Meeting Customer Expectations via Social Media

As I mentioned in my coverage of the C3 conference, social media and customer service seem to be made for each other. But the speed of interaction seems to be both a blessing and a curse. Case in point, during the conference I tweeted the following about how Best Buy and GiffGaff were considered to be models of how brands interact with customers via Twitter:

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Within seconds a rep from Best Buy tweeted this response:

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This Week in Social Local Media

I think this whole social local thing is starting to catch on. This week we announced our upcoming webinar on Social Local Media and we’ve already got hundreds of sign-ups. The big news in my opinion was Google’s upgrade to its social search product, which may be a small step on the search giant’s way to competing with Facebook. And speaking of Facebook, we also surfaced some interesting examples of Facebook Pages from players like LivingSocial to the extremely sociable Ms. Britney Spears. Jed broke down adoption of social mediaa by industry and Peter the K. got all gooey about a local chocolatier’s Groupon promotion for Valentine’s Day.

Here’s what else we uncovered this week in socialsphere:

How Travel Sites Integrate Social Tools
Social media fans could find interesting tools in travel sites that integrate social network features, but Roger Yu doesn’t believe these sites are ready to replace guidebooks and planning tools. Reviewing the sites, he rambles off annoyances and benefits that could act as supplements to traditional books that help travelers find local restaurants or hotels.

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Google Adds More Friends to Social Search

Google announced today that it has upgraded Google Social Search to now include social data from Twitter, Flickr and Quora. In the past you may not have even noticed social results as they typically showed up at the bottom of the SERP. Now they are going to be blended throughout the SERPs as you can see below:

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About a year and half ago, I posited on SearchEngineLand that it was inevitable that Local Social Search would be the default search paradigm for local queries. We’re still not there yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I recall having a discussion at the time with a search engineer at Google who claimed this would be an impractical technical challenge for the search giant (never thought I’d hear that from a Googler). But with the continuing improvement of Google Social Search along with the pressure GOOG is feeling to compete with Facebook on the social front, I have a feeling we are going to be seeing a lot more local-social stuff coming out of the Plex.  For those of you pondering the implications, here’s an excerpt from my old post that I think is still relevant:

…there is a large opportunity for businesses to increase awareness in their community by simply networking with other businesses via social media like Twitter. But now with the advent of Google social search, the simple act of following or being followed has a ripple effect that could yield dramatic benefits.

Here’s a pseudo-real-world example:

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