August in Austin. Muy caliente outside and an onslaught of shameless “asking for votes” in the SxSW panel picker.

I’m a little different – yes, I’d still like to get your vote and ask you to recommend my “Tired of @#%ing Social Media Experts?” game-show style panel presentation to your 519 Facebook friends, but I’d also like you to get involved in the process.

I’m talking to you, (yes, you in the red shirt, third row on the iPhone) what do you need to see or hear to get you and your friends to vote for my panel? A personalized video of a guy on a horse? A Top Ten List? A front row seat at my panel? Details are what’ll get your request heard and my co-host, the fabulous funny man himself, Sam Decker and I will give it serious consideration (which means he’ll follow through on the ideas I like). Just kidding, Sam!

Crowdsourcing is key to our game show panel. Why a game show? Well, because they are fun, light-hearted and almost everyone has a chance to be a winner (great prizes can’t hurt either). Sam Decker and I will serve as your humble game show hosts and we’ll select audience members for an exciting battle of the wits. The winner takes the title of Master Chief of the Social Media Universe – or Social Media Expert for short.

With a mix of 99% fun (at least for Sam and me) and 1% education – this panel will be sheer entertainment. Let’s be honest, we all deserve a break from the normal panels and presentations. And Tired of @#%ing Social Media Experts? is your chance for just that. It’s a comical break during a long educational week at SxSW.

So here’s what we’d ask of you:

1) vote!

2) get your friends to vote

3) please comment with your ideas on how to promote the panel

Voting ends Friday, August 27. Stay cool.

Shauna joins Ant’s Eye View from Comcast where she managed communications, community relations and partnered with Frank Eliason to lead many aspects of the company’s social media strategy.

Having worked closely with Shauna over the past year as Social Media Club Seattle Board members, I’ve witnessed firsthand Shauna’s passion for social media and the power these new technologies afford for real change in the community. And Shauna’s combination of moxie, understated charm and sheer will power has allowed her to do just that. Whether it’s launching Voluntweetup, a summer event series where local technology enthusiasts train and educate nonprofits on how to use social media effectively or starting TechMavens, a project that highlights the stories of trailblazing women involved in technology and social media across the United States, Shauna’s helped transform the way people think of social media – from beyond technology to what technology can do for society.

In her free time, Shauna is an avid beach volleyball player and serves on the Board for a number of nonprofits including Leadership Tomorrow and the Jolkona Foundation.

Shauna’s new role as Senior Consultant and Ant Evangelist will have her traveling up and down the West Coast adding her corporate communications and community relations experience to the team. She’ll join the firm officially on August 9 and begin immediately supporting the company’s growing roster of enterprise clients in the Silicon Valley area.

Please join us in warmly welcoming the talented Shauna Causey (@shaunacausey) to the anthill.

Without further ado, let’s introduce you to our newest consultants:

Meet Tyler Welch. This avid West Ham United supporter joins Ant’s Eye View after spending four years at Microsoft in the Community and Online Support Team where he led the global launch of Microsoft Answers in 12 languages for Windows and Office. When he wasn’t at Qwest Field cheering on the Sounders, he worked closely with online community leaders for XBOX, Windows Phone and other consumer products and community leaders who have been awarded and recognized as Microsoft MVPs.

Before Microsoft, Tyler was a General Manager for Gateway, leading sales, training and support for multiple markets in the Western United States. In his spare time, Tyler is a drummer in a New Wave Punk band called Groggy Bikini.  I’m not quite sure what a Groggy Bikini is, but I’m thrilled to add a new punk band offering to our portfolio if you want to hear them!

Jenna Jantsch, a new resident to the San Jose area, brings hands-on experience driving social media marketing efforts for Vertical Response, a large email and marketing service provider to small businesses. In addition to driving social media marketing for Vertical Response, Jenna regularly taught social media marketing best practices to small business owners through a wide variety of speaking engagements.

Jenna joins Ant’s Eye View immediately after her honeymoon so wish her a great first day in marriage and on the job!

