maandag 23 maart 2009

Customer service in the cloud: the Orange Service Community by salesforce.com

'Real wisdom lives in the cloud. Web communities. Twitter. Facebook. Forums. Blogs. Google. The cloud is where customers are turning for service' Salesforce.com helps companies to be part of those customer service web communities. Have a look at their video: http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud/tour/








dinsdag 10 maart 2009

Twitter in breaking news situations

A newsitem on Dutch television on the usage of twitter in breaking news situations. It is related to the coverage of the flight crash at Schiphol. (unfortunately no subtitles)

donderdag 5 maart 2009

Enterprise 2.0 and the strength of weak ties

Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School about Enterprise 2.0 and its impact on business and startups - at the talk the future conference in Krems, Austria.

One of the topics addressed is his view on the importance of weak ties, a subject on which he published earlier. I liked the following quote from this video: 'Weak ties are sources of innovation, they are ways for you to get introduced to people who you would not know otherwise'. It show that new technologies can indeed strengthen relationships between people in ways that previously was not possible.

dinsdag 3 maart 2009

Ambient customer intimacy


Today I was watching a video on ideasproject.com. The video starred the social media innovator Laura Fitton and she raised the term ‘ambient intimacy’. The term, apparently raised by Leisa Reichelt, describes how new technologies, such as Twitter, strengthen ties between people in a way that previousely was not possible:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because of time and space conspire to make it impossible’ (http://www.slideshare.net/leisa/ambient-intimacy)

Yesterday I was impressed by the way Skittles.com embraced Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Wikipedia. It is a strong example of how a brand puts social media at the forefront! I would like to call this ‘ambient customer intimacy’. It opens up new possibilities of companies to be more intimate with their stakeholders. Especially in the B2C domain social media tools open up new ways of keeping in touch with your customers.

Ambient customer intimacy refers to the ability to leverage social media in such a way that customer intimacy emerges bottom-up. Skittles, for example, just created the platform, or unified various social media surrounding their brand. By unifying these media under the skittles.com umbrella they are strengthening the relationship with their stakeholders. The large number of twitter feeds mentioning skittles is already an indicator that they strengthen the ties between people associating themselves with the skittles brand.

Ambient customer intimacy furthermore provides food for thought of re-examining the customer intimacy definition of ‘people collaborating in a structured and customer centric way to create customer value and achieve results’. Especially, the structured part: ‘Every decision or every contact moment should be governed by processes that are designed with a customer focus. These processes structure the way people work together and prevent that customer related decisions are out of sync with each other.’ This definition implies top-down governance and imposed ways of handling customer related activities. Ambient customer intimacy refers to a new dimension where structure is not governed top-down but is facilitated by the community.

Any other examples of companies with an ambient customer intimacy?