Which companies respond quickest (or not at all) on Facebook?

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By Doug Gross, CNN updated 8:19 AM EDT, Tue March 27, 2012 | Filed under: Social Media

 

Retailer Bed Bath & Beyond is responsive to customers who post questions on its Facebook page, a new survey found.

 

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Survey: One out of four retailers ignored customer questions posted on Facebook
• Conversely, the top 25% all replied in less than 10 minutes
• Researchers say survey was to help set standards in customer service
• A full 65% of companies didn't reply to a comment on a wall post

(CNN) -- If you've got a question about buying a camera, shooting out a quick note to the retailer on Facebook might help. But if you're in the market for a silky camisole? Maybe not.

That's according to a survey of 20 top online retailers on Facebook that suggests their level of responsiveness to customers is uneven, at best.

One out of four companies failed to respond to a customer-service question posted on their Facebook wall, and even fewer replied to questions asked as comments on their posts, reported STELLAService, a company that rates customer service among online businesses.

The results of the survey of 20 leading retailers, conducted on February 29, come at a time when almost every company that deals with the public is trying to tap into the more than 850 million people who use the social-networking site.

"Brands are doing an enthusiastic job of bringing people to their pages," said Jordy Leiser, STELLAService's co-founder. "[But] I don't think they're also necessarily bringing with them a desire to be social. It's just turning into a marketing message for many companies."

Leading the pack was B&H Photo. The New York City-based outlet, which claims to be the largest nonchain camera store in the world, responded to its wall post in about two minutes, according to the report, which was shared with CNN Tech.

Bed Bath & Beyond, Williams Sonoma, Sur La Table and Footlocker all responded to posts within 30 minutes.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Victoria's Secret, your best bet for the aforementioned camisole, was one of five companies that didn't respond to a wall post within two days. One Kings Lane, Radio Shack, J. Crew and Rue La La were the others.

"Retailers need to realize that two days in Facebook time is like two years in real time," Leiser said. "Customer questions on Facebook should be granted the same urgency as a phone call."

Leiser noted, however, that the survey wasn't meant to embarrass companies or suggest that some of them don't care about their customers. Instead, he said, it was an effort to start setting expectations for an area of marketing and customer service that remains relatively unexplored.

"I don't think we as customers really know what to expect yet if you post a message," he said. "Do you expect them to get back in 10 minutes or two hours? Or, a day -- is that alright? We're trying to develop the standard, or at least identify what the averages are for certain categories."

Among the companies that responded to questions during the survey, the average was under an hour, he said.

The posts were what Leiser called generic product questions: "Do you guys have this in a particular color I don't see? What's the return policy for this particular item ... ? That looks really cool, do you have this in whatever size?"

While 25% of retailers didn't respond to wall posts, that number rocketed to 65 percent for comments on other posts. Eight companies deleted the questions that were posted on their walls, whether they answered the question or not.

Five companies out of 20 -- B&H Photo, Gap, Bed Bath & Beyond, JackThreads.com and Williams-Sonoma -- responded to wall posts and comments and had not deleted those questions within 48 hours.

Only six of the 20 companies listed on their Facebook pages an e-mail address or phone number by which customers could contact them, the report showed.

"You can't just be there halfway with marketing," Leiser said. "If you're going to be part of the community, be part of the community."

The challenge of digital communication- the speed of change

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March 26, 2012

Much has been written and said about the challenges of integrating and developing digital communication and it what it means from a cultural, strategic and creative perspective. It seems pretty clear to me now that one of the greatest challenges is simply keeping up-to-date with the technology from both the perspective of communication product delivery and media.

Just in the past month, we’ve seen Facebook revolutionize its experience for brands with the introduction of Timeline and Apple introduce a new retina display iPad, that’s causing all kinds of chaos for content producers and advertisers.

It seems that simply making the transition and acknowledging the new world is not enough, you’ve got to be ready to have you finger of the pulse and be able to respond to the changing requirements that technology is forcing upon you. No one wants to be left behind and no brand wants to appear dated and behind the times with when they communicate digitally.

