1. An Ant’s Eye Point Of View – Employee Engagement and Getting it Right!

    Tuesday, 31 Jan 2012 1 Comment Posted by:

    Our people are our most valuable resources in business. In most business operations they also sit in an under-utilized state. No – we’re not talking about productivity. We’re talking about engagement. Employee engagement is often something that is being managed by individual managers or in the vacuum of an HR program. Employee engagement is something that needs to be activated across the entire organization and embedded and embraced at every level.

    Fully engaged employees will be more productive. They will have greater retention. They will work not just with the organization – but FOR it. A highly engaged employee base can be your greatest pool of advocates when empowered and activated.

    Internal Employee Engagement

    Recruiting, on-boarding, training, performance management…we could go on. These are all highly costly activities that your business must participate in. Highly engaged employees are more likely to remain a part of your organization longer leading to a decrease in costs nearly across the board. Engaged employees are more likely to advocate for you as an employer. Engaged employees are more likely to maintain an active and participatory role in their own professional development. Engaged employees are more likely to invest back in your company. Here are some interesting articles we’ve seen on this topic:

    External Employee Engagement

    The US economy continues to improve and organizations are looking for new ways to innovate and recover – they will continue to look inwards for ways to gain inertia and make progress. Employee activation is a dramatically untapped resource in the majority of organizations. What other group of people are as knowledgeable about your organization as your employees? What other group is as tapped into your marketplace as employees? And what other group of people is as excited about your product and potential as your employees? (HOPEFULLY no one!) Some of the most recent finds on this topic from around the web:

    • One of the first places many CMO’s thoughts go to when talking about enabling employees to engage with customers online is one of CAUTION. Yes, yes there are some really dramatic stories floating around out there about employee blunders in social media. But let’s remember that these are the minority. While we’re not suggesting that it is a good idea to get all of your employees out there and engaging in social channels without appropriate governance – it’s not something you want to avoid completely either.
    • Your employees have “skin in the game” as John Bell puts it in his post titled 8 Questions to Answer Before Activating Employees as Advocates. He lays out 8 questions for you to ask yourself that will help you plan out how you can develop your “super advocate” from the inside.
    • Start by activating your employees that are already and work on improving literacy for the rest is the tack that Shel Holtz suggests in a post on SocialMediaToday awhile back. This post looks at a Forrester study that points out that among staff who already use social media that almost half of them would actually recommend the company’s products/services. Hello opportunity.
    Whether we are looking at ways to engage your employees internally or looking to activate them in the social media space one consistency we see is Empowerment. Give employees the knowledge and training they crave to participate. Give them the governance they (and you) need to feel safe and confident. Lead by example and celebrate together. Given the right set of ingredients you can active your most powerful and high-potential asset: Your Employees.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  2. Got Governance?

    Friday, 27 Jan 2012 No Comments Posted by:

    With the new year, you might find yourself cleaning up from 2011. Have you ever cleaned up your processes? Do you find that you have a lot of processes that were necessary at one time and now are abandoned? What happened? Did the need for the process expire?

    Too often the process is still needed, but the energy behind the adoption and adherence of the process has relaxed. Usually the energy of the process shows up in the form of a individual who is very passionate about the process or more importantly the outcome. When this person relaxes, others tend to relax too.

    How many times have you known that you have an expense report to submit, but delay in getting it done. Why? Ignorance? Probably not. No one is harassing you to get the expense report submitted. Bingo (no one is watching)! Some tension is necessary until processes are second nature. Often the tension is governance. Governance is a critical element of managing processes to ensure compliance.

    At Ant’s Eye View, we work with top brands moving across the Social Engagement Journey. In the journey, there is process design and process implementation. After some period of continued activity in stages 2 and 3, process atrophy can settle in if you don’t have the right governance in place. Hoping for process outcomes is not enough. Audit and frequent review of operational metrics ensure that process (and more importantly the outcomes) don’t suffer from Social Process Atrophy (getting lax on social outreach service levels, infrequent content generation). Governance is a necessary audit function. Your governance model might be in need of a tune-up.

