Social media is the electronic, global equivalent of a traditional open marketplace, where customers can praise, offer suggestions, or criticize vendors with others listening and adding their supporting thoughts or coming to the defense of the merchants. Wellknown companies and entrepreneurs, such as Johnson & Johnson, United Airlines, and Simon Cowell have found out firsthand the power that customers wield through this channel. Patrons’ comments on sites like TripAdvisor influence others’ decisions that impact on sales and loyalty.

Find out how and why the social channel is empowering customers to affect companies’ branding and business. Understand how your customers are using the power of social media to, often emotionally, communicate their thoughts on your brand to the world. And learn how your organization can utilize this changing customer behavior to benefit your bottom line.

Overlooking social networking tools in the contact center means lost opportunities to drive customer collaboration. Being present with social media gives companies the opportunity to serve customers where they are congregating and communicating. By integrating social media outlets with contact center technologies, tools and processes, you can better leverage the skills, resources and processes already in place to communicate with customers. As with other methods of communication, contact center managers can and should establish metrics and KPI’s for activities on social media outlets. This ensures that social media is used effectively and correctly to improve customer service and support.

Attendees will learn the keys to developing a successful social media strategy, including:

•Customer contact channels never stand still…neither should you!
•Identify where your customers are communicating on social media, and target relevant corporate or public outlets for monitoring.
•Leverage integration to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of your Contact Center.
•Train agents on the subtleties of effective social media interactions.
•Dont forget tracking and reporting, just like other multimedia channels.

The power of social media requires organizations to develop and finetune a key skill they have too often neglected at their peril: listening to their customers and drilling down to the core issues beneath the emotions. Yet, there are so many social outlets that trying to hear from customers becomes like picking out words from the yells of crowds. Moreover, many who comment on sites may have their own agendas, like participants in town hall meetings that are backing a particular side or candidate.

This session delves into the best practices of monitoring social media, including site tracking, identifying brand attacks, filtering and parsing your social media data to view and measure the “noise” and make sense of what is being said. It also explores discovering and tracing the influencers and opinion makers for future outreach.

There is a key role that the contact center plays as a gating factor to all social media activity and a pivotal element towards being able to define and measure success from social media.

Monetizing on the social media opportunity has many dimensions and understanding them will be the key to achieving social media success. The current challenge comes from creating a plan for what to do with all that data. This is where the Customer Service organization becomes very relevant. A call center operation possesses very appealing qualifications for being the responsible party representing your company and establishing a dialog with your customers that will help you get closer to your goals.

This session will delve into several challenges for the next level of due diligence in your social media strategy planning:

•Handling scale – Managing 10 or 20 posts can be a manual effort, but what happens when that becomes 1,000 per day? How can you filter, prioritize and engage with all those opportunities?
•Measuring success – Establishing a success criteria might not be half as hard as measuring the success over time of that criteria
•Consistent image in your responses – Social media is a new channel and, once again thinking of the sheer magnitude of the interactions, you will need established processes and a high level of automation to provide a consistent experience to your customers
•Risk avoidance – Social media interactions are not 1:1, perhaps not even 1:many. How about 1:The world? How can you be comfortable with having your representatives respond to social media channels while ensuring compliance and customer satisfaction?

All of these questions are very natural discussions in the contact center space. Panelists will discuss aligning needs to expertise and, as social media continues to gain acceptance in enterprises, how to ensure the contact center is the natural next step in this evolution. One thing is certain: Once a social media strategy is in place, the contact center can help you reach the path to monetization.

Social work patterns are the most efficient way to collaborate and are, arguably, what has enabled civilization to flourish since humans first walked on this planet. New technologies such as social software and masscommunication systems that entered the consumer realm a few years ago have created a culture in which peopletopeople interactions constitute the main conduit to accessing processes and information.

It is until very recently, though, that these social work patterns are becoming standard fare in the enterprise. In the past, collaboration in the enterprise was defined by process and information hubs people had to learn how to use. Today, social software puts people at the center of it all and processes and information become attributes of the people who own them or know about them.

