Who to Connect with and How to Manage Multiple Networks on Social Media
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How many people connect with current clients via Social Media? I know that we do, to some degree, through sites like MangoLassi and Spiceworks as we have clients from those shared professional communities. But outside of that, do people really manage to connect with clients via Twitter, Facebook or something like that? Who is doing this and what has your experience been? What kind of interactions are you having?
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@scottalanmiller We talked about this at our user conference. I think the best example that I can give as to why this is important is from a Celtics game that I went to earlier this year. We were delayed getting in because of an issue with the security scanners and missed the opening tip off. I tweeted at the Celtics that I was frustrated and they immediately got back to me with a direct message offering me a seat upgrade. My frustration was immediately relieved and we watched the game from the floor.
This wouldn't have happened if they weren't monitoring their social media accounts.
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My side gig is 95% social media driven. My partner and employee stay active on social media and answer questions throughout the day. It's basically the same concept as SW and ML except we use facebook as our main platform.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller We talked about this at our user conference. I think the best example that I can give as to why this is important is from a Celtics game that I went to earlier this year. We were delayed getting in because of an issue with the security scanners and missed the opening tip off. I tweeted at the Celtics that I was frustrated and they immediately got back to me with a direct message offering me a seat upgrade. My frustration was immediately relieved and we watched the game from the floor.
This wouldn't have happened if they weren't monitoring their social media accounts.
I'm familiar with this for consumer services, but for MSPs with business customers? I can't imagine SMB managers reaching out on Twitter (or knowing what it is) nor how they would expect their MSP to respond - especially when they have a continuous communications channel to us. Social Media for complaining about support makes sense when you don't have a channel to talk to the vendor, but that isn't the case with MSPs.
How would the corner store use Twitter to communicate with the guy that runs their IT? Why wouldn't they email, open a ticket, call, etc.?
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@IRJ said:
My side gig is 95% social media driven. My partner and employee stay active on social media and answer questions throughout the day. It's basically the same concept as SW and ML except we use facebook as our main platform.
And your customers are businesses? Or is it consumer?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
My side gig is 95% social media driven. My partner and employee stay active on social media and answer questions throughout the day. It's basically the same concept as SW and ML except we use facebook as our main platform.
And your customers are businesses? Or is it consumer?
consumer, but we deal with businesses as well on the advertising side.
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Outside of discussing advertising on social media, which is a unique case, would you ever expect business customers to reach out for support, once they were your customer, via a channel like Twitter other than reaching out to support or their account manager?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Outside of discussing advertising on social media, which is a unique case, would you ever expect business customers to reach out for support, once they were your customer, via a channel like Twitter other than reaching out to support or their account manager?
Yeah, and you will see Facebook leaning towards that. Business pages now get a green icon for being responsive to messages. This encourages customers to reach out to you via facebook. Here are 3 different examples below. If you respond in 10 minutes or less you get the response time listed. An hour or more and you get a standard icon. Less than an hour and you get a green icon
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That is so weird. Are those like completely incompetent clients that don't know how to use email? Why would they choose a tertiary communications method instead of official ones that can be managed, monitored, etc.?
If a business did that to us, I feel like that would almost certainly put them into the "not going to be able to pay their bills" category if they were unable to email or open a ticket or other appropriate business communications channel for a partner.
Facebook is fine when you have no relationship. But for partners? That sounds crazy.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why would they choose a tertiary communications method instead of official ones that can be managed, monitored, etc.?
That's the thing, you decide if you want it to be tertiary or primary.
Do you want to log Facebook chat as a ticket? You can do that now, respond in your ticket system and it responds in chat. Someone tweets at you? Messages you? You get a note then respond to it.
Whether it's good or not is up to each business.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Why would they choose a tertiary communications method instead of official ones that can be managed, monitored, etc.?
That's the thing, you decide if you want it to be tertiary or primary.
Do you want to log Facebook chat as a ticket? You can do that now, respond in your ticket system and it responds in chat. Someone tweets at you? Messages you? You get a note then respond to it.
Whether it's good or not is up to each business.
Agreed, but any business using an unmanagable channel as their primary communications seems... flawed. No ticketing, no tracking, no ability to assign or store or hand off.
This sounds like increasing levels of incompetence to come up with use cases.
Would anyone consider an MSP that uses Facebook posts as tickets to be worth talking to? if so, would they be a viable business? I'm being serious, this is like "business for twelve year olds who can't even".
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@scottalanmiller said:
Agreed, but any business using an unmanagable channel as their primary communications seems... flawed. No ticketing, no tracking, no ability to assign or store or hand off.
But there are plenty of tools to manage it, audit it, track it, do hand off, ect. - If you do it amateur hour style then yes you get problems but if done correctly, it can work.
@scottalanmiller said:
Would anyone consider an MSP that uses Facebook posts as tickets to be worth talking to? if so, would they be a viable business? I'm being serious, this is like "business for twelve year olds who can't even".
Probably not MSP, but in other markets, sure.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Probably not MSP, but in other markets, sure.
But we are only discussing MSPs. Of course it works in other markets.
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I agree with you Scott.
The only thing I can see being used by MSP's and clients is FB chat - but I would still fully expect the ticket to be created through either an online portal or email.
That said, you can open tickets through a chat portal with HP on their website - so that same thing could be expanded to work through FB chat as well I suppose.
So the chat portion I think could work, but the general page? it's little more than a Yellow Pages ad in my view - one that now potentially allows people to litter all over their page.
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Universal chat is something that's still missing.
Facebook is quickly closing this gap.
The closest thing we currently have to universal chat is SMS. But international SMSing costs a fortune, and I'm guessing it all but avoided.
It would be awesome to see a platform for universal chat - but I have no idea who would be willing to host it, and how would they be paid for it?
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@Dashrender said:
The closest thing we currently have to universal chat is SMS. But international SMSing costs a fortune, and I'm guessing it all but avoided.
It's funny that local SMS is what I never had for free. Now I have international for free.
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@Dashrender said:
It would be awesome to see a platform for universal chat - but I have no idea who would be willing to host it, and how would they be paid for it?
Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft all do that on a huge scale.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
It would be awesome to see a platform for universal chat - but I have no idea who would be willing to host it, and how would they be paid for it?
Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft all do that on a huge scale.
You're right, but they aren't universal.
Apple for example is limited to Apple's hardware. Google has thus far refused to make a client for Windows Mobile/phone. Yahoo - is that still around, j/k.
FB Chat is the only one that I know of that is on nearly every player out there, and it rides the coat tails of their money maker FB.
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@Dashrender said:
You're right, but they aren't universal.
Mostly they are. Especially Google which uses XMPP. Can't you connect with any client that you want?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
You're right, but they aren't universal.
Mostly they are. Especially Google which uses XMPP. Can't you connect with any client that you want?
Sadly this is no longer the case. Link
Google dropped support for XMPP federation in May 2014, meaning that Google Talk servers will no longer communicate with other XMPP servers.[10]