  3. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Zappos Crisis Response (the first 24 hours)

    Tuesday, 24 Jan 2012 1 Comment Posted by:

    On January 15, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos issued a letter to employees and customers informing them of a massive security breach that exposed customer information including name, passwords and other personal account information.  Widely regarded as one of the most socially connected companies, we were eager to see how Zappos handled this crisis both as professionals and as customers of the brand.  What transpired reveals the importance of not only having a crisis communication plan in place, but also preparing a social engagement strategy as part of that plan.

    From our observation, the Zappos crisis response plan seemed to be solid at first.  Passwords were reset. Content was quickly produced and posted. The message that credit card information was not impacted was clearly articulated.  Customers were being notified of the breach with clear directions of what to do to protect accounts. But, as the news rolled out across the country on Monday, January 16 customer reaction on Facebook and Twitter started to turn negative.

    What’s interesting, in our opinion, was that negative comments were not about the data breach itself, but rather the company’s reaction.  The New York Times tech blog captured the zeitgeist in this quote from a Zappos customer “That’s it? That’s how you respond to a security exposure that may require me to change my password on a large number of other sites to protect myself? That’s how little you think of your customers, just drop this glib little note and wash your hands of the whole affair? You have a legal and moral obligation to protect my information.”

    The first 24 hours of the response captured a few missteps out of character for a social business like Zappos and can provide some helpful lessons for e-commerce brands:

    1.    Changing the standard form of communications with customers.

    One of the biggest successes of Zappos’s business model is ability/desire to interact with customers seamlessly across multiple channels. During the first 24 hours of this crisis, Zappos went the opposite direction, shutting off phones due to high volume and relying on their blog post and email as their support channel. With email slowdowns and blocking international access to Zappos.com properties, a large number of customers were kept out of the loop.

    2.    Key information was not discoverable.

    The main logic behind using a blog post to respond to a crisis is to lend an authentic voice and sense of credibility to a company’s message. Deliberate or not, the Zappos blog post about the security breach is not discoverable via their normal blog channel.  Instead, you needed a link sent via email or posted on other properties to view the key content about the response.

    Moreover, the only public version of their message to customers comes as a “Here is the email that our customers will be receiving” section of that note to employees. The result is a sense that Zappos is ashamed of their response or not truly committed to helping their customers understand the situation.

    3.    A (large) blind spot in their response strategy.

    While Twitter was a responsive channel across the entire first 24 hour period of this crisis, Facebook seemed to be handled by an entirely different team. They missed obvious opportunities such as posting Hsieh’s letter as a note for people who could not access Zappos.com. More impactful perhaps was an seven-hour quiet period wherein Zappos did not respond to customer posts on Facebook. While it is a well-established practice to have a looser response time policy for Facebook than Twitter, seven hours is a long time to go silent during a crisis.

    The lesson to learn from the first 24 hours of the Zappos crisis response is that a crisis communication plan is not complete without integrating social engagement. Zappos seemed to be caught flat-footed and unprepared to engage with their customers across multiple channels. This exacerbated the frustration of customers who had not received an email from the company or were stymied by the bottleneck created by the volume of users resetting their passwords. The end result was a smudge on Zappos’s impeccable heritage of online customer service.

    Conducting crisis communications across multiple channels is no small feat but the foundation of a successful response can (and should) be set in advance:

    1. Build a crisis response team (with representatives from Corporate Communications, Legal, Public Relations, Customer Support and Marketing to engage online and coordinate between channels)
    2. Create a proactive and reactive crisis communications plan that includes an escalation policy for negative comments on social media sites
    3. Conduct crisis response simulations to test teams and processes
    What are your thoughts on the crisis? What could Zappos have done better?

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  4. 2011: An Ant’s Eye Year in Review

    Tuesday, 10 Jan 2012 7 Comments Posted by:

    Adventure is worthwhile in itself. – Amelia Earhart

    As we reflect on an amazing 2011, we’re incredibly excited about the adventures ahead for Ant’s Eye View, and for our clients. Our thought is that by continuing to be customer- and talent-focused, we can become trusted, strategic advisers to our clients.

