What can you use the application for?


Conversocial gives users a way to manage social media and discussions. The site focuses on the idea that high engagement will lead to high visibility (and more exposure). Using ConverSocial, professionals and businesses can stay on top of discussions about their product or service. ConverSocial allow the user to see complains and questions through social media. These items are visible to followers. This information allows the user to address any concerns or questions quickly, creating a positive experience that can be seen by others. Collaborations features are included as well as interaction histories so the user can see the development of discussions. The tools provided will also help the user determine what kind of content has a stronger impact on their audience. Users can efficiently moderate their brand and protect content from inappropriate comments and spam. ConverSocial is used by Groupon, Aviva, MediaCom, Tempero, Abercrombie and Kent and ITV.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Conversocial was founded in November of 2009 by Joshua March. The application was intended to give users a better way to manage social media on Facebook and Twitter. Today, ConverSocial employs fewer than 10 individuals including CEO March and CTO Dan Lester at its London office.

What are the differences to other apps?


Conversocial.com provides users with many ways to view, manage and maintain customer interactions. The user can see what is being said and react accordingly as necessary. This gives the user a rare opportunity to show good customer service and provide more information to customers or potential customers quickly. Fast reactions and in depth responses can speak volumes for a company’s ethics and overall quality to consumers.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The ConverSocial website uses a stylish dark color scheme offset by vibrant blue and refreshing orange. The contrasting colors work well for the site, creating a unique layout that is easy on the eyes. Users can find navigational links in the upper, right hand corner while information and screenshots are paged through near the center of the site. The application offers a use friendly interface that retains an air of professionalism while working in hints of beautiful color.

How does the registration process work?


A new user can begin the registration process by clicking the orange and white “Sign Up and Pricing” button in the upper, right hand corner of the ConverSocial homepage. Doing so takes the user to the pricing page. To the right, the user can find a 14 day free trial sign up form. The form requires a first and last name, email address, company name and password.

What does it cost to use the application?


ConverSocial gives its users three plans to choose from. The user must choose a plan after their 14 day free trial is over. The Starter plan is intended for small teams. This plan costs around $125 per user per month and includes the core features and unlimited channels. The mid-ranged Plus plan is intended for growing teams and costs around $165 per user per month. This plan upgrades to include role and access permissions, multi-channel publishing capabilities and aggregated channel analytics. The free trial provides the same level of access as the Plus plan. The third option is the Enterprise plan which is intended for multiple teams and costs around $200 per user per month. This plan includes location based permissions, custom channel groups and custom team groups.

Who would you recommend the application to?


ConverSocial is a valuable tool for anyone who works with social media and marketing. The application helps users manage interactions with their audiences and gives them more ways to create a positive view of their brand.

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There is no shortage of stories about business missteps in today’s digital and social media realms. As brands try to invite customers into their processes and provide greater transparency Into their worlds, stories like Nestlé’s disastrous Facebook customer interactions, or Gap’s rebranding debacle, force judgement on their choices of processes and implementation of tactics. Unfortunately, amidst the chaos of damage control, companies are forgetting to ask: what were the root cultural causes of the disaster?

There needs to be better evaluation of corporate culture and its influence on the actions and sentiments of its employees. Countless hours are spent setting up external communication policies, teams that listen to what customers are saying, and even entire departments dedicated to customer experience (CX). This outward focus on developing good experiences for customers often overshadows the need to live that philosophy inside a company’s own walls. A culture that does not internally live a focus on experience will find it impossible to externally execute the same.

There are big shifts happening to empower employees and recognize their contributions, as evidenced by stories coming out of big companies around the world. Employees are becoming trusted represenatives of the brands they work for, which is a win for both brand and employee. But in today’s age of transparency, many will have little chance of success in representing their company’s supposed focus on CX if they are functioning in an opposing internal atmosphere.

Organizations need to design their internal culture to live the tenets of good experience every day. The Nestlé employee wouldn’t have interacted with customers negatively had the culture within Nestlé not propegated such sentiments. In the case of Gap’s rebranding, inviting consumer feedback into a decision as monumental as changing a reknowned logo wouldn’t have failed as miserably for Gap if it were not executed as an afterthought in their decision-making process.

These events provided a window into these companies’ worlds, and exposed how they live on the inside. Nestlé didn’t fail at social media, they failed at fundamentally respecting their customer. And Gap didn’t mess up a logo change, they highlighted just how unpracticed they are at utilizing customer feedback, an indication that customer involvement is not an everyday occurance for them. The cultures these companies have designed simply aren’t supporting the experimental tactics they are attempting to implement.

