Google Just Wants to Have Fun: Their New ‘Auto Awesome’ Feature

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Jozefien Verhaeghe

Imagine this: Thursday morning (Thursdays are the new Mondays), rainy weather (yes, spring/summer only lasts about 7 days in Belgium) and no more cold Engagor Energy drinks in our fridge. As you can image, this Engagor Ninja wasn’t feeling like doing side kicks this morning.

All that changed when I entered the office. Some of my Engagor homies were talking about the ‘Auto Awesome’-feature. At first I thought it was just another Engagor feature. But then I thought, our features are awesome by default (Duh! Have you seen the Photo Uploads Feature we just released?), so there’s no need to point that out again. But apparently they were talking about the new Google feature.

Introducing: Auto Awesome

Google is currently hosting their annual developers conference in San Francisco: Google I/O 2013 (In case you don’t speak geek, ‘I/O’ stands for Input/Output. Just Saying). Yesterday evening they announced a new photo feature called ‘Auto Awesome’.

Basically, Auto Awesome is a tool to make photos more fun (Uuuhm, yes, because creating photos was a totally horrifying experience before). There are several features included:

HDR: High Dynamic Range. Google takes multiple exposures of the same image and then merges them. This way your photos have a broader range of shadow and light.
Smile: We all know that moment when you take group pictures and each person in the group looks best in a different photo. Result: you can’t decide which one you should upload. Google to the rescue! ‘Smile’ chooses the best pictures of each person, and merges them into one photo. Go ahead girls, a ‘YAY’ is totally appropriate here.
Pano: When you have a series of photos with overlapping landscape views, Auto Awesome stitches them together into one panoramic image.
Mix: This Booth is Made for Snapping, and that’s just what it’ll do. The Sixties are back! When you take several photos with the same background, Google combines them into a Photobooth style grid.

And finally, there’s one extra feature that made all the Engagor colleagues very happy: MOTION. You might not know this, but everyone here is a totally into GIFS. Basically, Google will combine certain different photos into a moving photos. So from now of on, you can easily create your own GIFS!

Spokespeople Benefit from Social Media Through Email Alerts

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Lien Brusselmans

It’s official: social media is infiltrating all company departments and functions. A spokesperson is one of those people who can definitely benefit from social media. Let’s have a look at a spokesperson’s responsibilities and how social media can be of use. The key lies in monitoring but there’s no need to monitor social media 24/7. A tool can send you automatic email notifications whenever something interesting is picked up or when a crisis is lurking.

Spread information and follow up on results/reactions

Your brand or organization has an announcement to make, so you organize an official press announcement. Newspapers and blogs will probably report on the announcement. Once the news is out, people will start discussing it on social media. You can easily follow up on everything published and said about it online with a monitoring tool.

If your brand is already using a tool, you can easily set up a filter in the topic about your brand to extract everything about the press announcement. You can then enable automatic emails whenever something is said about it. Following up on this has several advantages: you watch and learn (if, for example, people tend to misinterpret the information) and you can react early if necessary.

Build and maintain contacts with the press

Most, if not all, journalists are active on social media. They have to because nowadays Twitter users are almost always ahead of newspapers in reporting on breaking news. Building and maintaining a good relationship with these journalists is often easier via social media. You can receive email alerts whenever a journalist mentions your brand, press announcement or even your industry. Make sure you interact with them now and then: they will remember your name and that’s a good thing for your brand’s notoriety. The better they know your brand, the more interested they will be in your press announcements.

Follow up on your reputation and respond early in a crisis

People are continually sharing their opinion on social media about a variety of things and your brand or organization can be one of them. It’s not the spokesperson’s responsibility to react to these messages (that’s more a task for community managers or customer support) but he should be in the know of them in times of crisis. A negative comment can explode in your brand’s face if it goes ‘viral’. As a spokesperson you can receive an email alert whenever a crisis is lurking. If necessary, you can be one step ahead of the spreading comment with an official press announcement.

