Gradually, I added MySpace to my social music mix. Why? At that time, it was a natural extension for the music and party family. Then I was asked by a none-music and party friend “why are you not on Facebook?” I was not sure about maintaining another social profile. After much thought, I joined on September 25, 2007.

That was six years ago.

Today, as the Empress and Curator at Mavin Digital I am THRILLED to moderate an esteemed group of business leaders as they weigh in on the importance and impact of the Social Consumer. Attendees will hear insights about compelling social media topics that drive demand generation and engagement. I am expecting a conversation and discussion that will offer attendees a fresh perspective on how to best apply social strategies for their organization.

WHAT: The Social Consumer Roudtables and Case Studies
WHEN: March 22, 2012 [8:30AM - 1:30PM]
WHERE:The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, New York City
REGISTER AND USE THE PROMO CODE MAVIN FOR A SPECIAL DISCOUNT

The Social Consumer Roundtable Topics
Content Marketing Best Practices
Getting Insights from Social Analytics
Social Customer Service Strategies
Mobile Meets Social for Consumer Brands
Understanding the Social Gaming Opportunity
Engaging Consumers on Facebook
Integrating Social into your Overall Marketing Plan
Organizing your Team for Social Media Success
Measuring ROI for Social Media Campaigns
How to Engage the Influencer and Super Fan

Mavin Digital is offering a complimentary social web and mobile technology strategy brainstorming session to attendees. Register and use the promo code MAVIN to get the discount and a FREE social media tips for your business..

Make sure to follow us on Twitter or join us on Facebook to receive our social web and mobile ebook written and produced in collaboration with business leaders and innovative thinkers from Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley! Stay tuned!

Until soon!

Kohort is a robust group social networking product combining the best of Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup and Chatter while eliminating the shortcomings that limit the effectiveness of each of them as group networking tools.

Facebook’s group page feature is great for individuals who want to find other people who share their interests, but as an organizational feature it leaves a lot to be desired.  That is not a dig at Facebook, it is simply an inherent limitation in Facebook’s model.  Facebook is driven by individuals, and its design and features reflect that.  In that respect it is the gold standard – no one else is even close.  But as a result, its groups feature is more of a novelty than anything, feeling tacked on and piecemeal.  The bottom line is that Facebook groups serve as another vehicle to service the needs of individuals in the social networking environment, whereas Kohort does the opposite by bringing individuals together to service the needs of groups in the social networking environment.

LinkedIn suffers from similar limitations in the group context.  Its groups are a platform for individuals to expand their professional network, although there are some organizations, such as University Alumni Associations that use the groups feature as an organizational tool.

Meetup is an outstanding tool for creating groups and organizing live events to facilitate live networking, but given its limited feature set, it isn’t exactly built to facilitate organizational communication and online planning.  Also, like Facebook’s groups pages, Meetup groups are built to bring together individuals, whereas with Kohort groups are  the endgame.

Finally, Chatter is a slick tool with a robust feature set that allows for quick, efficient communication within groups while reducing email and improving organizational messaging.  In reality, it is functionally very similar to Kohort in that regard; however, Kohort is free while Chatter is part of Salesforce.com’s pay for play SaaS suite.  More importantly, the major differentiator between the two is that Chatter is strictly an internal communication tool and does not allow for communication or networking outside of the user organization, whereas Kohort’s explicit purpose is to provide a platform for networking among organizations.

With its hierarchical group structure, familiar social networking interface, and ability to connect disparate groups at the click of a mouse, Kohort will help organizations of all kinds to eliminate unnecessary email, isolate issues within specific subgroups, communicate organizational best practices, and easily connect with similar organizations to form strategic partnerships.

If Kohort can drive early user adoption to develop a critical mass, it looks to have the potential to be a major player in the social networking space.