Last but not least, Geoff Knox comes to Ant’s Eye View from communications firm WCG, as part of their social media group optimizing listening and engagement strategies for the new online landscape. Geoff was one of the original members of the Dell customer outreach program as team lead, and brings valuable experience in customer and technical support, sales and corporate communications for companies working in the online space.

When not herding children with his wife, Geoff spends time obsessing over professional football teams based out of Oakland, California. In fact, Geoff is such a die-hard fan, he even owns a Darth Vader Raiders helmet.

Please join us in warmly welcoming these three ants to the team.

Our quest for talent has not waned. We’re hiring for a Senior Consultant for our new Silicon Valley office to support a growing roster of enterprise clients in the area. For more information on what we’re looking for in a Social Business Consultant, drop us a note in the comments section.

How do you use Social Media Optimization to increase passive content discovery?

In this age of infomania, where most of us have Tweetdeck or Facebook up on our screens during the day, passive content discovery is increasingly prevalent. While we aren’t actively searching for content, when something interesting gets populated into our social stream, we typically click on the link and check it out. Oftentimes, it doesn’t matter if we were doing something else. Links, referrals,  images and recommendations from our friends and family typically receive first priority. That’s why optimizing web content to get information into as many social feeds is more important than ever.

This week’s Tech Talk post features Gigya, an on-site social optimization technology that enables content discovery through social channels by aggregating social API for single API access.  For users, Gigya allows for a seamless experience connecting into third-party websites through social platforms and provides an easy way to share content they’d like to recommend to their friends. For businesses, Gigya builds the pipes between social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and corporate websites, helps lowers the friction in the registration process through single sign-in registration, delivers insightful reports about web traffic by platform — all the while, gaining access to a user’s social graph and friends through sharing.

We’ve provided two videos (from Gigya) that illustrate how easy Gigya can be used to share content and drive engagement.

Gigya for Sharing Content

ESPN Using Gigya Sharing from Gigya, Inc. on Vimeo.

Gigya for Engagement – Live Chat

Gigya / PGA – Social Live Chat Plug-In from Gigya, Inc. on Vimeo.

Another business use case for Gigya is the tool’s ability to deliver granular analytics about user interaction and web traffic by platform. With Gigya, businesses can aggregate analytics from multiple social platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace Google and Yahoo into one user interface. Through these types of reporting, it’s easy for companies to measure and compare which content gets shared most frequently and on what platform. Other possible metrics include: total connected users, new users, new connections by platform, newsfeed posts, newsfeed posts by platform, status updates, messages sent, messages sent by platform, referral traffic and referral traffic by platform.

Right now, we’re just skimming the surface of Gigya, I’d highly recommend poking around the Gigya website for more information. Special thanks to Ben Pashman, Senior Vice-President of Business Development at Gigya for the interview.

Next up for Tech Talk review is Klout. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask about Klout, the “standard for influence?”

BP Response

Because BP was slow to respond to the public’s needs (information, action) the topic of “oil spill” (which is the paramount disaster) is actually not mentioned as often as BP. In the chart below (source: Radian6 May 23-June 22, 2010), AEV’s Listening 360 service measured online mentions (blogs, forums, comments, tags) of “oil spill” vs.“BP” (included “Exxon” and “Chevron” to give a sense of the baseline of online mentions for other large oil companies).  There were more online mentions (avg. 80,000/day) for BP than the actual crisis itself. It’s interesting to note that where our attention is should be focused on an environmental issue, BP is now in the spotlight because of their response.

“Oil Spill” vs. “BP” vs. “Exxon” vs. “Chevron”

You might feel that no company can really respond appropriately for a crisis like this.