    As 2011 began, we started to advise our clients along the Social Engagement Journey and guiding companies as they transform their business through social customer engagement. Our goal was to encourage our clients to look beyond tools and technology, and instead focus on the customer. We applied our experience as practitioners, our enterprise-wide point-of-view and proven methodology for strategy to make the case for change.

    This really resonated with our clients and the industry. Along the way, our clients asked us big, new questions:

    • How does social customer engagement change the way we think about enterprise collaboration across our organization?
    • How can we distribute social and digital competency across a global enterprise with thousands of marketers, multiple business units and dozens of markets?
    • How do we break down the operational seams and build shared objectives between our marketing organization and services organization?
    • How do we reorganize our global marketing organization across traditional and digital marketing functions?
    • How do we build a more agile and customer-focused process to support our awareness, activation and engagement objectives?
    • How do we effectively drive our success and measure the impact of our investments?

    It turns out that having a sharp set of skills on social is only a part of the puzzle. In order to endure, you have to assemble the right talent, a proven methodology and a vision and culture that creates a partnership between the organization and the clients your serve.

    Over the course of 2011, we’ve:

    • We’ve expanded our client engagements beyond our traditional strength in technology and financial services to include food and beverage, hospitality, quick service restaurant, luxury retail and professional services giving us the opportunity to work across a wide variety of sectors. Through this process, we’ve learned that by expanding the breadth of our experience we bring greater depth to our work.
    • We’ve grown our services portfolio beyond core social strategy, listening and analytics to include readiness, organizational design and marketing process developed by guiding one of the world’s largest technology firms through an overall marketing organization re-design,
    • We’ve also built playbooks, helping massively-matrixed organizations make sense of social engagement planning and execution, and how both fit into a company’s culture, policies, systems and processes. This includes projects with several leading technology brands, one of the Big Four accounting firms, one of the world’s largest telecommunications and mobile providers, one of the world’s largest CPG companies, and an upscale department store with more than 100 retail locations.
    • And, perhaps most importantly, we’ve continued to add great new talent to our team. In 2011 alone, we added thirteen new practitioners and we’ve also moved to three new offices in our respective communities. And today, we’re excited to announce that Len Devanna has joined our Silicon Valley office, joining us from EMC Corp. as vice president, social business strategy. He brings 17-years of digital and social media marketing experience driving social strategy change across a global workforce of 45,000 employees.

    I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished over the past year.  The intersection of our work, our people and our client relationships have given us an unique opportunity to learn, grow and develop as a business while setting the stage for the year ahead.  2012 brings an ongoing opportunity to build upon what we accomplished in 2011 and proactively seek out what adventures the future holds. Our experience has taught us much in the past year and we couldn’t be more excited to kick off 2012. Stay tuned for an announcement in early spring!

  5. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Social Media Comebacks of 2011

    Tuesday, 3 Jan 2012 4 Comments Posted by:

    The New Year is here and with its arrival comes an opportunity for new beginnings. And in the world of social media, new opportunities to prepare proactively, execute more wisely and avoid communication missteps.

    For some companies who found themselves in social media hot water, new beginnings could not come fast enough. But not all #fails in 2011 led to negative outcomes. A few quick thinking and savvy organizations took potential disasters and came out ahead … all thanks to the power of social media.

    With a hat tip to the Japanese proverb, “Fall 7 Times, Get Up 8” here are good examples of social media comebacks from 2011:

    Verizon: “Verizon Wireless realizes $2 fee a bad call, drops it”

    In the last week of 2011, Verizon created a stir when it was announced that a new “convenience fee” would be added to customers paying their bills by credit card. From a business perspective, the move was aimed at reducing credit card processing costs. From a customer perspective, this was another large company increasing fees. The response was loud and immediate. A petition on Change.org called for Verizon to drop the fee and gained over 150,000 signatures. The angry tweets and customer reaction blog posts mounted more pressure on Verizon to respond.