While all this sounds great it brings up a lot of questions and it is easy to be skeptical. For instance, the textbooks seem to be for high schools and so far the most popular benefit mentioned appears to be that the kids won’t have to lug around heavy books. So if this is meant to improve the way high school kids study and learn, who will provide the iPads needed to run iBooks and iTunes U? A privately funded school would likely be more willing to adapt by, perhaps, including the price of the iPad in the students’ tuition costs. Public schools would obviously be more hesitant because, well, who foots the bill, the school or Apple? And now the price-point of 15 dollars per book seems inflated since textbooks in K-12 are usually given to the students for free. However, it is a step in the right direction. Today’s student no doubt sees the hardcopy textbook as boring and archaic. Having a book that links to a video is an advantage because not everyone is a great reader. Some students need further explanation after reading something and if the student’s teacher isn’t around to answer any questions, the interactive textbook can fill that void.

The true star of Apple’s new focus on education is iTunes U. Students today use the internet for most of their research, yet there is not a single teacher on this planet who considers Wikipedia to be a legitimate source of information. It simply cannot be trusted. iTunes U, on the other hand, provides resources from an abundance of universities including Stanford, Yale, and Oxford as well as other institutions such as the New York Public Library. This makes it easier for students to find what they’re looking for from trusted sources.

Genevieve Shore, Pearson’s CIO and director of digital strategy says,“These books break new ground in digital and mobile publishing. If you open one of these books, you will discover how a three-year-old learns his first words, how his heart beats, how you solve equations and how dinosaurs lived. We’re delighted with the results and we hope that readers, students, teachers and parents are too. We see enormous potential to create these kinds of programmes for more subjects, more stages of learning and more geographic markets.”

Pearson has long been implementing technology into their textbooks and the most important things we can take out of Ms. Shore’s quote are the words “enormous potential.” An ambitious project like this one is not going to be perfect the first time around, but it opens the door to many possibilities for current and future students.

1) No more customer service agents reading from scripts. This is something that infuriates me. The entire reason I chose not to use the automated customer service decision tree was to speak to someone who can help me with my specific problem. What is the use of a customer service agent who clearly has no knowledge of the product or service I am calling about and has no ability to go off-script? An IVA solves both problems – it can answer scripted problems more effectively (wont upset customers because they expect a computer to be scripted), and Virtuoz’s IVA’s are able to respond to natural language (a la iPhone 4S’s Siri), while learning about customers by accessing the database of all previous questions asked by customers in calls/chats with other IVA’s. Because of this, IVA’s are extremely adept at handling questions of low to medium complexity, and can learn to go off-script more easily than many live customer service agents.

2) Avoid the irritations of outsourced offshore customer service. “As a result of . . . unexpected overhead, the projected savings from offshoring can swiftly evaporate. ‘The typical promise is a 30 to 60 percent cost reduction. We think 10 to 30 percent is probably realistic.” “Lesson: Screw outsourcing up and your savings will be eclipsed by your declining market cap.”. There may be no better way to piss off an already annoyed customer than to make him/her work hard to make the customer service rep understand the issue. In my experience, largley due to the language gap, outsourced customer service reps are extremely poor at discerning subtle distinctions between specific sub-issues within the larger categories of issues they are trained to address. Most of the time they have a set of stock categorical questions that they can answer, but if the question requires a subtler understanding of a particular problem, the rep is virtually guaranteed to be unable to answer my question without laborious, repetitive, and irritating explanation; or more likely, not at all. At least with an IVA, customers wont have to haggle with a live rep to get the understand their issue – an IVA’s ability to answer questions of increasing complexity will be binary – either it will be able to answer my question, or it wont. See point four for an idea re: closing the loop when IVA’s fail to solve or understand problems of high complexity.

3) IVAs can create significant cost savings. Virtuoz has solutions starting at as little as $10,000/month, which is less than it costs to run a call center with a paltry 10 customer service reps working minimum wage. As the articles linked to above attest, often the savings of cheaper labor is often largely stripped away by customer retention problems due to poor customer service experiences and inefficiencies related to managing outsourced call centers. In addition, something that is more difficult to measure is the loss of good will in the company’s brand through poor word of mouth. How many people do you think I have told about my Comcast experience? Plus, with online channels like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets, one poor customer experience can be magnified by an order of magnitude or more.

