If you have been following this blog, you might remember that I posted this a while back. But with the new year here, I thought it might be good to repeat some of the case studies while adding new ones... just incase you missed them or incase you wanted a refresher as you start down the path of providing a solution to your company social media needs!

Remember that great song... "Can't get no... Satisfaction..." Some how I think that is the national anthem of most customers. Why is it so freaking hard to get satisfaction?

If you have been following this blog, you might remember that I posted this a while back. But with the new year here, I thought it might be good to repeat some of the case studies while adding new ones... just incase you missed them or incase you wanted a refresher as you start down the path of providing a solution to your company social media needs!

The Second Case Study on Customer Service Social Media: How To and The Results...

If you have been following this blog, you might remember that I posted this a while back. But with the new year here, I thought it might be good to repeat some of the case studies while adding new ones... just incase you missed them or incase you wanted a refresher as you start down the path of providing a solution to your company social media needs!

This is the second case studies in the series on Customer Service Social Media Best Practices! You might be wondering what I meant by "ownership." In organizational change management language... there are three stages of project success - awareness, buy-in and ownership. Here ownership doesn't me "owning" like it's mine - not yours. It means taking 100% responsibility for leading and faciliating solid, genuine, collaborative relationships with the whole company to further the whole company's succcess. Here's more details on how Lenovo accomplished their social media goals!

Why Did Lenovo Consider Social Media?

When Lenovo acquired the IBM PC computing division, they realized customers were talking about their products on 3rd party forums like notebookreview.com and thinkpads.com. They felt left out of these important customer conversations. To remedy that, they took ownership and lead the customer social media interactions.

Social networks have always been with us, of course, but now they’ve gained concrete reality in the online fabric of modern life.

Social network analysis has, in a real sense, been with us almost as long as we’ve been doing predictive analytics. Customer churn analysis is the killer app for predictive analytics, and it is inherently social. It’s long been known that individual customers don’t always churn themselves—i.e., decide to renew and/or bolt to the competition—in isolation. As they run the continual calculus called loyalty in their heads and hearts, they’re receiving fresh feeds of opinion from their friends and families, following the leads of peers and influencers, and keeping their fingers to the cultural breeze. You could also make a strong case for social networking—i.e., individual behaviors spurred, shaped, and encouraged within communities—as a key independent variable driving cross-sell, up-sell, fraud, and other phenomena for which we’ve long built predictive models.

The other day, a Forrester client was asking me for educated guesses on how fast the average enterprise data warehouse (EDW) is likely to grow over the next several years, and as I was working through the analysis, I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that social network analysis—for predictive and other uses—will be an important growth driver (though not the entire story). I’d like to lay out my key points.