Customer Support communities: HP

Few months ago HP annouced it would create his Customer Support Community, a way to use Social Media to reduce support costs.
I’ve found myself this last month in the situation where my HP laptop needed assistance; i turned to the support forums (thanks to google) and got my swolution right away, both from HP users and HP staff.

As Charlene Li stated in “the groundswell” this use of social media might save a lot of money and time, reducing the load of traditional customer services.

According to the press release these are the functionalities of the support community launched by HP:

• A revamped global peer-to-peer online support forum allows members to connect with one another to exchange insights and tips, and get answers to each other’s questions regarding their HP consumer products.
• The updated HP Customer Care website makes it easier for more than 20 million monthly visitors to find the information they need to solve issues.
• Online classes, offered at no charge, help customers with subjects like migrating to Windows Vista®, safe wireless computing and digital scrapbooking.⁽¹⁾
• A series of online videos provides tips and tutorials on topics ranging from connecting dual monitors to configuring a TV tuner on a PC.

How many mass media do you know? Five? Seven?

Here’s a quick post to inspire some toughts of our media landscape.

 

According to wikipedia the seven mass media in order of their introduction are:

1 - Print (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc) from the late 1400s
2 - Recordings (records, tapes, cassettes, cartridges, CDs, DVDs) from the late 1800s
3 - Cinema from about 1900
4 - Radio from about 1910
5 - Television from about 1950
6 - Internet from about 1990
7 - Mobile phones from about 2000

Mobile offers seven benefits that cannot be replicated by the six legacy mass media:
1 Mobile is the first personal mass media (each person has one)
2 Mobile is permanently carried (it’s the first device we turn on, and last to turn off)
3 Mobile is always-on (some even sleep with cell phone on)
4 Mobile has a built-in payment mechanism (and a built-in identification number)
5 Mobile is available at the point of creative inspiration 
6 Mobile has the most accurate audience measurement (if you have a blackberry, you are a high spender) 
7 Mobile captures the social context of media consumption

No wonder there a lot of buzz around mobile, mobile industry, mobile standards and mobile social networks….

One last figure… the number of mobile phones overtakes the number of internet connections by a factor of three.
“A recently released UN study indicates that in 2008 mobile phone use worldwide will reach 50% of the earth’s population“ 

Event the web can seem small compared to mobile…

Curious Social Media facts

1. Amazon top reviewer Harriet Klausner has 18.000+ reviews and reads two books a day. Publishers send him 50 books a week to read.
2. Facebook spends approx $1.000.000 per month on electricity
3. Chinese copy everything, even facebook. Check it out, looks familiar?

“All men are equal – or are they?” user profiling on social networks

I was reading again some chapters of the popular “Groundswell” by Forrester Research this morning.
I’ve found really useful the Social Technographics Tool (chapter 3), explained in this slideshare presentation by Forrester.

For those not familiar with this profiling tool, Forrester groups users into:

• Creators
• Critics
• Collectors
• Joiners
• Spectators
• Inactive

This conceptual framework can help understaing and profiling users, in order to treat different users in different ways. Here’s a brief explanation.

If you are dealing with Social Media and Social Computing I strongly suggest to read the Groundswell book

How human competition benefits social networks (brazilian pride)

 

Men are competitive by nature. Peraphs we have been genetically programmed to compete over scarce resources, and this is why we enjoy so much challenging and competing with others.

Most of the online games are about quizzes and competitions. Magazine publish rankings of any kind: bestselling books, richest people, wealthiest companies, powerful brands. We even have a “book of records”.

Online Social Networks allow us to compete and measure competition even more. This competitive inner force is a big driver in social interaction and social networks growth.

Here’s a simple example of what people are capable to, when they are challenged.

Orkut is a social networking service (now owned by google) started in 2004.  At the beginning of 2005 on the website appeared a leaderboard showing how many members each county had in orkut (US, Turkey, Brazil…). Brazil at the time was a minority. The fact of showing a public ranking of users engaged brazialian in a race to become the biggest nation on the website. By word of mouth brazilians started registering to orkut and, by july 2005, 73% of Okrut’s members where brazilian. Today Orkut is mainly a brazilian website after what has been called “the brazilian invasion”.