Johnson & Johnson Response

Wednesday morning, September 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, died after taking a capsule of Extra Strength Tylenol. Adam Janus of Arlington Heights, Illinois, died in the hospital shortly thereafter. Adam’s brother Stanley of Lisle, Illinois, and sister-in-law Theresa died after gathering to mourn his death, having taken pills from the same bottle. Soon afterward, Mary McFarland of Elmhurst, Paula Prince of Chicago, and Mary Reiner of Winfield, Illinois, also died in similar incidents. Investigators soon discovered the Tylenol link. Urgent warnings were broadcast, and police drove through Chicago neighborhoods issuing warnings over loudspeakers Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of McNeil, distributed warnings to hospitals and distributors and halted Tylenol production and advertising. On October 5, 1982, it issued a nationwide recall of Tylenol products; an estimated 31 million bottles were in circulation, with a retail value of over US$100 million. The company also advertised in the national media for individuals not to consume any products that contained acetaminophen. When it was determined that only capsules were tampered with, they offered to exchange all Tylenol capsules already purchased by the public with solid tablets.(source Wikipedia “Chicago Tylenol murders”).

J&J wanted to solve the cyanide tampering crisis, same as BP would like this oil spill to be contained and all the spilled oil cleaned up. But what J&J practiced was to find a solution first, damage control later. By being open for help and communication with the public and police, FBI, and FD&A; J&J got vital information that help identify source of the tampering, solutions to prevent future crisis and public trust that listen and responded positively to J&J messages.

They did this practicing the 5 BE’s:

BE Timely
BE Honest
BE Responsible
BE Transparent
BE Human

So how could BP have accomplished the 5 BE’s?

1. BE Timely

• Early BP messages were to avoid guilt and to control
• Damage control, instead of assessment and solutions. Lacked sense of urgency.

2. BE Honest

• Admit that size of spill is not understood in the beginning

3. BE Responsible (but don’t focus on control)

• Ask for help
• Invite ideas, set expectations about ideas taking time to test/evaluate. Give idea givers homework before they submit ideas

4. BE Transparent

• Talk about the who is working on the ideas, what you are doing with the ideas submitted by public

5. BE Human

• Empathetic, apologetic, disgusted
• NO whining

Is BP finished? BP has lost approximately 50% of market cap ($80 Billion) since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill .

Normally financial markets will discount any public bad news (i.e., costs of oil spill) in stock price. But this case begged the question: Is the stock price impacted by the hard cost of the oil spill or because no one trusts BP?

My opinion is that it’s probably a combination, with a low public trust, financial markets are heavily discounting the stock price, and it is not over. The costs of clean up can be a sensitivity analysis on a spreadsheet. But the impact of no/low trust in the company can be a going out of business signal, unless major change is enacted. I want and need BP to be successful in stopping the oil spill and cleaning up the mess. But my trust is on the sidelines, I need BP to express some of the public emotions. The current media messages are not coming across as genuine, is still appears that BP is more worried about their image ahead of the oil spill.

So what can BP do at this stage? Stop the oil spill and make progress on the clean up, then the public will be ready to listen. Use the 5 BE’s once you have some genuine messages to communicate about the crisis.

With all of this thinking and talking, it can be easy to forget about doing. So, here is the summer conference season challenge. What is the one thing you are going to start doing, right now, based on what you learned from a conference you attended?

Here are a couple of ideas from the Social Media Summit, a Ragan Conference held at Cisco Headquarters:

• Establish a baseline of traffic coming to your website from social media: This is easier than it sounds. Start by making sure that all relevant social media URLs are classified in your website’s analytics tool. This means not only top level domains but all sub-domains. If you are in a large organization, make sure these URLs are classified not only in the global suite but also in the local suites that your business units use. Fewer than half of attendees during an ROI presentation at the summit said they’d already done this.
• Ask your customers about how social media does, or does not, impact their purchase process: You typically know the last step your customers took before they purchased, which, if online, is usually search. But, almost no one pops out of bed each day, types in a search query and then makes a purchase. That’s why it’s called a process. So, ask your customers about their process. What influences their purchase process of your product or service? Is it a primary influence, one of many or not at all? Yes, this is self-reported behavior, but the data gives you a lot of insight into how social media plays a role in sales. For reference, no one in the audience had asked their customers this question.

What’s inspired you recently from a conference you attended that you’ve put into action? What have you learned once you did?

