consortium’s existing five key tenets for social media and support and proposed that one good outcome from this meeting would be a review of the tenets to see if we could organize them for better balance and less overlap.

We heard from Erica Kuhl about Salesforce’s community evolution, which included two complete overhauls of the technology since its inception in 2005. Erica shared with us seven lessons to live by when implementing a community. The team very much appreciated her candor and enthusiasm.

Rajat Paharia from Bunchball presented his insights on gamification as data-driven motivation, and showed us some tools and mechanisms for turning “I have to” into “I want to” for both employees and customer communities. Thanks to Rajat for joining us!

During Open Space, the group explored ways to measure and communicate social media success, the role that customer support should play in communities, and strategies for engaging international audiences.

Three Tenets of Social Media and Support

After spending some time on these topics, the team determined that the original five tenets of social media and support could be distilled down to three:

  • Monitor, listen, and learn
  • Let social support social
  • Improve, inform, and influence

Members can find more information on each of these tenets in the meeting notes on the wiki.

We also did a lot of tuning on the Social Engagement Journey Spreadsheet, first developed in 2012. This matrix aims to lay out a road map to identify where your company is on the social support journey and where you might be headed next. While it’s possible you might find your company at the same stage for every focus area (moving from stage 2 to stage 3 in all areas), it’s more likely you’ll find that in some focus areas you’re at different stages. The current version of this spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Members can find more information in the wiki (email Kelly Murray for access).


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