Social work patterns, however, are only as efficient as the communication channels available to the people who participate in those patterns. Unified communications provides the connective tissue that enables social work patterns and makes them run. This session will discuss the role unified communications plays in enabling social work patterns in enterprise environments and the tools available for creating a social enterprise.

It took the humble telephone 89 years to reach the 150 million users that Facebook achieved in just five. From sales and marketing, to research and development, everyone is using social media in the workplace. However, its rapid uptake by end users, often against written policies, has also left many enterprises inadequately prepared from both a data leakage and a compliance perspective.

Combine this with the growth in unified communications and collaboration and it’s easy to see the boundaries between corporate communication tools and social media becoming increasingly blurred.The problem for organizations is that today’s collaboration tools nor social media natively provide the security and compliance required by most companies and many enterprises find themselves at risk from data leakage and libelous comments to record retention, costly eDiscovery, malware and market abuse.

This session considers the rise in social media and the specific security and compliance issues that organizations must consider. Attendees will learn how to securely enable both corporate and publicly available social collaboration tools in line with other corporate communication, why enterprise communications tools don’t meet compliance needs and the steps that need to be taken in order to meet compliance and security regulations for today’s new Internet.

At a time when customers hold the ultimate power on brand equity, it’s important for businesses to listen to what customers are saying, have the ability to analyze those conversations, and be equipped to take swift action. These capabilities can often mean the difference between the success or failure of a new product or marketing promotion.

Customers often give clues about why they continue using a certain product or decide to turn to an alternative product or service. They email with questions possible reasons to churn, they complete surveys and explain what they like and don’t like, and, of course, they tell the world via social media what they think, what they are looking for and what they expect in terms of service. These customer conversations represent a treasure trove of insights about churn and hundreds of other topics e.g., opinions about new products, quality issues, ideas, etc..

This session will highlight the steps companies can take to address the concerns of their social and most influential customers. Attendees will learn powerful ways to decipher and leverage unstructured customer conversational data, and how the most successful businesses have leveraged social media to connect and serve customers using an integrated approach of semantic analysis technology and oldfashioned customer service.

Attendees will leave this session armed with the tools necessary to monitor, analyze and repurpose customer conversations to intelligently respond, react and reach out to these influential customers shaping their brand.

Utilizing the power of social media to monitor and engage customers can establish longterm meaningful relationships and create a whole new echelon of brand loyalty. Tools such as Facebook and Twitter reveal incredible insight into the desires and frustrations of a customer base that can be applied to proactive outreach and problemsolving by forwardthinking companies.

Fortunately, a host of tools are available today that can be utilized to take information sharing a step further by integrating customer intelligence into business process solutions, such as Salesforce.com and Sugar CRM, to enhance the customer experience. In essence, these applications can be leveraged by savvy businesses to get into the heads of their customers by understanding what they’re thinking and, more importantly, how to react. It will allow information to be shared across an enterprise in an instant to create a highly personalized customer experience that can win them over permanently. This session will explain how UC applied to CRM, along with popular social media outlets can help create meaningful profiles of customers than can make a brand an integral part of daily life.

As more marketing moves online, this session will discuss 10 key tips businesses should bear in mind for ensuring success in online marketing. These ideals will provide a roadmap for ensuring your portal, community, social media, and websites become effective tools for maximizing on the Internet revolution.

As businesses decide to use social media and digital communications in their daily operations, they need to understand that what they are doing makes business sense? There is no question social media is a market changer, and a permanent fixture in the business communications landscape. The question is not whether to implement social media strategies, but when and how, so that you are able to engage your customers at their convenience, not yours.

This session will explain why you need a social media strategy and, depending on where you currently stand with regards to strategy and implementation, what your next steps should be in order to ensure a successful implementation and maximum benefits to your customers and, ultimately, your bottom line.
•Where does your company stand with regards to social media strategy?
•Who should be responsible?
•How can you justify the investment to corporate management?
•What products should you consider?
•What are best practices for rolling out your strategy to your workforce?
•How should you determine the effectiveness of your program, including calculating ROI?