What should you do?

1. Search Twitter for your company’s name, brands, products, or services
2. Search Twitter for your competitor’s company name, brand, products, or services

Why?

We see several trends.

Today’s customers are social networkers and influencers. They are publicly sharing observations and experiences regarding your company’s products and services and those of your competitors. New social web applications such as Twitter allow any customer to amplify a single voice.

Twitter, Facebook, and all social networking services have an inherent interest in growing their user base. Hence, they continuously innovate and build new tools and services to foster easy sign-up, discovery and broadcasting of users’ experiences. For example, at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Twitter’s CEO announced @anywhere. This technology enables publishers to embed Twitter and its tools directly into any web page, thereby strengthening and streamlining the social network’s presence, broadcast, discovery and follow process for any reader. Facebook’s Connect feature has similar capabilities.

Twitter recently partnered with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo search engines to have them incorporate Twitter’s search results into those search engines’ organic search results. And this week, Facebook surpassed Google’s search page as the most visited web site in the US. Social media platforms, and hence your customers’ voice, will continue to become more ubiquitous.

Forward thinking managers and business owners are already taking advantage of new conversations enabled by social media. These business owners understand consumers have a bigger microphone, but these astute business leaders also realize that social networking applications provide a new means to respond. At a discussion about the popular and social restaurant review site Yelp.com at SXSW, a restaurant owner said he responds to negative feedback on Yelp the same way he would if the reviewer was still a guest at his restaurant.

How?

Simple. You don’t even need an account. Twitter’s real time search allows anyone to search for any buzz at any time. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in a phrase of interest. For best results, if your company or brand or product name has more than one word, enclose all the words with double quotes. Try adjusting the search phrase to include specific product names or model numbers. Do the same with your competitor’s products.

You’re likely to find many useful and interesting Tweets, a trend of positive or negative comments, and actionable insights. You may even find customers or prospects who have been reaching out to you directly.

Search is only the first step. From there, develop a process to allow for interaction and engagement. Make plans with your team to engage with authors of negative reviews or complaints about your products. Make social media a two-way street.

After all, if listening is part of your strategy, you’ve got to be ready to act and change. Be authentic, honest, and transparent in your responses. As soon as you show you care, you’ll rescue customers, and you’ll have made your caring engagement public.

Allegiance has several social media related projects in development. The Allegiance platform is all about helping you listen wherever customers and employees are talking. Hence Twitter and social media are natural channels for us to capture. In the meantime, use Twitter.com or a Twitter client such as Seesmic to monitor public experiences and dialog about your company and the competition.

While traditional satisfaction and loyalty scoring methods are great, they’re typically only a stepping stone on the way to engagement. The reason is that many of these methods aren’t able to answer questions such as: Of those customers who are likely to recommend you, are all of them equally likely to recommend? Are some customers more effective at recruiting new customers than others? Does each customer’s recommendation have the same impact? Etc., etc.

Each month, our company conducts a national benchmark survey called the Allegiance Pulse of America survey, which tracks the emotional loyalty or engagement of banking customers throughout the United States. In this survey, customer engagement is measured by several questions, covering overall satisfaction, ‘likelihood to recommend’ and other emotional and behavior outcomes. In addition, Pulse of America asks customers how many friends or relatives they have told about favorable experiences with their bank, and of those they told, how many actually switched banks as a result.

What we found when we separated engaged customers (i.e. those who have an emotional bond with a business) from other customers in this survey is that the engaged customers were nearly 4 times as effective at recruiting new customers as other customers, which proves that all recommendations are not equal. After all, it makes sense that a dispassionate customer’s recommendation doesn’t have the same convincing power as a recommendation from a customer with an engaged, emotional bond.

My point is that it’s not enough to simply know your loyalty score—you have to actively track, measure and understand the feelings and behaviors of your customers and understand your organization’s unique drivers of engagement and loyalty in order to know who’s recommending you and why in order to capitalize on that behavior by obtaining more effective customer referrals. And that’s where technologies (such as those offered by Allegiance) can help pick up where other traditional methods of measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction leave off.

Alan Bainbridge, Allegiance Best Practices Consulting Specialist

The Pew Research Centre conducted a survey on the enduring legacy of Barack’s approach to his presidency. Its key findings showed that:

• 62% of Obama voters expect to encourage others to support the new administration’s policies and actions during the upcoming year. 48% of these expect to do so in person, 25% expect to do so over the phone, and 16% expect to promote the new President’s agenda to others on the internet.

• Among Obama voters who were involved online during the campaign, 25% say they plan to mobilize support for the administration’s policies by using the internet.

Plus, Obama supporters also expressed a strong interest in remaining in the loop as the new administration took office and began promoting its legislative agenda: nearly half (46%) of all Obama voters expected to hear directly from the new President or other officials as the incoming administration took office.

As Aaron Smith, a Research Specialist with the Project and author of the report, so aptly put it: “The election may be over, but these voters want to hear directly from their leaders and they hope to remain part of the action. They plan to be in direct contact with the Administration and then carry those conversations back to their fellow citizens. This is a new kind of personal democracy.”… And a powerful example of engagement!

Kimberly Carroll, MarCom Manager, Allegiance

I most value my time. Time is rare indeed. It is fleeting. It cannot be preserved and saved for later. You either make the most of the moment you are in or it is lost forever. How can you best measure how you are valued by another person? Measure how much and the quality of their precious time they spend with you.

Allegiance has spent significant time and money writing and speaking about engagement. Engagement is the emotional bond that can (and I propose must) be built between an employee and his/her company, as well as between a company and its customers. We have worked hard to build technologies that can measure this bond. We have worked equally hard helping our customers not only implement these technologies but also to work with their people to improve the processes surrounding the measurement and improvement of engagement.

Lately, we have changed our thinking about engagement. We have begun to understand that engagement isn’t some intangible concept, but like time, it is an equally precious resource. In fact, engagement IS time.

Look at your most valued customers. They are usually most valued because they are engaged with you—and therefore spend their money with you. How do you know they are engaged? It is because they spend their precious time with you, usually in providing feedback about your products and service levels.

Look at your most valued employees. Once again, we value them because they give of their time. These most valued employees often give over-time. They get things done, quickly and timely, and as a result, we profit from them.

May I suggest a few time-based things you can do to increase customers’ and employees’ engagement:

Appreciate their time by word
When a customer or an employee spends time providing feedback, celebrate! Take time to thank them vocally as quickly after they spend time with you as possible. Follow up (with more time) to send them a note of appreciation. The more time and effort you spend on the note the better.

Appreciate by spending your time
Spend some time to evaluate the suggestion and evaluate its potential positive impacts on your business. Further explore how it might impact other less obvious elements of your processes. Then make the changes necessary. And of course, communicate back the results and how much you appreciate those results.

Reward
Share with them some of the rewards of the improvement. This may not always need to be monetary. Customers may appreciate even more the company that spends their time to reward engaged behavior. Perhaps you can reward a customer who improves your bottom line by offering your best consultants’ or executives’ time to analyzing and improving their business.

John Epeneter, VP Product Management, Allegiance