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hey, retail!

get serious about social customer engagement

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contents

1 intro 2 4 5 6 7 8 social customer engagement for retail what does enaged look like? relationships, deep engagement how to build stong relationships with customers trust vs. relevance co-creating long-term value

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Lithium social software helps the worlds most iconic brands increase loyalty, reduce support costs, drive word-of-mouth marketing, and accelerate innovation.
Lithium helps brands to build vibrant customer communities that:
reduce service costs with grow brand advocay with drive sales with innovate faster with

social support

social marketing

social commerce

social innovation

lithium.com | 2013 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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intro

Imagine a time when your acquisition strategy is roaring.


Your brands message is set to go viral, your sensational social media strategies are clicking away, and you are launching the greatest virtual cocktail party social has ever seen. The music is great; the drinks are flowing; and the crowd pulses to the beat of your brand. Through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc., your foray into the social customer experience has now attracted the perfect set of consumers. These consumers, or as we call them, superfans, are fully engaged and really dig your products. They are both interested in and capable of bringing serious value to your company. These superfans are so passionate that they will donate their time and skills to help your company with support, marketing and innovation. If you play your cards right by effectively engaging, empowering and inspiring them to do so, these customers will keep your social party happy and growing, now and far into the future. Social customer engagement, however, is no easy task. Your customers are constantly swamped with invitations to connect with other brands through social media. Their limited time and attention, together with their invaluable loyalty, will go to those who win on the social customer experience. Thats why your engagement strategy is so importantin order to take on the competition.

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social customer engagement for retail

Social engagement is not just about technology. Its about social customers themselves who have permanently disrupted the traditional, sales-based business model. The opportunities of this tectonic shift challenge retailers to engage their social customers with more than price alone. Market share now increasingly goes to brands that master the customer experience in stores and online mastering the social customer experience in stores and online.

Engagement is about nurturing prospects and cultivating customer relationships. It picks up what your social customer acquisition strategy delivers, and then ratchets it up to the next level. Taken together, your acquisition strategy and customer engagement form the tactics that sustain the social customers attention span and make customers want to stay with you rather than give their attention to other competitors.

$14B
US social commerce sales, 2011-2015 Sales of physical goods through online social networks will grow by 93% per year in the US, reaching $14 billion by 2015.
Source: Booz & Co.

$9B $5B

$1B
2011

$3B

2012

2013

2014

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Lets dig deeper into these relationships in the context of the customer experience and discover how brands can build strong, lasting and valuable relationships with their customers. Well unveil the essential differences between public social networks and communities highlighting topics like interaction, trust and relevance. Then well show why social networks are better for acquisition, but that channels like Facebook and Twitter have some deal-breaking limitations when it comes to customer engagement. Finally, well explore how to co-create value with and between customers, and how communities and superfans play special roles in winning the social customer experience.

because of social media, I am more likely to:

80%
Try new things based on friends suggestions

74%
Encourage my friends to try new products

72%
Stay more engaged with the brands I like

42%
Share any negative experiences with brands or products

32%
Not buy certain products because I learned of a negative customer experience
Source: CMO Council

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what does enaged look like?

Truly engaged customers are more than enthusiastic fans. Theyre interactive participants in activities that help define your brands value. Consider the following social customer activities and behaviors: From consumption to co-creation, social customers engage at various levels of activity. To foster engagement, we need to find and nurture users inclined to progress through those increasing levels of activity until they are co-creating value with you. This process involves moving your social customers from simply connecting with your brand to interacting with it. social investment really pay off. So, while connections certainly have value, interactions (a much stronger form of engagement) have much greater value. Connections must interact with your brand and other customers in order to drive: 1. Influencethrough interactions, customer connections generate stronger, more trusted relationships, higher participation (support, help), and user-generated content (reviews, knowledge articles, or advocacy) that can significantly affect consumer purchase decisions. 2. Loyaltyinteractions build the stronger and deeper customer-brand relationships that lead to persistent consumption of your products and services. Your role is to empower your best customers to interact in ways that benefit them, you, and other customers. Those interactionsand their resulting relationshipsare what you are trying to make fun, easy, and mutually rewarding.

Connection vs. Interaction


Your acquisition strategy is naturally designed to help you make lots of connections (e.g. likes, fans, followers, and friends) which are fairly simple to make and easy to maintain. Think of connection as the active engagement. Measuring success solely by the number of connections youre able to make through social media is a very common practice for businesses today. While it is important to connect with customers, just having a lot of likes and followers does not constitute a business. To be competitive you need those connections to engage in a way that is profitable for everyone. Its critical to remember that each connection we make with a social customer only has potential value. Interaction is what turns simple customer connections into valuable assetsassets that drive influence and build loyalty. Theyre what fuel the social customer experience to make your

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relationships, deep engagement

The goal of engagement is to build and strengthen relationships with and between your customers. Building any relationship, however, requires interacting with the other party. You cant bring your social customers home with you like a team of enthusiastic new recruits, run off to the office for a week, and then expect them to wear your jersey or go to bat for you. You must faithfully, consciously interact with them in order to get them to respond to you, know and value you just as you do in return.