    24 hours later, Verizon CEO came out with a statement that “in response to customer feedback” it was no longer going forward with the fee as planned. It was a plain and clear explanation that the input that Verizon received in their forums and social media channels motivated a reversal of their business decision.

    This quick action and response remedied the potential for a larger uproar of Verizon customers adamantly against the service fee. Social media helped identify the immediacy of this problem to Verizon before any negative consequences or loss of subscribers could take place.  By getting rid of the service fee in an immediate fashion, Verizon maintained its credibility going into the crisis and could then promote its other fee-free payment options in their statement.

    Red Cross: “Red Cross’ Rogue Beer Tweet Brings in Donations”

    It was a mistweet when Gloria Huang, apparent fan of Delaware craft brewery Dogfish Head and social media specialist for the American Red Cross, tweeted the above post to the wrong account late one night. The Red Cross took a compassionate approach and used the embarrassing tweet to humanize its image with this clever anthropomorphic retort: “We’ve deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.”

    Concurrently, Dogfish Head was flattered to have received inadvertent public praise for their product, and they reciprocated by encouraging all their fans to donate blood (a ‘pint’) to the Red Cross.

    So, it’s still not OK to tweet while drinking, or #gettingslizzerd, but owning up to mistakes and keeping an open dialog with your audience will help get through compromising situations. Afterwards the Red Cross capsulated the experience with a post on their blog titled: “Twitter Faux Pas”

    Bronx Zoo: Bronx Zoo’s Missing Cobra Spawns @BronxZoosCobra Twitter Account

    What do you do when a dangerous animal goes missing and a parody account is making your organization look incompetent? As tense of a situation this was for the Bronx Zoo, they stayed cool, played along and then leveraged the attention to their favor. We all recall the clever and comical “@BronxZoosCobra” twitter account that entertained hundreds of thousands on Twitter with tales of karaoke, being at Opening Day for the Yankees, and chided the pursuit by the Bronx Zoo. The social media account was not operated by zoo and as the twitter account exploded in popularity, the humor came at the expense of the Bronx Zoo.

    There was genuine fear but the lightheartedness was well received by the public and the Bronx Zoo took it in stride.

    When the snake was eventually found, the twitter account remained active and became a new voice to attract visitors to the zoo. The Bronx Zoo held a contest to name the once-fugitive snake, now back in the reptile house. Using social media, the contest drew in over 60,000 visitors to their website where they voted on a name.

    Businesses also appreciated the attention this meme had generated and jumped into the conversation with unusual but humorous offers, like a vodka endorsement deal.

    Take what social media sends your way and work with it to find potential avenues for added engagement, even in a misstep. The Bronx Zoo got through the ordeal but also embraced the exposure in social media to add a new dimension to their online presence.

    Starbucks: “Starbucks Responds to Blog Post About Intolerance”

    Even when something wrong happens offline, the social customer will capture and introduce that mistake to their social networks. When one employee goes rogue, it can negatively impact the entire organization when that event is recounted throughout social media channels.

    At a Long Island, NY Starbucks a contentious discussion took place between an employee and manager that appeared to one customer to be an incident of “homophobia”. That customer wrote a detailed open letter to Starbucks denouncing the incident and held Starbucks responsible for allowing such discrimination to go on in their stores. This letter was then subsequently published on the customer’s wife’s blog and attracted the attention of the blogosphere and news outlets.

    Instead of enduring a “full-blown PR firestorm”, Starbucks went on the offensive only days after the incident was posted online. Taking a multi-channel approach, Starbucks chose to fully confront the situation to ensure that the incident remained isolated from its corporate image and culture. On its website, Twitter account and through the press, Starbucks clearly laid out its response including steps for “immediate action” and commitment to investigating the incident.

    As quickly as social media can hurt organizations by amplifying bad news, Starbucks recognized the value of speed and transparency that would help their cause to clarify their position on discrimination in the workplace.