4) Companies can utilize cost savings to create concierge services to help resolve high complexity issues. By utilizing IVAs to answer questions of low to medium complexity companies can spend money training (and paying) highly competent, native English speaking customer services reps who have an intimate knowledge of the company’s products and services. Customers can be comforted knowing that if an intelligent virtual assistant fails to resolve the issue, a highly trained human agent will be able to do so. This is a far better solution than futilely requesting to speak to a supervisor at an outsourced customer service shop, who is no better equipped to help customers than the agents they supervise. Like a team of Oompa Loompas, they are no different from one to the next, each repeating what the last one said.

5) BONUS – Create Internal Q&A systems to establish best practices. Just as customers often encounter the same issues over and over, employees often see the same issues come up over and over. Especially in very large companies with disparate offices all over the country or world, consistent messaging and best practices is often difficult to achieve. An IVA service could help solve this problem. Instead of creating huge FAQs, wikis or other such “living documents,” and then forcing employees to go searching for needles in a haystack to find solutions previously solved problems, why not allow the learning and database searching capabilities of an IVA to do that work for you?

AN INTERVIEW WITH STEVE ADAMS, CEO, VIRTUOZ

WHY I CARE

When I moved into my new house last year I was faced with a grim proposition – giving up my beloved DirecTV and its fantastic customer service for the Mephistopheles of the customer service world – Comcast. According to my neighbors, in my neighborhood AT&T’s DSL service speed falls somewhere between a 56K modem and a three-toed sloth. Needless to say, slow-internet vs. poor customer service is no choice at all; I went with the lesser evil of Comcast and its bundled internet/TV offering. After all, how bad could it be? The answer is: so bad that I will definitely switch services whenever my indentured servitude to Comcast expires sometime around the year 2050.

Among my numerous negative experiences with Comcast customer service, one easily avoidable travesty stands out. When I signed up, I was offered a $200 Visa gift card as an inducement. Great! I was going to sign up anyway. Ignoring the fact that Comcast also screwed up the installation and I had to wait an extra week to establish service, everything else went fine . . . until . . . I set up my online automatic billing and a week later I called and spoke to Comcast’s offshored and outsourced customer service just to confirm that my bill pay was set up in their system. Although my customer service agent spoke somewhat acceptable English, I was suspicious that he never quite understood my question, but I nonetheless accepted his assurances that everything was fine. Of course one month later, automatic billpay failed (was never set up in their system for whatever reason) and I got dinged with a late fee. On top of that, 3 months later, when I still hadn’t received my gift card, I came to find out that I was disqualified from receiving it because it was contingent upon three consecutive months of current bills – a criterion that was never communicated to me, and which I failed to achieve because of the incompetence of Comcast’s customer service people. After some wrangling with an outsourced customer service agent and his supervisor, I was finally (a week later) able to reach an American representative of Comcast. I explained that Comcast could either give me the $200 gift card or I would pay the contract buy-out and never use Comcast again. After doing the math, this representative was able to realize the poor opportunity cost of losing me as a customer forever vs. giving me the gift card.

Comcast successfully turned a marketing strategy, which had no impact on my decision to use their service in the first place, into a customer satisfaction disaster; all because they utilize incompetent, outsourced customer service.

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His throng of followers, listeners and critics marveled in awe when he romanticized his audience. From his famous “oh just one more thing” to his relaxed and very casual jeans, black turtle neck and New Balance running shoes, Steve new how to connect with the faithful. Ultimate audience arousal was what he aimed for and it is exactly what he always left with.

Why would a CEO put so much effort in launching a product? Why is a jazzed up booth at CES or SXSW and lots of booze not enough?