Earlier this week I published Part 1 of the interview with Ben Hong, Sr. Mgr. Technical Services, Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group for Logitech.The first half of the interview gave you a brief introduction to Ben and his team at Logitech.

This is the final portion of this written interview.

Part Two: People, Process, & Tools- Logitech with Ben Hong

What kind of training is required for team members who are active online? And, does your company have a social media policy in place? Can you tell us a little bit about these efforts and how they help (or hinder ) the team.

We train our team on how to be online ambassadors and effective writers for blogs, micro-blogs and knowledge bases (SEO). So far, training has been extremely important to maintaining consistency and control. Without it there would be chaos. Currently, the online ambassador training provides our employees with knowledge of the social media policy. It’s helpful, not a hindrance.

If you could share your favorite tips, best practices, lessons learned or social media must have – what are they?

• Look before you leap….have a framework and plan before you get started.
• Start with social monitoring. It is incredible what you learn your customers are talking about and provides critical insight about where your early investments should be made.
• If you are managing a social media program for customer service you must be social internally as much as you are externally. Key learning’s and shared insights complement VoC programs.

There are many tools for tweeting, listening, and overall participating in social media – which ones do you use either personally or for your work?

Co-tweet, Radian6, TweetDeck, backtype, delicious, FriendFeed, NetVibes, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Yelp, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg, Google Buzz, ShareThis, Technorati

Whether you have your own community on your “dot com” or you participate in existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Get Satisfaction etc) – what do you do to build the community and encourage your community members to become ambassadors for the brand?

We have a reputation model in the community that helps us and community member identify and recognize key contributors. Our Logi Legends and Gurus have a close relationship with my team and we work side by side with them in the community. To help them with their work we often send them our products.

Do you reward community members for the work they do? If so, how?

Nothing formal … yet.

When helping customers in social channels do you reply publicly or privately? Does it differ by channel? Discuss how you make this decision.

We reply both publicly and privately. If we are managing a customer escalation in our forums or on Twitter we respond publicly but ask for specific information to be provided privately. We do this to protect customer information. Otherwise we respond publicly to all else.

Is YouTube a part of your support efforts? How do you use this and other video channels for customer service and support? Do you create the videos or is another team responsible for these? Do you engage with the YouTube community? How do you measure success for your video efforts?

Our plans for YouTube are in development. We plan to publish 1-2 videos per month.

Many companies have gone through some highly visible social media gaffs (Dominos, Southwest); while others have seen offline issues go viral due to social media (Graco recalls, Toyota recalls). In your opinion how should a company deal with crisis online? Do you have a process in place that helps you determine next steps in the case of your own “crisis”?

Responses should be quick, open and honest. To that end, Logitech was put to the test recently when the US National Labor Committee reported on Chinese labor issues back in April of this year. Joseph Sullivan, our Sr. VP of Worldwide Operations, responded with a letter to the committee and we posted in online. In his letter which he shared, he stated the plain truth. Thankfully we had severed the relationship with the offending factory, however, he was clear to state when and why. It was met with positive comments and response.

What is next for you and your team? What are you excited about today?

Twitter enhancements, YouTube and Facebook integration are on our roadmap. Right now I am working on Radian6 setup and configuration.

What is your favorite social media tool, network or other for personal use?

LinkedIn. I was an early adopter and have seen how it evolved. It helps me keep up-to-date with colleagues, recruit, participate in communities of interest/practice and share what I am working on.

Thanks to Ben for taking the time to share!

Often when we talk about social media in business we talk about “social media marketing” which is a term I dislike for various reasons -one reason being that it supposes it only lies in one department rather than an integral part of how we communicate with customers, employees, and stakeholders.

One area that should be part of the grand scheme when it comes to social media is customer service.  Today many companies are finding ways to connect with their customers directly via the web, often offering support and help. Since this is a focus in my work I wanted to highlight the subject on my blog.  Through my work I have had the opportunity to chat with many others that are using social media for support. I have learned a lot from them and want to share some of these conversations through a short series of interviews. My hope is that you will find this information helpful in building your online customer care communities.

In order to facilitate these posts I sent a series of questions to a few folks and they were kind enough to respond. The first interview is with Ben Hong, Senior Manager Technical Services, Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group at Logitech. Due to the number of questions I have broken this post into two posts. Part two will be published later this week.

Part One: Customer Care Online First Steps- Logitech with Ben Hong

Can you describe your career path that brought you to where you are today?