How do you keep track of the e-mails, tweets, status updates of the people that matter most to you or your company?

This week’s Tech Talk (a roundtable discussion featuring new products, tools and trends during Ant’s Eye View staff meetings) focused on a tool called Gist, an intuitive personal relationship manager that helps those of us who feel inundated by incessant e-mails better manage our inbox and build stronger connections with the people we care about — whether clients, customers, friends, family or co-workers.

But what’s most compelling about the tool goes beyond the efficiency features. Listen to Gist CEO, T.A. McCann describe Gist.

While Gist is one of several e-mail management tools on the market, it sets itself apart from competitors by augmenting e-mail search with some of the following relationship-centric functions:

• Integrate contact information, calendar events, links, news, and social networking data from Outlook, Salesforce, Lotus Notes, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail into one intuitive dashboard;
• Tag contacts within a network to create an instant “influencer” list for future reference;
• Gain business-critical insights about contacts and companies within a user’s network from 50,000 news sources and 20 million blogs; and
• Rank and score information and contacts based on what the user has determined to be most relevant and important.

We’re still discovering many of the different ways Gist can be used, but one thing we’re sure of, this notion of building better relationships and maintaining connections is at the heart of Gist and the reason why it was created. In fact, if you ask T.A. for the story behind Gist, he can tell you the two people he built Gist for and why he and his company continue to innovate and make it easier for individuals to maintain and sustain their network.

At Ant’s Eye View, we’re constantly looking for new social tools we can learn about and recommend to our clients. What are some tools you’ve used and can recommend to us? We’d love to hear from you.

Sound familiar? As a S.P.I.C.Y. leader in your organization, you’ve worked hard to use customer feedback to break down barriers within your organization, as described in part 1 of this series. But, it is inevitable that you either have heard or will face a customer vs. shareholder debate when it comes to reporting out on customer feedback and the root causes driving it. Price, product and policy issues that drive sales and negative sentiment are particularly tricky to navigate within the context of large organizations.

What makes these conversations so hard and the barriers between silos so thick is that different measures of success are in play. Customer experience measures, derived from customer feedback, usually come in the form of satisfaction, resolution rates and brand favorability while shareholder measures are, well, all about revenue, expenses and profit. And, the concept of missed revenue as a result of negative sentiment can feel very fuzzy for operations, finance and business unit leaders.

Having an apples-to-apples discussion between the two camps is critical. At Intuit, we heavily used the Net Promoter methodology which asks a simple question – “how likely are you to recommend this [product, service, etc] to someone else”, and it is often used as a side-by-side measure with revenue. Over the last couple of years, Intuit’s research teams did extremely hard work to connect Net Promoter data to revenue.

But, Net Promoter data is what people “say” they are going to do. What about what people actually say and actually do? Listening on the social web is the best way to understand this other side to the loyalty coin. Using tools like Radian 6 or Scout Labs, you can listen to what’s being said about your brand, apply sentiment scoring and use your real customers’ voice to show how they are, or are not recommending your products or services.

In some cases, you have listen yourself in specific channels, like my team at Intuit did within Amazon. My team led the effort to have a 100% reply goal on Amazon reviews on Intuit’s flagship small business product, QuickBooks Pro 2010, and we developed a weekly dashboard, shared at senior staff, that showed key topics, number of reviews, sentiment and change over time.

What that dashboard didn’t show was impact on sales. By adding in simple questions to several surveys that regularly go out to recent purchasers (and not) of QuickBooks, we were able to determine impact on sales.

We found that online reviews had a double digit impact on sales – meaning that our customers said that reviews were the main & only source or the main but not only source of purchasing. Between the Net Promoter value work and the online review-to-sales research, our team had the opportunity to really connect customer and shareholder measures. Efforts like this enabled the team to drive closed-loop changes within the product that dramatically decreased negative sentiment.

Valuing customer feedback is the second key step in breaking down the barriers within an organization. Next up, we’ll tackle responding to customer feedback!