    FedEx: “FedEx’s apology: expertly delivered”

    And speaking of speed, FedEx also staved off a PR nightmare when one of their deliverymen was caught on camera hurling a package over a fence with no regard for the contents. The YouTube video went viral attracting 1 million views in 24 hours and presently with nearly 8 million views today. Soon news outlets picked up the brazen act with the FedEx truck and logo clearly captured in the background.

    In only 48 hours, FedEx crafted a direct response to the incident and posted a video delivering that message by a senior executive responsible for all US pickup and delivery operations. The message was clear and forthcoming about his feelings of ‘disappointment’ and ‘embarrassment’ of the recorded actions.

    For FedEx, the YouTube platform provided the opportunity to offer a personal and intimate appeal from senior leadership in order to restore any consumer confidence lost from the ordeal. The speed of the response also demonstrated a recognition of how quickly negative stories can spiral out of control if left unfettered.

    Social media presents challenges and opportunities to articulate your business values, especially in times of crisis. In these examples, immediate adaptation was a necessary skill to overcome unexpected and sudden changing of events. Open communication, internal coordination and transparency were also vital to each organization’s rebound.

    For a quick roundup of social media blunders, here are two resources for you to check out:

    Would your organization be able to proactively respond in the face of a social media crisis? What other rebound examples in 2011 deserve to be mentioned and how did they turn the conversation back in their favor?

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt,Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  6. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Tis the Season for Holiday “Social Media” Campaigns

    Tuesday, 20 Dec 2011 2 Comments Posted by:

    The countdown is on. With Hanukkah candles burning brightly, and with Christmas just around the corner, the energy of the holiday season is palpable.  With the hustle and bustle of shoppers scouring stores for that elusive last gift, it’s sometimes just easier to sit behind a computer and finish your holiday shopping in one fell swoop.

    According to Lab42, a Chicago market research firm, 61 percent of shoppers plan on finding ”the perfect gift” via social networks.  And retailers have responded. Almost 75 percent of retailers invested in their Facebook and Twitter accounts in advance of the holiday season.

    So what are retailers doing for the 2011 holiday season?

    Target: “Santa has elves. You have Target.“

    Who needs elves when you have Target? That’s the message at the heart of Target’s holiday advertising — and one that they successfully also extended on social media channels like Facebook. After clicking on the Target Christmas tab on Facebook, customers are treated to a blizzard of savings, free shipping and other coupons, making it easy for customers to tackle their to-do lists.

    TIP: Make it easy for customers to shop online by providing quick access to deals on social media channels and direct links back to online shopping destinations.

    Etsy: “Gift Ideas for Facebook Friends”

    Instead of painstakingly thinking through gift ideas for your friend (or boss), the handmade crafts e-commerce site makes it easy. With one simple click of a button, Etsy suggests an array of gift ideas based on the recipient’s Facebook preferences and at a range of different prices, too.

    TIP: Simplify the shopping process. Curate personalized content using social media data to create a gift list that customers can quickly find and purchase items on site.

    Nordstrom: “Nordstrom Santa”

    Rather than awkwardly dropping gift ideas to your friends and family, Nordstrom has made it fun and easy to “pick your must-have gift” with their Nordstrom Santa Facebook App. In short, you can choose what you’re wishing for, and their app will either post the hint on your Facebook wall or send a message to one of your friends via Twitter.

    @shaunacausey Ho ho ho! Psst, I know what @joannjen wants this year! Take a peek: is.gd/vfoAt5

    — Nordstrom Santa (@NordstromSanta) November 25, 2011

    TIP: Make it fun for customers to purchase products, and make it easy for them to suggest potential gifting ideas to their friends.

    For more helpful insights on how retailers can leverage social media to boost holiday sales, we recommend:

    What holiday social media campaigns grabbed your attention this holiday season? Which retailer wins in your book?

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney, Anthony Garcia and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  7. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Measuring Social Influence

    Tuesday, 6 Dec 2011 7 Comments Posted by:

    One of the hottest topics on the minds of social media marketers is the concept of quantifying influence, or the power of an individual’s voice on social channels. There are many vendors that offer solutions that analyze a user’s activity and network to deliver an “influencer” score.