Beyond the basics of constantly updated experience from familiar brands and channels, there’s also the ongoing fragmentation of media channels that requires constant checking and understanding. This now appears to have added complexity because we are at the start of fragmentation of social media channels, as we can see with the arrival of Path, Pinterest and the growth of sites like Instagram and dozens of other small emerging entities.

Any agency that believes the tough part was the cultural change and the integration is misguided, the real challenge is keeping up with the technological change and being anticipate it, build for it and stay ahead of it. This means you need team members who constantly read the pulse of change, but more importantly don’t just know what’s going on, they understand how to make everyone else aware and do something about it.

Toward a common content strategy vocabulary

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March 26, 2012 

by: Rahel Bailie

 

If there’s one thing about the content strategy community that can be crazy-making, it’s the lack of a consistent vocabulary to describe the various activities, deliverables, and outputs of the work that we do.
The current situation reminds me a bit of the conversations we had in the 1990s about a then new field called information architecture. There were many tortured discussions about the name itself (can we even call it architecture?), the deliverables (what is the difference between a “conceptual IA” and a “physical IA”?), and outputs (what exactly do you mean by a “wireframe”?).

Twenty years later, and those discussions have given way to a common vocabulary and a certainty that allows for smooth discussion amongst practitioners and between practitioners in adjoining fields.

We’re at a similar stage in the content strategy field. Here’s a rough recreation of a discussion between a group of professionals that include a content strategist, project manager, developer, CMS integrator, and user experience professional:

CS: The writers are using template A to do this and template B to do that.
CMI: It’s all the same template.
UX: No it’s not. This template goes here and and that template goes on that page.
CMI: But those pages are the same template. The modules are just different.
PM: We contracted for a maximum of eight templates. Is this one of those templates, or is this something different?
Dev: It’s the base template, with variations based on modules.
UX: By module, do you mean widget?
CMI: What’s a widget?
UX: The thing that goes on the page with the tabs where the writers put these four types of content.
CS: Just to clarify, the UX guy isn’t talking about content types.
CMI: But that has nothing to do with the template.
Dev: I think you are calling it a widget when it’s just another kind of module.
UX: So the thing that works this way in the right rail has the same name as the other thing that works a different way in the center column?
CMI: Yes, because they all go into a template.
CS: Whoa! Hold on. Can we do a round of definitions before we go any further?

It turned out that each person in the room had a different definition of what was meant by content type, module, and template. No wonder we couldn’t come to a speedy decision. Fifteen minutes later, we ended up with a common project vocabulary that we could use to discuss the many moving parts of the project.

One of the more interesting outcomes was the conclusion that the word “template” could not be used without a modifier. There are CMS templates, UX templates, and editorial templates. In fact, the writers adopted the word “stencil” as a confusion-reducing alternative.

The topic of vocabulary has arisen a number of times recently. While preparing a workshop for a client, my research uncovered a wide range of vocabulary discrepancies that made it difficult for me to convey concepts easily to a multi-disciplinary team. I could talk about “object-oriented content” to explain topic-based content to a developer familiar with object-oriented programming, but when the developer didn’t want to attend a workshop that included content typing (because he thought typing meant how to type, as in use a keyboard), I knew it was time to tackle the topic.

In a discussion with the co-author of my book, Noz, Urbina, we engaged in a similar discussion. The resolution came after a screen-sharing session where numerous screen shots were carefully labelled and annotated. As Noz and I discover quite often, we had both been working through similar issues at the same time. We built on each other’s work, and will each publish a post about the topic with the definitions we particularly feel strongly about.

In my next article, I will present a vocabulary that creates a foundation for content strategists.

The future of mobile

Mobile Commerce Best Practices

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By Joe Skorupa

Shoppers drove retailers into the mobile channel before many were ready, with the result that some are swimming in the deep end of the mobile commerce pool even though best practices, execution strategies and ROI have yet to be established. Download this Custom Research report to see where the high-speed m-commerce train has taken retailers todate, and find out about key business drivers and top mobile functions being deployed as well as the major obstacles still to be overcome.

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