This semester I am taking a Digital Branding class, and we are reading Delivering Effective Social Customer Service by Carolyn Blunt and Martin Hill-Wilson. So far, this book has provided a great overview of the social media revolution we learned about last semester. Social media has shifted power from businesses to the customer. Now, more than ever before, customers take to social media to voice the comments, concerns and complaints they have for everyone from Fortune 500 companies like Walmart to local mom and pop diners.
In Chapter 3 of Delivering Effective Social Customer Service, Blunt and Hill-Wilson discuss the notion of "an ecosystem for Social Customer Service," and they make the argument that too often organizations limit their social ecosystems by only thinking in terms of Facebook and Twitter. As our world becomes more and more "digitalized," it's becoming more important for organizations to map their social ecosystems in order to locate the "watering holes" at which their business practices are being talked about, good or bad. With social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite, organizations are able to lay these maps out on the table and observe the big picture.
Chapter 3 provides a helpful graphic for visualizing the social ecosystem:
Social listening lies at the center of this chart, meaning organizations' social media efforts should always be focused on listening to the customer. Every organization will have active customers communicating in different channels, which means organizations will have varying levels of influence among different audiences. Such a map may be able to help an organization answer the following questions: In which channels are our customers communicating? Where should we focus our social media efforts? How strong is our ability to influence in these channels? In my opinion, this visual aid provides a great starting place for any organization interested in mapping out the growing territory of the social media world.
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