It has been one focused on creating the best possible experience for customers by implementing service innovations and managing for high performance.

How would you describe a typical work day?

Busy, busy and busy…so it usually starts even before I leave for the office by reading and responding to email, tweets and Facebook. When I arrive, I try meet with each member of my team individually to discuss projects/tasks and provide the team with feedback or direction.  The rest of the day is spent managing programs which normally involve participating or chairing meetings, preparing and delivering presentations, briefs and reports. For the last few months I have also been spending time throughout the day monitoring our discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook and Blogs. Putting into action our social media support program is what excites me about work these days.

What responsibilities fall into your department or team? Where does you team fall in the organizational structure ( eg. customer service? communication?)

My team and I lead social media, knowledge management, VoC and training initiatives within the Global Customer Care and Digital Home Group organizations of Logitech.

How many people work on your team?  What are you able to accomplish with this size team in the social space – e.g channels? quantity of daily responses?

My team is made up of two products specialists, curriculum designer, and various contractors that provide technical writing, training and video content.

• Blogs – We write one Tips and Tricks blog post each week for the corporate blog and respond to on average 2-3 comments each day.
• Customer Forums – We monitor customer forums from 20-30 responses per day for the team.
• Internal Forums – We monitor internal discussion forums for our customer care agents and respond daily to 10-20 posts per day.
• Twitter – We co-tweet with marketing/PR teams and respond to 2-5 customer care or technical support questions each day.
• Social Monitoring – We just acquired Radian6 as social monitoring tool. However, we have been using a variety of free tools to track blogs, twitter, product reviews and other social media. We typically report once a week on social media trends/buzz for our Harmony Remote Controls products.
• Videos – Currently creating prototype videos for publication on YouTube and Viddler. Our plan is to publish 1-2 videos per month.

Social Media plays a large part of your role, but typically people associate the use of Social Media with Marketing, what are the biggest benefits realized by your business due to your team’s participation in social media for customer service?

We are early on in our adoption of social media for customer service, month three. There are two early benefits to our participation in social media responding to and managing negative customer experiences, learning more about our customers through social monitoring. Our long term goals are tied to the mission of delivering an engaging online customer service experience.

How did you initially convince the business that engaging with customers via social channels for customer service was the right strategy?

It’s a work in-progress, but we asked to create an incubator team. Our chain of command from CMO to VP to Directors have all been extremely supportive and eager to see the program grow.

Generally, customers don’t care what department you work in when they connect online. Do you work closely with other internal departments to integrate social media communication efforts? If so, which ones?

Absolutely. We work closely with marketing, sales, PR, CX, QA and product/software engineering teams. Our marketing and PR social media programs are more mature and we have learned a lot by partnering with them.

There are many social channels where your customers will engage with each other – how do you decide which social spaces you will participate in?

Given where we are with the development of our program we have focused primarily on mass social media applications and networks. Social monitoring tools will help us to decide if and where we move next. For us it is critical to look before we leap.

As social channels grow, and customers come to expect businesses to respond online to their requests – there has been a lot of talk about scaling efforts. Is this a concern for your team? If it is how will you scale to meet the growing business? If not, why?

Yes, scale and resourcing is a critical part of our plan, which is why we have decided to take a measured approach to building out the program. Currently we have a small team, with a roadmap for adding resources.

How do you measure the success of your social media efforts?

Success is and will be tied to our corporate and departmental goals. So, NPS and cost will be key measures of our success.

Do you have KPIs for your team (for example time to response) if so can you share what these are and why they were chosen?

We are working on them.

Watch for part two…

In part two I ask Ben questions around the people, process and tools he is using to accomplish the work they are doing online for customer service.

Some time ago (before my sleepless night) Beth Harte had an interesting post “Is Social Media the Same as Marketing?” She questioned the term “Social Media Marketing” and said “the term social media marketing is not working for me: social media is about sharing and discussing information. It’s communications, not marketing.” What ensued in the comments section was not only a discussion of whether we could call social media – marketing or social media marketing; but a conversation examining the hierarchy and definition of Marketing itself. Now I am a little late jumping into the discussion – believe it or not this has been in the “drafts” for a long time!

Define Marketing…

Some comments on the post placed Communications squarely as part of marketing, others separated marketing and communications as though it were Church and State. The four Ps are mentioned, and then suggested they are an over simplification of marketing.  Marketing runs the show. Communications runs the show. One comment says PR, Sales, Marketing, and advertising are all different disciplines. Another says MarCom and PR are separate but collaborate more often. Still another commenter says that the P for Promotion stands for various communication techniques that would include PR, personal selling, advertising and publicity.