Can a Culture Be Designed?

The short answer: yes. This is the definition of culture:

The attitudes and behavior that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization.^[*]

Attitudes and behaviors are constantly being shaped within organizations. It’s the reason there are performance reviews, processes and procedures, and role expectations. If business leaders want to foster a specific culture, then all opportunities, activities, and expectations of their staffs will be measured against the success of exemplifying that culture. To design is to plan something for a specific role, purpose, or effect—to work out its form. Company culture is designed in every conversation, and in every bit of feedback and evaluation criteria. It’s possible to control the corporate atmosphere by choosing which behaviors to support and encourage, and which to discourage. Cultures grow organically, but they are actively designed.

What Is an Experience-Driven Culture?

In today’s world, customers expect companies to focus on experience. In order to meet that expectation, a company’s UX and CX efforts cannot be isolated in a single department, or in one or two positions. The experiences that resonate and are successful for customers are those that are seamless across all touchpoints; experiences should seem to originate from the whole company, not just from whichever department they sprung from within an organization. Companie cannot lean on the experiences customers have with the “customer satisfaction team” and call it a day. Every role within an organization should work together and towards the vision of how the brand interacts with its customers.

So what are the attributes of an experience-driven culture? While the subject is still evolving, I believe there are three core attributes of a experience-focused culture:

Action, not process-oriented

There is always an important role for process within organizations. It allows employees to function effectively and efficiently through the important work they do. But too often process becomes a crutch. People execute what the process dictates, adhering to the strictly defined steps. For all the efficiencies that processes enable, they can actually hinder progress towards goals and the free exercise of creativity when used in this manner.

In an experience culture, action—whether it conforms to process or not—is more highly valued and encouraged. Having the flexibility to move, execute, and explore without fear allows people the ability to develop solutions and learn from their own experiences. This proves invaluable the next time they’re challenged to solve a problem. It promotes confidence by producing results, and by giving people a say in how those results were arrived at.

Problem solving, not execution-focused

Unfortunately, we live in a checklist-driven world. There are lists of tactics that need to be implemented, webpages that need to be designed, and so on, and people do their best to fulfill on each of these. But how often do managers encourage their teams—or themselves, for that matter—to challenge the why behind what they are doing?

In an experience-driven culture, assignments for tactic planning and execution aren’t handed out. Instead, problems are framed and defined. For example, team brainstorming and discussions don’t start with deciding which social network the brand should have a presence on, but rather with describing a problem customers may be having, and then designing and developing a valuable solution to that problem. The former is tactic-driven, and the latter is experience-driven. When people are allowed to look beyond the surface from the very beginning, it frees them to think beyond the obvious. It trains them to hear complaints or feedback differently and to identify and connect dots, rather than band-aid-fix their way to a solution.

Creativity and collaboration at the core

A key attribute of a culture focused on experience is an uncompromising encouragement and expectation of creativity and collaboration. Why? Because the very nature of collaboration creates opportunities for challenging individual modes of thinking. The act of discussing ideas and possible solutions or scenarios forces people to engage in their work in a creative manner.

Creativity is fostered because people aren’t just applying their own isolated knowledge and ideas, but rather are actively seeking and applying the experience and insights of others. This allows people to work in a setting that makes the focus on customer experiences an extension of how the employees themselves work and produce, rather than a skill they have to try to learn and apply. To have these attributes at the core of a company’s culture means that creativity becomes the measure of proficiency, thereby surpassing production. One is not at the expense of the other, but success is measured based on the creative thinking applied, not just the number executed.

Fostering a culture based on creativity and collaboration helps bring down the walls that divide people from each other within organizations. Collaboration is not just amongst and within a given team; it needs to filter through and cross teams and departments. Creativity is not relegated to the creative department; it is a requirement for all.

When team members are given the opportunity to live this way within the designed culture of their organizations, the benefits manifest when they engage with customers. They can see beyond the script to find creative ways of being helpul. They identify opportunites to deliver beyond what the customer may be asking for. They work with and for customers, inviting them to be part of the solutions. All of this comes together to deliver the experiences customers are increasingly expecting and demanding. And the amazing part is, this becomes just an extension of who an organization is, rather than a collection of skillsets that are needed to be taught and learned.

Every type of organization would benefit from designing their own version of an experience-driven culture. But note that I said “their own;” this is an important distinction. There is no universally right way to design an experience culture. It must fit with a company’s brand, beliefs, and business. It is a challenge all companies need to address, lest they find themselves failing to live up to customer expectations.

