Telco, energy company or bank social media team. Which is the toughest job?
It's a tough call. But instead of waiting for the complaints, or plaudits, to come in, Optus is hunting them down. And it is hunting though customers posts and tweets to find out what makes them tick. Not only that but it is using social media to take customers from Telstra, Vodafone and Virgin.
But is it creepy or friendly if brands are trawling tweets and posts?
Nigel Lopez-McBean, Optus associate director, social media and content marketing, said the telco has set up a social sales team to take a proactive approach, privacy setting permitting.
“Instead of going in there and saying 'hey come talk to us', [we are going] in there [to] effectively stalk them,” he told a panel session at Social Media Week in Sydney yesterday. “Find out about them, find out about their interests, find out about their passions and then when you do engage, engage in a way where their interest is going to be automatically piqued.”
Lopez-McBean said the telco recently converted a competitor's customer of twenty years with just one tweet. And it was because of her love for Bon Jovi.
Lopez-McBean said the now-Optus customer in question had touted the fact that her contract was up to a bunch of telcos via twitter – a come and get me plea. Optus trawled her profile, spotted the Bon Jovi connection and referenced the group's lyrics in its tweets to her.
“And the reaction was astonishing,” he said. Either way, she's a customer, and customer acquisition for telcos is not cheap.
But is trawling social media for customer acquisition purposes friendly or creepy?
Staying on the right side of that line is a concern in social media. In another panel session Disruptor's Handbook founder and strategist Gavin Heaton claimed people are happy to hand over information if it's not going to be used in a creepy way.
Emma Lo Russo, chief executive officer of Digivizer, suggested it wasthose that did not grow up with social media that find use of social information creepy. Given that Facebook and Twitter are less than a decade old, that's technically most adults. But even non-social natives are becoming "more tolerant" of it, he said, provided it "translates into value".
Ian Laurie, head of social investment at IPG Mediabrands Society agency, added that whether it's creepy or not all comes back to relevance.
"People are scared of [brands] using data in a wrong way. But I have no problem with billboards changing to reflect something targeted at me ... If we can take that personal targeting from social data and put it back into the rest of marketing, like outdoor advertising, that would be fantastic."
"Marketers really need to understand why they are going into social data," and what they are using the insight for, he said.
We Are Social strategist Amaury Treguer told AdNews said that for community managers “it's an easy click” to go to a profile and understand the customer more, particularly when it comes to dealing with consumer complaints. However, he believes that brands looking at social media profiles - even though they are publicly available - borders too far into “creepy.”
“Profiling is part of the terms of customer service but we wouldn’t go to the root, trying to find a hook in order to get them in. Its more like understanding who we're talking to than using this as a way of selling more,” Treguer said.
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