Want to try this all out yourself? No problem, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial and activate your own email alerts!

Social Media Monitoring: 4 Things to Consider Before You Start

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Lien Brusselmans

Although it sounds obvious that you think about what you want to monitor before buying a social media monitoring tool, we notice not all brands think about this sufficiently. Or rather, not all brands know all the monitoring possibilities. Here is a list of 4 things we believe you should consider when you start monitoring your brand online.

Think about what you want to achieve

goal

analytics

sales leads

customer service

market research

HR department

Think about what you are going to monitor

your own brands

marketing campaigns

monitor your competitors

market research

Think about how you are going to monitor this

What will your keyword search look like? If you have a unique brand name, this is easy. If not (e.g. Apple, Orange, Makro), you will have to filter out everything that has nothing to do with your brand. Click here if you want some more information on how to create keyword queries. Good to know: Engagor allows you to filter on word combinations, countries and languages as you wish.
Will you only listen to what it said about you, or also what is said to you? In other words: will you only monitor based on a keyword search or will you connect your social profiles as well? Make a list of all profiles you want to manage from within Engagor, as well as their passwords. If you don’t connect them with a password, we won’t be able to pull in private messages and you won’t be able to post anything on them. Click here if you want to read more on how to connect your social profiles.

Invest in training/consultancy

brands that took a training of as little as 3 hours, use Engagor much more actively and get more out of it

Marketing 2.0: Combine forces of Marketing and Customer Service!

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Dimitri Callens

The tension between Marketing and Customer Service

In my professional past, I have worked at Marketing and Customer Service and I never quite understood the tension between the two. In an obvious case of hyperbole, I would like to state the following. Marketing tries to improve sales by targetting ‘the persona customer’, losing sight of the individual customers as they go along. Customer service is always busy answering all individual questions which never seem to fit in the bodice Marketing imposed, and as such, have difficulty in believing what Marketing is telling them to do.

Why Marketing and Customer Service will soon be BFF’s

Now, before you both go yelling at each other, I have good news: Marketing and Customer Service are going to be best friends forever, real soon! Yep, BFF’s. Why? Because your customer has taken control. How? A team-up of public social media with ever more mobile internet.

Social media forces Marketing and Customer Service to change

Marketing has, for too long and too much, been about pushing products down customer’s throats in a shouting action. ‘Hear, hear, we have the best product for this-and-that and as you cannot compare it to any other on the market: buy it, and buy it now.’ Well, that’s a thing of the past. Customers are investigating now what they are buying, and teaming up together on Facebook, Twitter and lots of other networks. There is no use anymore in spending money on Marketing campaigns for non-needed or bad products if customers can break it in a matter of types ànd tell all their friends about it in a matter of clicks.

Customer Service has been responding to individuals in a one-on-one relationship. As no one else was listening during those conversations, the customer often got powned. ‘OK, something got messed up, but you are not important enough, so shut up and move along. Ne-eext!’ Before you bash on Customer Service: the people there don’t like doing this, their management just forces them to do so as they believed giving in to the customer’s needs was like giving in to terrorists. Well, it may seem hard to believe, but there is in fact a slight difference.

It’s the customers that make a business successful. No buyers, no business. No happy customers, no long-term business. And as those customers are now talking to everyone quadrupled instantly about you, you’d better start listening to what they have to say. Or they will bye-bye you in the blink of an eye.

Customer Service becomes the foundation of Marketing

And this makes my point: through social media, Customer Service is becoming the foundation of Marketing. In my humble opinion, Marketing 2.0 is all about ‘listening and communicating with your customers, to learn from their experiences, better fit their needs and as such ameliorate your business and products.’ Social media is the way in which it happens. The way, not the means: no use in having tons of fans if no one is listening.

If you have built an audience on social media, and you are responding to their remarks, questions and sometimes filthy words, you can start shouting again. Or better, you can start speaking again, because you will have an audience that will be listening to you. This means: Marketing with a much higher ROI, no shooting in the dark anymore. And in the meantime, you gain lots of information about those customers.

