How Context Can Define a Great Online Customer Experience

By Ian Truscott (@iantruscott) Jul 25, 2011

Hello, which “you” is reading this, how and where? As many others have observed in these articles, at no time has the mantra “be where the consumer is” been more relevant in our multi-channel world. But it’s not quite that simple.

Our access to information, and therefore advertising and messaging, pervades every part of our life, as Tony White put it in the recent #CXMChat Tweetjam (organized by CMSWire); quoting one of his customers, he said:

How many other opportunities do you have to communicate with a customer from his nightstand?"

It's About More Than Just Being There

Nice quote, and “the nightstand” could have been replaced by any obscure place or occasion where you might reach for your smartphone — waiting for a friend in a bar or checking into Facebook on the train. But, is just being there enough? Is it enough to have a mobile website, an app and a Facebook page? Can we congratulate ourselves on a multi-channel marketing job well done if we’ve ticked these boxes?

In addition, planet “social media” is still forming; it’s crust occasionally starts to look like rock, something we can depend on, and then “boom,” there is a distant explosion, and we have another river of magma to ponder if that will form into our next mountain to climb or a rich seam of priceless marketing resources. For example, as I write this, Google+ has entered the social media fray, and the buzz suggests that it’s disrupting the established order.

To use the word “established” is strange for such a youthful technology, but I think some patterns are emerging. For example, broadly speaking, lots of folks I connect with consider Twitter for their work persona, broadcasting for public consumption; LinkedIn as a professional Rolodex; and Facebook for more intimate personal relationships. This is a crude rule, but it starts the ball rolling in terms of the subject of this article — context.

Get the Context Right per Channel

If you are engaging with one of those folks that split their home and work personas by social media channel, then to make your message relevant, the context provided by the channel is going to be the critical first step.

For example, if you look at what the “Facebook me” talks about, you’ll find a favorite sports team, updates to traveling to home games, and where I eat and drink before the game. The professional “Twitter me” doesn’t mention any of these things,and to engage me publically on Twitter, exposing my sports allegiance feels (to me) like someone using my nickname in a business meeting.

I’ve emboldened the phrase “to me” to emphasize that I absolutely understand that my use of these social media channels is potentially different. Some folks do like to provide a blow-by-blow account of the agony and ecstasy of a ball game on Twitter, it’s just not me. Social media engagement is therefore not just about the context of the channel, but also about understanding that person’s use of that channel.

We can extend this, as context can be derived from location and services like FourSquare and Tripit, which provide another stream of contextual data about me that a marketer could use. But, again, the context of using that data is going to affect my level of engagement.

I only share Tripit information on Facebook and LinkedIn, and I only check-in to places through Facebook; I don’t make them very public. So, as a marketer that wants to ask me how my evening in Amsterdam went, don’t Tweet it if I didn’t. Context goes two ways.