Customer Engagement News & Articles

Okay, first of all let’s cut to the chase. We marketers can get ourselves in a big frothy tizzy over new terms. And, Web Engagement Management is no exception. On the marketing hype cycle, WEM is the Ducati Multistrada 1200 (look it up, kids).

Quick: Name a company on Twitter that you admire because of the way it promote its brand. What would you want to know about how it strategizes that could help your organize manage its online presence?

Many different elements can influence a social media strategy. Most of them rely on anecdotal evidence -- often the result of trial-and-error initiatives. While there’s nothing wrong with using experimental outcomes to plan how to use social media to reach customers, it also helps to use actual data.

We learned in The Keys to Understanding Web Customer Engagement that the notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new -- but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals and which metrics matter the most. This article explores a sampling of goals and metrics for measuring and understanding engagement on the Web.

The notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new, but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals and which metrics matter the most. Context -- or even hierarchies of context -- plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics and understanding what to do with the data.

Now that most C-level executives basically understand why social media is necessary, they have more interest in how their company’s social media efforts compare to their competitors.

Periodically, media research checks in on women to see how they interact and engage online. This week, AOL, in partnership with Bovitz Research Group, released the findings from an industry study it commissioned in an effort to identify determining factors that influence women's choices when it comes to consuming and sharing online content.

Recently Chris Crabtree explained that social media networks, such as Twitter, fail companies when it comes to customer service and engagement because they limit the amount of information that can be communicated from company to consumer. I respectfully disagree.

Customer service has long been a part of organizations’ marketing and business strategies. Yet, many companies treat customer service as a separate operation, apart from sales, research and development, even marketing. To serve customers more effectively, companies need to refocus their efforts on the customer experience and make it an integral part of company culture.

With enterprise collaboration dominating the CMSWire charts this month we sat down with Salesforce.com EVP Alex Dayon to talk about what was key to enterprise collaboration product and project success, how enterprise social diverged from consumer social and to ask a few obvious questions about Chatter vs. Yammer and how the two social enterprise products are really different.

Alex highlighted three top priorities for enterprise social apps: security, integration and mobility. Here's a segment of our interview:

Cool news: Facebook finally rolled out a secured browsing option (https). Typical news: Users have to manually activate it. 

Colleen Jones’ new book, Clout, could have been called “The Internet is Not Magic.” The book, which is actually about the art and science of influential web content, is straightforward and useful. Anyone wanting a book that tells them exactly what to write and how to market content to a target audience, should look elsewhere. Jones is very clear right from the beginning -- there is no magic bullet or one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, everyone from executives to designers to writers and small business owners are asked to do what’s right for them.

For some this may not be want you want to hear, but Jones assures you, it’s for your own good. And we agree. 

As all successful sales people know, some of the most important conversations happen in informal settings. Connecting these moments to the sales cycle is a discipline, but one that's become increasingly possible with the evolution of web engagement tools, as they bridge between web content management and customer relationship management.

Got a corporate content strategy? Got a corporate social media strategy? Do they work to compliment each other? Yeah, we thought so.

Presumably you have identified your audience, determined their online behaviors and understand their needs. Additionally, let’s assume that you have content to publish to your company’s blog or news feed. To ensure that your content is distributed across channels seamlessly and efficiently, an effective content strategy for social media marketing requires both cooperation and communication. 

Web content management continued to be an interesting space in 2010 -- from shaker acquisitions to the pivoting role of open source, not to forget SharePoint 2010 and a slew of new acronyms and debates. Let's review the highlights of what's happened.