Dale Evans, the author of Social Media an Hour a Day said

“marketing is being defined more and more by what consumers experience and translate into shared content than it is by what a marketer has to say directly”

Walter Pike quotes Peter Drucker:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself”

As does Gabriel Rossi:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

And Laurie Broderick quotes the AMA

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”

the original market

Ultimately, I don’t think it was necessarily the definition of marketing that was really in question, as all definitions brought up seem to recognize that the role of marketing is to have such solid understanding of their customer base that they strategically create, deliver, and appropriately price the products or services that this customer wants or needs. The original meaning came from literally going to the market to buy or sell goods. However,  I think confusion surrounding the definition comes when we assume that Marketing is just sales promotion.

From the variety of comments it may be that the trouble is not defining marketing, but defining the roles that fall in the umbrella of marketing. In particular, the role of Communication and Marketing Communication.  My understanding has always been that MarCom would fall into “Promotion” – one of the simplified 4P’s of Marketing. In, my working experience it has always been that MarCom and PR have reported into Marketing.  I realize that is not always the case.

Start with the Basics

I took a look at Marketing using the perhaps over simplified 4ps (from my school days, many years ago!):

The Marketing Mix:

Product: Create a product that fits the needs or wants of your customer. Specifications of the goods or services should meet those requirements.

Placement: Otherwise known as distribution and refers to the channel in which a product or service is sold.

Pricing: This is the process marketers use to set the price of a product for market.

Promotion: Textbook definition houses the following in this “P” – Advertising, Sales Promotion, Publicity, Personal Selling (Sales), Branding and other methods to promote product or service.

It is this final P that seems to be the conundrum. Many businesses house these promotional roles in a variety of silos, others have them report directly to Marketing, still others work in tandem with the Marketing group, and of course still others outsource some of these roles to (a variety of ) agencies. Some include only those aspects that would be considered Marketing Communications:

According to Wikipedia: “Marketing communication is concerned with the general behavior of an organization and the perceptions of the organization that are promoted to stakeholders through these touch points. The six areas usually associated in this representation are: Advertising, Public Relations, Promotions, Direct Marketing, Event Marketing, and New Media.”

Others see MarCom as those “selling” aspects of Communication and leave PR out of the mix – seeing it as a Communication role.

Needless to say it is all a bit of a mixed bag.

We also need to examine Marketing as potentially having three additional Ps  (often associated with Service but could just as well work when talking about products):

People: Any person coming into contact with customers can have an impact on overall satisfaction. In the customer’s eyes, the people are generally inseparable from the company and they can therefore highly affect the customer’s experience.

Process: This is the procedures involved in providing a service (or product) which can be crucial to customer satisfaction. Example I buy a new Humidifier at Sears for my baby’s room, take it home and discover it sounds like an airplane jetting off so I take it back – but have to wander the store (with stroller and baby in tow) find an elevator and return it to hardware (where there is no immediate staff member to help) – despite numerous “Service” desks on the main floor.

Physical evidence: To reduce the feeling of risk, thus improving success, it is often vital to offer potential customers the chance to see what a service (or product – especially key for online shopping) would be like. This is done by providing physical evidence, such as case studies, or testimonials. This could also refer, I suppose to the physical appearance of the product – the quality (or lack of) it promises.

Is it Marketing vs Communication?

After reading Beth’s post and the numerous comments I decided I would search about to figure out if there was a rule of thumb for the relationship between Marketing and Communication. It seems once again that there are two schools of thought. In fact- this leads to two possible hierarchies.

1) Marketing is the 1-way, the push, the sell. Communication is two-way. They are two different disciplines. Two different departments.

2) Communication is a piece of the marketing puzzle. It is the tactics used to market and to converse with the target market. Same discipline. Same department.

Hmmm. Doesn’t help does it? While I believe that Communication must work in an integrated manner with the Marketing department, it seems that there are just as many that see the two as very separate pieces of the corporate puzzle.  If separate how do we ensure that all communications are sending the same messages? And, where does Social Media fit in – Marketing or Communications? Both?

The Dreaded Social Media

Like Beth, I dislike the term Social Media Marketing.

Social Media is defined as “primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” (Wikipedia). The words “sharing” and “discussing” being an important factor to differentiate the “media” from other one-way channels such as television.