    While these services are far from perfect due to questions about scoring algorithms and the ability for individuals to artificially inflate scores, they can be integral parts of social marketing and CRM efforts. In the last year influence monitoring services have started to segment into three main categories.

    Social Analytics:  These services are built to measure and score activity, friend/follower growth, and track common post topics. Social analytics can be useful to track a brand’s effectiveness on social channels. Some examples of these types include:

    Influencer Identification:  The next level of social services includes features that identify the top social influencers on particular topics. Influencer identification is particularly helpful for blogger outreach.  Examples of influencer identification services include:

    Reputation Quantification:  Turning social reputation into an actionable asset for marketers and customer service is the next evolution of influence monitoring service.  By taking social analytics, influencer identification, and adding user vouching these services enable marketers toeffectively target influencers. Examples:

    There are many new competitors entering the market and companies are constantly refining their services. As of now, however, social influence monitoring services are useful to social marketers even if there is some debate about accuracy.

    Here are some more helpful articles on quantifying influencer scores:

    We’re curious to hear your thoughts on this much debated topic. What tools have you used to measure social influence?
    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  8. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Ideation Communities

    Tuesday, 22 Nov 2011 1 Comment Posted by:

    Collecting product and services ideas from your customers is a great idea, right? An ideation platform will allow you to collect customer feedback, use crowd-sourcing to improve your products and services, grow your relationship with your customers through co-creation… in other words it is a technology that can enable mass collaboration with your customers.

    Not so fast partner! Implementing and maintaining an ideation community takes a lot of effort, during both the planning and maintenance stages. While marketing may be ready to gather customer ideas to demonstrate that they are listening, product development and operations must be ready to act on ideas that are both popular with customers and align with the company’s business objectives.

    Key steps to creating a successful ideation community:

    • Get executive support for an ideation community. They can serve as a champion for the community and get the appropriate teams bought in.
    • Determine where to start. Do you have a flagship product or service that customers would love to help you improve?  SAP’s Idea Place is not all-inclusive, but it lets users suggest products and solutions to add to the topic list.
    • Get commitment from those products or services teams that they will act on the approved ideas. Ideally, you can agree on a schedule for implementing ideas. Have a software product that only updates once a year? Strive to implement a number of ideas into that product each year. Have a product or service that can be continually improved? Get commitment to implement a certain number of ideas spread throughout the year. Dell implements about 10 ideas per month and in 2011 Intuit implemented 24 ideas from Inner Circle feedback.
    • Find resources to moderate the ideation community.  This includes standard community housekeeping as well as finding the correct people to respond to ideas when necessary and changing the status of the idea to indicate where it stands.  Starbucks uses two Idea Partners to make their community run smoothly.
    • Routinely review the ideas and decide which ones to act on. Consider setting up a process where ideas over a certain number of votes are reviewed by the teams responsible for that line of business.  Other consideration factors may be the cost of implementing the idea and whether or not it supports the objectives for that business line.  Threadless allows submitted designs to be scored for 7 days before determining whether to print them and P&G Connect and Develop looks for ideas that are strategically aligned with their business and provide a win-win for P&G and the idea submitter.

    Once the ideation community is launched the real work begins:

    • Promote the ideation community to customers through multiple touchpoints, paying specific attention to where your company previously has collected customer feedback. Send those customers to the new ideation community.
    • Actively moderate and review ideas. Set customer expectations by keeping them updated about the status of their ideas.  Statuses such as acknowledged, under review, coming soon, not planned and implemented are easy to understand.  On the salesforce.com IdeaExchange, you can easily see which ideas are under consideration and which were delivered in the latest product release.
    • Communicate reasons for not implementing popular ideas. Don’t just let them hang out in the community without a response. Customers will appreciate your transparency.  Forrester says “For ideation sites, transparency is key” (membership required).
    • Lastly, celebrate ideas that do make it to market. Customers want to see that you are listening to them and want to know what improvements have been made that make their lives easier. It may even convince them to buy the next upgrade. National Instruments launches their customer-driven software improvements at NIWeek, their annual user conference.