I say “recover,” because today more than ever (and in the realm of social media more than elsewhere) words become buzzwords become catchphrases become acronyms – and become meaningless. We fill presentations, mission statements and marketing copy with words like “community,” “influencers” and “engagement,” but how often do we poke through the “idea” of these words to know what we’re really saying to our customers?

Case in point: When I started working in support at Microsoft, I heard variations on the word “deflect” in almost every meeting I sat in and report that I read – “call deflection,” “incident deflection,” “customers deflected.” Being in a cost center, I understood the need for operational efficiency and optimizing expenditures, but something about that word got under my skin. When I went to my old friend the dictionary, I understood why:

Deflect De*flect”\, v.

1. Prevent the occurrence of; prevent from happening.
2. Turn from a straight course, fixed direction, or line of interest.
3. Turn aside and away from an initial or intended course.
4. Draw someone’s attention away from something.
5. Impede the movement of (an opponent or a ball).

Ouch. We would never have put those words on our Web site – “Welcome to Microsoft Support, where you’ll be prevented from getting help” – but we were subconsciously acting on that word (which we were using all the time), and that’s what was getting communicated to our customers.

In the Online & Community Support team, we talked about a different idea: “customer engagement.” We talked about it so much, in fact, that it became some kind of mythical Holy Grail, an intangible idea. But what did it really mean to “engage” your customers?

Engage En*gage”\, v.

1. To attract and hold the attention of; engross.
2. To gain for service; to bring in as associate or aid; to enlist.
3. To gain over; to win and attach; to attract and hold.
4. To draw into; involve: engage a shy person in conversation.

Wow! Reading those definitions made me really glad to be working on “customer engagement.”  It also made the concepts – as well as the tools and technologies – concrete and actionable.  Isn’t this what we – what every enterprise, across every phase of their business – were really after, attracting and holding the attention of our customers and enlisting them in our cause? It’s what Microsoft wanted to do for consumers in customer service, and it lead to the creation of Microsoft Answers, which has grown to become one of the largest and most successful community support sites in the world.  You can follow the path from deflection to engagement – of making support social – in this presentation from the recent Social Media and Community 2.0 conference.

Only when you’re armed with the right words, and a commitment to their meaning, can you define and accomplish what you want to with – and for – your customers.

At Ant’s Eye View, we believe the purpose of business is to create customers who create customers. What better way to create customers than to celebrate your current customers – give your current customers something to talk about – WOM 101.

So how do you celebrate a customer? The typical way is to thank them for conducting a transaction with your company and then sending a holiday card at the end of every year – nice, but easily ignored. To celebrate a customer you should make them feel special, give them props and support beyond the business transaction.

I had the opportunity to make a public display of celebrating a customer-Rod Brooks, CMO of PEMCO Insurance and School of WOM instructor. Rod is an early customer of AEV and we are big fans of Rod. Rod was traveling to Austin for the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit last month. Typically if a customer is traveling to your zip code you arrange to share a meal – nice and expected. Well, Rod was only in Austin for 36 hours and not a lot of time. Instead we wanted to give Rod something to talk about while in Austin and after he left. At first we (@jakemckee, @jackiehuba and I) said why don’t we pick Rod up at the airport, give him a ride to his hotel. @jackiehuba got us one step further, “lets make Rod a celebrity.” So we used the service Celeb 4 a Day that consists of four paparazzi photographers to surround Rod and capture both Rod’s reaction, but also the crowd at the airport (pointing and whispering “who is that guy?”, “he must be somebody famous because of all the photographers shouting questions at him”).

The outcome was spectacular because Rod is such a great sport and enjoys people (even at 11:15 pm in the Austin airport). During the Bazaarvoice summit, I heard Rod retell his memorable experience of his celebrity reception in Austin. Rod got a ride to his hotel after answering all the paparazzi questions and being photographed over 100 times in 15 minutes. AEV got the opportunity to not only thank a customer, but to celebrate a customer with some fun memories, pictures, and a story that gets retold over and over again.

If you are attending School of WOM be sure to ask Rod about his 15 minutes of fame from his one late night in the Austin airport.