The problems I see with the term “Social Media Marketing”:

It is a name that in a few years will be dated. The web is, and has been for years – social. What happens when every site has some sort of forum, profile sharing, comment field etc. Will we still call it “social”? Or will that be rather redundant?I wonder if the even the term “media” too closely relates it to Television and Print Media which are traditionally used in an interruption method which as of now is a method which has not worked for the web.

and Social Media cannot be seen as only a tool to send simple outgoing marketing messages, as it also allows for two-way communication which can help an organization do much more. Amber Naslund said it best in the comments to Beth Harte’s post:

“Social media doesn’t just need to fit into marketing or public relations or other disciplines that are used to communicate. It’s also about customer service, technology and user experience, client relationship management, product and service innovation. It’s an undercurrent of so many more business touchpoints than we’ve ever seen, and I think that’s causing some consternation. In a good way, but it’s still hard.”

Social Media is two-way, it is authentic conversation between customer and company – and in such should fall under Communication. However, look at it in another way it works to benefit marketing in a number of ways:

Let’s just look at a few examples:

Product Idea Generation and Product Innovation

Sites such as My Starbucks Idea and Dell Ideastorm allow customers to work along with the company to develop products and innovations. To work this must be a collaboration between Marketing and the customer. However, as always it must remain “on brand” and conversational – so Communication must also be at play.

Customer Support Forums

Software companies have for quite some time had self-service support forums, allowing customers help other customers. These types of forums allow customers help others trouble-shoot, personalize and understand the product or service. Examples could include Apple iPod Discussion Forum; or the more community oriented Ubuntu site. This type of support can have an effect on how the brand is perceived, and despite the fact these are not employees of the company, on overall satisfaction with the product or service.

Customer Support via Twitter

Many companies are using Twitter to promote products or services, or drive traffic to their website. More effective however, have been the companies such as JetBlue, Starbucks,  and others who have also offered Customer Support through their Twitter accounts.

Corporate Blogs

There are certainly corporate blogs that are using the blogging platform as a tool to promote only, either to solely offer information on products or to drive traffic to their corporate site by optimizing for search using the blog. However, these are generally not successful in engaging their customers.  Other blogs that offer more insight, helpful content, and increased depth of information such as Graco’s Corporate Blog or Fiskars Fisk-A-Teers Blog have helped to build loyalty amongst their target demographic while of course increasing brand awareness. But, once again is this genuwine communication – Marketing? or Communication?

There are an amazing number of examples of Consumer Generated Content (wikis, videos, blogs, even advertising), File Sharing (photos, videos), Fan Pages, Social Networks, desktop widgets, online widgets,  – Peter Kim has an amazing list of social media examples.

Clearly, it seems to me if we treat these social media examples as “marketing”  or a simple tactical tool to sell products or services we are missing out a vast amount of information, we are missing out on a authentic conversation with our stakeholders and customers.  On the other hand, if it lies in Communication – then Marketing can miss out on an incredible space for innovation and collaboration.

This brings us to my 3rd point on why I dislike the term Social Media Marketing

It cannot be a silo. social media needs to fit in the grand scheme of the brand strategy. It needs to be consistent with other communication channels and it needs to work with the 7 Ps of Marketing. Because of this -  hierarchies may need to change.  Perhaps an executive level that joins the discipline of Marketing and Communication, and Customer Service allowing an integrated approach to communicating and marketing to all stakeholders, to all customer touch points.

The problem that Beth Harte recognized is that if we place social media in this type of integrated approach is that “the mashup will allow for people [aka agencies] to offer services like Social Media Marketing or PR Communications or Marketing Relations or… (really, you don’t want me to go on right?) without having a firm grasp on any of the disciplines that they are trying to deliver or implement.”

This kind of approach means that any advertising agency, PR agency, boutique can claim the title of “social media” expert since they work in the realm of communication or marketing, or advertising. The onus is then on us (the “us” that work on client-side) to flesh out the agencies that “know” and those that “think they know” or “don’t know” social media. As Beth says ” the walls need to come down and the need for two-way communications is forcing a sledge hammer through the walls. But at what cost?”.

This comes down to my reason for blogging in the first place. As someone working on the client-side I believe I need to understand what the agencies I work with are trying to sell me. I understand my business best, but if I just take what the agency is telling me without actually comprehending it, and being involved myself then I am not doing my brand justice. So I am involved in social media – social networks, blogging, listening and contributing. We need to be accountable to our brands and unfortunately this will mean sorting out the agencies selling “snake-oil” and those that are true communication “experts”.

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Images: stock.xchng