Interactions are much harder to maintain than connections because they require persistent actions over time. Social networks determine who connects with whom, but they dont determine who interacts with whom, or how. Thats up to the social customers themselvesand what drives those interactive decisions is their own personal inspiration. Your job is to find out how to tap into that inspiration.

Strong and Weak TiesWe Need Both


Not every relationship within a social network is equally strong or reciprocated. We all have a range of relationship strengths and interaction depths. This is what we mean by tie-strength. Some relationships in social networks are strong and some are weak depending on your relationship with that person. In social networks, we need both. Weak ties give your messages reach, helping you to reach a wider audience. By virtue of their diversity and sheer number, weak ties tend to propagate brand messages further and to more disparate parts of the social network. Strong ties, on the other hand, are what lead to loyalty, repeat purchases, persistent consumption and ultimately, advocacy.

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how to build stong relationships with customers

Here are the pillars of a basic social strategy for strengthening relationships with (and between) your customers.

1. Time
Time spent together increases tie strength. Most importantly, the desire to spend time together has to be mutual.

Strategy: Know when your customers want to spend time with you and be there for them.

2. Intensity
Intensity is the most difficult component to control. The intensity a customer feels for a brand will always be less than it is for a friend, however, when you tap into your customers passions, finding topics they care about, your chances for creating that intensity improve. Also, because people trust themselves, they tend to trust brands that co-create with them. Here were talking about two types of co-creation: passive co-creation (listening and collecting customer input), and active co-creation (crowdsourcing and collaboratively filtering customergenerated ideas).

Strategy: Appeal to greater causesthings that have higher meaning that your customers feel strongly aboutnot just for your brand.

Strategy: Create transparent and authentic communication channels to and among customers, and co-create with them.

3. Trust
Transparent communication channels create an environment thats more conducive to building trust. In this case were talking about two types of transparency: B2Cbusiness-to-customer (your outbound messages on social channels), and C2C customer-to-customer (peer-to-peer community discussions).

4. Reciprocity
Reciprocity means two-way reciprocal servicesboth from B2C, and from C2C. Your job is to make it easy for your customers to help other customers of yours, and then to reward them properly.

Strategy: Let your customers help youand one another! A small investment from the customer is valuable in building deeper relationships, but it must be voluntary.

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trust vs. relevance

Deep engagement requires both trust and relevance. When either quality is lacking, the odds of conversion plummet. Creating trust and relevance, however, are not equally possible over any social media channel. Social networks and communities have different strengths and an effective social strategy plays to them.

Heres where it gets interesting: It is vastly easier to build trust than it is to create relevance. Specifically, its easier to create trust within a community that already has relevance, than it is to create relevance within a social network that already has trust. We can build trust within a community, but relevance is very hard to createespecially among strong tiesunless it already exists.

A social network is there to maintain established relationships. A community is there to build relationships around a common interest.

Social networks have high levels of trust because theyre comprised of people we already know and trust. Communities, on the other hand, have high levels of relevance, because everyone gathers there around a common interest. Relevance is what gives you depthwithout it your engagement tactics will stall. Without relevance your nonphotographer friends might still look at the camera you recommended because youa strong tierecommended it over Facebook, but they wont actually buy it. They wont buy it if it isnt already relevant to their needs, interests and desires. Conversion requires relevance.

Social networks feature high levels of trust. Communities feature high levels of relevance. It is vastly easier to cultivate trust than to create relevance.

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co-creating long-term value


aw ar en es s
Within a community its shared interest without ulterior motive that forms the foundation for trust-building communication. Thats your engagement strategys target: common interest. Connect and build weak ties based on engaging interactions within the community. In turn, the relationships that grow into strong ties get maintained over social networks. a common interest, then strengthen those ties through fan page wall feeds or Twitter streams) are great for news discovery. On the other hand, they tend to be very noisy channels and only support relatively shallow conversations. Deep conversation is key to engagement and to building relationships. What keeps your customers engaged for the long term isnt rank, special icons or points so much as the sense that they are helping you create something of actual value to themselves, other fans, the company and society. Were talking about things like contributing ideas that make it into products, authoring articles for knowledge bases, answering questions for support forums, or spreading the word far more efficiently than your company ever could. Loyalty itself is a long-term value. The long-term strategy for your social customers engagement is about setting up a trusted community. Its about creating an engaging social customer experience through which consumers can access

trusted, relevant content, where you can build and strengthen relationships, and where you can foster value co-creation between customers and the brand. Value for everyone means everyone wins.

action

Public sites that use stream interactions (like Facebook

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