This simple story demonstrates the power that competition has in online networks, it is a driver that engages people and, sometimes, makes the fortunes of some websites

The attention economy and asymmetric relationships

Twitter is booming, stats say it clear. The growth in the last 12 months is indeed remarkable.
This made me think about the main differences between Twitter and Facebook.
Recents changes in the Facebook user interface suggest that their trying to get closer to Twitter, feeding live streams and allowing for more interaction (or conversation) with brands and celebrities, expanding the Facebook Pages section.

One main difference remains: asymmetric VS symmetric relationships.

On facebook in order to “keep in touch” with someone in need to have a two-way relationship called “friend request”. After all Facebook mission is to map our social graph and connect with friends and acquitances.

Things are different on Twitter. I can follow Steve Jobs, without having Steve Jobs following me. This simple difference (asymmetric relationships) can help understand the core differences of the two webistes.

Facebook is a social utility to map our personal relationships
Twitter  is mapping our “attention”, allowing us to give attention and receive attention from other nodes of the network, whether these are friends or companies.

Twitter, in my opinion, is capturing the real essence of the attention economy, allowing us to connect (and disconnect, without feeling embarassed, like we would on facebook) to those entities that matters the most to us.

Facebook is obviously doing the same with their “fan system” on Facebook Pages, but the scale at which Twitter implemented it is much bigger and meaningful.

Crisis? we stopped to be wise

An inspiring video on the crisis, not just the financial crisis…

“Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.”

Future of Social Web

The following post by Jeremiah is a must-read for everyone in the social media business. 
It’s part of a Forrester report, but this abstract is already a good starting point.
I’ve found it useful to understand how and when different technologies  (like OpenSocial, Facebook Connect) will come together and offer a new technological paradigm. 

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/04/27/future-of-the-social-web/

Last.fm and free meals

To my surprise yesterday when I turned on my last.fm to listen to some music I received a message saying in polite terms that the service was not free anymore. “trial period has expired” – funny, I didn’t even notice it had started! When I subscribed Last.Fm was a free service.
My first reaction was a slight disappointment: “Why should I pay for something that had been free until yesterday!”. Soon after I realized how important for me the last.fm radio service was; I listen to it almost everyday. Economists say that in free markets there is no such a thing as a free meal, and I agree with that. Quality comes at a price, and I was willing to pay – I took my credit card and spent 9$ for three months of service. As soon as the music feed came back I felt “good” for helping a successfull web company to expand his business and build a sustainable business model. 

My point here is very simple. Technology doesn’t come for free, and great services such as Last.Fm don’t come for free either. The social web is a great revolution and like most industrial revolutions it also need a social revolution, in terms of sensibility to certain matters and a cultural shift in the way we consume information and services. If we love a service we should be ready to pay for it, at least 3$ a month.

Today Last.Fm annouced that, after the negative feedback they received, the service will remain free.

Wisdom of the crowd wins again – or does it?
Isn’t peraphs this crowd failing to understand that even in the information age, information has a value, and the currency we use to buy this value is still money?

UGC: User Generated Costs

According to a report from Credit Suisse, YouTube might lose approximately $470 million in 2009, mainly because of bandwith costs from all the user generated content.
The main problem with YouTube is that monetization of content remains a big challenge, with infrastructural costs growing, and advertisting revenues not catching up.

An interesting post from The Slate shows that YouTube’s problems are very similar to those faced by newspaper, where printing and distribution costs sometimes are not balanced with advertising.

YouTube and Newspapers are not alone in this game; Facebook is facing the same growth in storage and bandwith due to UGC from the now 200 million user base. Techcrunch reported that facebook is spending almost $1 million a month just for electricity.

The Silicon Alley on his post “Is YouTube dommed” states:

Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals.