He responded, “Haan Haan madam, Facebook wale main bahut colour hain.”.

The same evening I took a shared taxi back to Churchgate Station. A middle class family with a kid was sharing the taxi with me. The wife was suggesting to her husband,

” Agar aaj ke koi pics ache hain toh woh Facebook par daal denge.”

The next day on my way back from a meeting, I overheard a conversation of two college students in the First Class ladies compartment. One of them was having a problem with her album privacy settings, while the other was suggesting her to go to Facebook Privacy settings on the top right of the page and change it from there. Alternatively she said,

” If you have a Facebook addict or Techno Freak in your class ask him to change it for you.”

I never imagined something like a Facebook would penetrate people’s lives this deeply.

Have you come across any such event? Do share

If you have a business , it is crucial to listen to what people are talking about you. It is also a way to reach out to your relevant audience and start a conversation with them and maybe convert them into a customer.

Here is one of the free monitoring tools, Google Alerts, among others, that you can use for tracking your brand mentions on the internet.

How to use it:

Visit- www.google.com/alerts

Fill in the keywords you wish to track. Please add the keyword in quotes, else for the keyword Hotel Sea Princess, Google will send you alerts for Hotel, Sea and Princess ending up spamming you.

Once you create an alert you will start receiving mails.

Depending on the content of the mail you can take action, ignore, raise a flag or plain simple just be aware of what the internet is talking about your brand.

Note: Google alerts is not 100 % accurate but does a fairly good job and almost all online marketers use it.

Starting off with a Welcome tab & Deals tab for your Facebook page.

Founded by Rohan Dighe, Dealtadka.com offers you a dashboard to create deals for your Facebook connections. It also creates a decent looking welcome tab. It is a very easy process and they also offer help to set it up. You can create multiple deals for a very minimal fee.

Live deal:

Dashboard: [Where you can create a deal yourself]

Welcome Tab:

It is suitable for local businesses selling products or services and for businesses where footfalls is of prime importance.

It is extremely affordable, the monthly retainer cost to keep one deal running, as I know it, is really marginal.

If you like the idea and want to try it out, reach out to me in the comments section or write to me here. I will connect you to Rohan.

Disclaimer: I am in no way attached to Dealtadka. This is just a knowledge sharing blog post.

I see Reliance Mobile attempting to do the same. They have this fancy customer care tab on their Facebook page and also believe in being transparent about which customer care executive is handling the query. Pretty much like dell does. In past Dell representatives have reached out to me through messages on my Fb profile.

I recently bought a Reliance tab and it’s been 5 days and they haven’t started my calling and 3G connection. I have posted a query on twitter and their fancy Fb tab. Let’s see how much of this is being put practice.

PS- They could have done with better designing.

Personally I love twitter. Facebook is cluttered and brand pages kill it for me. Google +…well I haven’t logged in for ages now.

For those who missed it can read up on it on Miss Malini’s blog here.

Excerpts from the blog -

I [Miss Malini] actually had a lot of fun last Saturday afternoon speaking at The Social Media Club of Mumbai (thanks for the invite guys!) Not only did I get to meet the brilliant Search Engine Marketing Specialist Ben Hayes (aka @benboombastic on Twitter) from Communicate 2.0 who taught me several things I can do to popularize my blog. I got to put in my two bits about how MissMalini.com came about!

To stay updated on the upcoming events follow SMC, Mumbai on Facebook and Twitter . All SMC Mumbai events have no registration fees.

I describe my issue to which they have a common reply.

And this has been their standard response I can see on twitter.com/tataphotonplus .

My initial thoughts were,

- Why would a brand use a Gmail id for customer care?

- If they have to direct people to an email id, why be on twitter anyway?

Me being me, I asked them to solve my issue on twitter and their answer was that they have a protocol to follow.

Nevertheless I emailed them, after all they at least made the initial effort to be on twitter, only to know that I can feel free to call their customer care number to solve my issue.

However this is not a post where I am being just another disgruntled customer. The point I am trying to make here is, why do brands need to follow a protocol for customer service/support/care on social media.

How different is a call centre customer care to a twitter customer care. In fact twitter is public and one wrong step could fire back. I don’t see any protocol followed when I call the call centre. The customer care executive solves my issue over the call. Why give the step motherly treatment to twitter/social media.

If your offline customer care is well routed and is many a times internally managed, if not it is at least well integrated with your systems and business verticals, why not replicate that to social media.

So let’s jot down some bullet points that go in favour of integrating your social media customer service into your other processes-

-          Quick response time is always appreciated. This is only possible if it is not an agency managing your twitter account.

-          Internal resource will be at a better position to handle the query than your outsourced team

-          If the outsourced team again directs the troubled user to the offline customer care channels, you are only ending up increasing the time of response and adding one more unnecessary step towards solving a users problem

-          You can cut cost by directing users that have similar problems to say a trouble shooting blog post that you have written.

-          You can also cut cost by encouraging brand evangelism. Many a times in a very active community I have seen loyal users assist other users, solve their queries, fire fight even before the brand reaches to that conversation.

-          You can further cut cost by managing more queries in the same stipulated time than that of the agency.

-          If it’s a product issue you can internally share the feedback with the product development team, if it’s an idea it can be forwarded internally to the R&D team. All of this information just gets lost somewhere between your communications with the agency.

Sadly, the harsh reality is that marketers still think that the primary benefit or reason for them to be on active on social media platforms as a brand is to either acquire customers or increase current consumption.

Convinced that it should be managed internally? Can you think of any other reasons why Social media should be integrated in your business functions? Please feel to disagree and have a healthy debate by commenting on this post.

Sharing some pictures. Will soon share the presentation.