In the end, it is a win for all: for customers and for businesses. But it takes a leap of faith and quite some rethinking of your business to attain it. Good luck!

Social Media for Customer Service. Why? How?

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Lien Brusselmans

Companies can no longer deny it: customer service through social media is becoming a must. Up until now many customers had only one way of reaching the companies whose services or products they use: the telephone. Some companies have their own callcenter, others work with external partners. Whatever the case, these phone calls almost always involve music on hold, waiting, being put through, and so on. Social media however, has provided customers with a new way of getting in touch with companies.

What’s in it for the customers?

As with the telephone, social media offers a direct line between companies and customers. However, as most of social media conversation takes place in the public space, customers can feel more powerful towards bigger companies. Other customers can and will be listening as well. It’s even possible that they come up with an answer. And the best part: no more being put through and no more holding the line while listening four times in a row to a clarinet solo!

What’s in it for the companies?

Companies might regard this as extra work that makes customer service too complex. They can choose to remain mute and not answer the customers’ questions online. However, I would warmly advise you not to think this way. Why not?

What is now considered extra work, will soon become the norm. More and more people will discover the benefits of asking questions through Twitter or Facebook. Gradually the telephone use flow will decrease, and the social media flow will increase. It’s best to adapt to this new situation now and not in a few months or years.
Social media and especially Twitter, urges people to be clear and concise. This way many customers will ask straightforward questions. Internally you can pass these questions on to the right people in your team, who can come up with the correct answer. It avoids some typical back and forth communication. With the right tool, frequently asked questions can even be answered automatically, further improving your speed of service.
It can drastically reduce the cost of your callcenter. After receiving a complaint, you can quickly send out a message such as ‘We noticed you had an issue with our product. Please pass us your customer number so that we can help you.’ The customer feels as if he is being helped instantly, while the customer service employee does not lose time waiting untill the customer passes his customer number. In fact, he or she can answer other questions in the meantime!
It takes a lot of stress away from the customer service employees, as they have to deal less with impatient men or women at the other side of the line.
Your social media customer service will be visible to everyone online. If you handle your customers’ questions in a polite and efficient way, your brand’s reputation will definitely get a boost!

How should we get this organized?

At the moment, many companies still use a variety of tools and services to handle their online presence. However, managing it all from one and the same tool, is the best solution: it’s a time-saver, supports your workflow and it keeps everything structured.

Expand your customer service with social media

Will you handle all messages in which your brand is mentioned, or just the ones that are directly addressed to you? An example:

MissY tweets – “I hate my phone company! This is already the second time this week I can’t send any texts! #companyX”
MissE tweets – “@companyX I can’t send any texts. What’s the matter? #already-second-time-this-week”

As CompanyX, you can decide whether you will answer in both scenarios, or only in the second case.

The second tweet is really one you can’t deny. If you do deny it, chances are high this MissE will send another tweet into the world, complaining about not even getting a response from you. Make sure to always handle messages that are addressed to you.

The first tweet however, opens up an opportunity: it’s not like MissY is asking for help, but she is still tweeting for a reason. Reaching out to her will really help your reputation. It positions your brand as caring and helpful. No doubt very soon these customers will start praising your customer service. At least that’s what I do when I’m pleased with a company’s support, even when I did not really ask for it. Free publicity that is!

To remember

Social media is changing the way companies need to work, whether you like it or not. This definitely brings about many many challenges, but it also provides new opportunities. With social media there now is a direct line between your company and the people you want to engage with. It allows you to build up a long-term and loyal relationship with them, based on user experience and conversation.

Oh, and one more advice: don’t be afraid for the negative comments that will be visible to everyone out there. And definitely don’t try to hide or erase them (from your Facebook page for example). Perfect people don’t exist and neither do perfect companies. You can only show you are trying. Create a free 14-day trial and start using the engagor Inbox as the perfect Customer Relations Tool.