    Because ideation communities are only one way to innovate with your customers, don’t miss:

    10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories
    5 Steps to Success in Customer Innovation Programs
    A Co-creation Primer
    How to Turn Social Media Assets Into Social Co-Creation Assets

    Note: Some examples used in this post (SAP, Intuit, P&G, Salesforce and Dell) are current or former Ant’s Eye View clients.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  9. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: The Rules of Engagement

    Tuesday, 8 Nov 2011 4 Comments Posted by:

    Practically every month, we have a new organization as a poster child for customer engagement failure. The recent fiasco with ChapStick deleting fan’s comments illustrates that although online enterprise engagement is no longer new, companies are still failing customers in a very public, proliferating, and often tailspin manner.

    As such, we thought it was time to brush the dust off some of our favorite engagement principles, and share some tips and tricks for the best ways to engage with customers online.

    • Building relationships in the enterprise world often takes the form of community.  In this post, Ant’s Eye View’s very own Jake McKee shares his rules for community building.
    • Conversely, there is no faster way to derail and erode customer engagement by ignoring or failing to consider their needs them before making huge decisions that impact their relationship with you – just ask Netflix. At least they were ultimately able to own up to their mistakes.

    Ultimately, it’s not terribly difficult to make online engagement successful.  One simply needs to abide by a few principles and learn from those who have succeeded and fallen before us.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants:Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  10. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Online Privacy

    Tuesday, 25 Oct 2011 2 Comments Posted by:

    Online privacy is a hot topic. With every Facebook change, launch of a new location-sharing service, and every Federal investigation of online privacy, data concerns get more and more attention. Rightfully so.

    As individuals, we are putting more and more data “out there” about ourselves than ever before. Often times we are sharing or providing this information without realizing it, or understanding the implications.

    There are varying philosophies surrounding online privacy security ranging from highly conservative to highly liberal. But more important than opinion, we think it’s valuable to look at the data and privacy issues from a frame of reference that acknowledges bias.

    So stepping back from the conservative versus liberal debate, we give you the Ant’s Eye Point-of-View of Online Privacy from the major players perspective.

    Facebook

    Facebook (re: Mark Zuckerburg) has publicly declared its stance on the issue of online privacy.  To “Zuck”, the age of privacy is over.

    With the addition of Timeline they may have taken it a step further. It can all be quite confusing for the users to understand the privacy settings

    Google

    In it’s most recent attempt to protect user privacy Google has announced it will now be encrypting all sessions for signed-in users.

    Sounds simple, but many in the online marketing world take objection.

    Amazon

    Recently Amazon announced a new line of Kindle’s along with a new device called “Fire” and a browser/operating system called Silk. Shortly thereafter a member of Congress with some concerns contacted them requesting a response on several issues.  The issues surrounded their handling of  personal information and user data. They have since responded alleviating/addressing the privacy issues.

    4Chan

    While many Internet users may not be familiar with 4Chan, they are aware of it’s effects. The image board website is responsible for many things including some of the webs most popular meme’s.  The founder Chris Poole (aka ‘moot’) has been a strong advocate of online privacy and anonymity. He, and the fellow anonymous users of 4Chan will undoubtedly continue to be a major voice in this conversation.

    You

    You. Me. We. Cumulatively we are THE biggest “player” online.

    At the end of the day, it is up to each of us to define our own levels of tolerance with privacy and security. You dictate how much information is being shared about your life so it’s important to understand as much as possible.

    A nice walk-through of the new Facebook settings can be found here.

    Google’s privacy policy is rather lengthy, but a good read if you’re concerned and definitely explore through the links. For a more concise list of what you are sharing with Google check out dashboard.  The Better Business Bureau offers up a list of tips for helping to secure your online activity.  And finally, Google offers up a ton of helpful information on staying safe online and managing your data that we highly recommend checking out.

    Knowledge is power.