If you’re trying to guide your company or team to be experience-driven, try starting with activities like building with marshmallows and spaghetti. See how it feels, and what your team learns. You might be surprised how refreshing it is and surprised by the results. Then build from there. Besides, what could be more of an experience than marshmallows?

About the author(s)

Cynthia Thomas is partner at Translator, a digital experience agency focused on connecting online and offline, customer and brand, and person-to-person through smartly designed experiences. She leads strategy, conceptual incubation and user experience thinking for agency clients, helping them navigate the digital landscape. Cynthia’s passion for the UX discipline and experience thinking as a whole has driven her focus on studying the social, cultural and behavioral influence of the digital space on human interactions and expectations.

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Historically speaking, marketing and UX have been either somewhat at odds or simply unconcerned with each other. At the risk of oversimplifying, it might be said that marketing is generally concerned with things like new customer acquisition, reach and frequency, and producing stickiness. UX practitioners, on the other hand, have been concerned with things like adoptability, usability, and transparency. But the separation of marketing and UX is in the process of changing.

Marketing organizations are beginning to shift their focus to include a new emphasis on customer experience (CX) as they realize that reach and frequency strategies are not working as they used to. Simply said, in order to be effective these days, marketing needs to be in the business of helping consumers and adapting to customer needs while also executing smart outreach strategies. Talking to prospects with the right message at the right time and the right place (as good marketers have always known to do) is just not enough anymore. Marketing now needs to offer prospects or customers smart and dynamic tools that help them in their decision-making.

As Dave Stubbs of Teehan+Lax has written, “In the past we were incentivized to create ads and microsites that would launch onto the Internet, exist for a while and then disappear. In the future, we will create programs and ‘things’ that solve consumer problems…” Vidya Drego of Forrester Research has also written a great paper on the topic.

With all of this in mind, it’s important to examine how UX and marketing can collaborate to build the next generation of customer engagement.

From a marketing perspective, a whole lot of a company’s customer interactions are staked in digital touchpoints. This makes it important that UX professionals be recruited to help shape customer interaction models from the very outset of product development, rather than brought in as an after-thought after a product is built to try, too late, to make it more user friendly. Through its user-centric approach, UX is especially well suited to help marketing shape a more comprehensive and brand-cohesive view of their prospect and customer interactions.

From a UX perspective, branding is an increasingly important consideration these days. This is a result of both the growing digital bandwidth and the fact that new experiences focused on persuasion or selling are now integrated into the digital tools themselves. Think mobile apps and tools like the Nike+ runner application or Ozarka‘s water delivery website. As a result, the UX perspective has broadened to include new types of experiences that are less process-driven and more advertising-driven. UX designers must contend with more messaging that increases cognitive load, and they must work in an area that’s typically been the bastion of marketing communications.

One way to describe this shift is that the interests of marketing and UX are merging into a new approach to customer relations. That outlook is pretty exciting. So many customer experiences will improve when marketing and UX get together to craft tools that give consumers the power to shape more mutually beneficial relationships with the brands, products, and services they choose.

But for this collaboration to be effective, a third ingredient is required: IT. And that’s where things threaten to unravel. What good does it do if marketing and UX can put their heads together to design exemplary customer experiences only to find out they cannot be implemented? This isn’t due to problems inherent to IT, but more because of the problematic dynamics of marketing and IT’s relationship. In a nutshell, marketing (as well as UX, although to a lesser extent) have been guilty of tech phobia. But to be fair, IT has given marketing and UX plenty of good reasons to distrust technology.

Some of us are familiar with the historic battles between interaction design’s and engineers’ implementation plans. Well thought-out designs have been thrown out because the software platform “can’t do that.” Marketing has had similar struggles with IT when trying to gather dynamic customer data or automate its processes. IT has been so overburdened with support and maintenance that being asked to implement new features is more than they can handle, especially if those new features could present a threat to their systems’ stability.<

Scott Brinker of Ion Interactive expands on this issue in his blog post, Why IT and marketing are diametrically opposed.

On the bright side, increasing numbers of a new breed of technologists are joining the ranks in IT departments. These new technologists arrive in IT already knowledgeable about CX and marketing. They come from much more flexible programming environments, and have evolved through the age of the Internet and open-source platforms. They understand the importance of the customer experience, and are very engaged with it once they know they’re involved in a meaningful customer experience effort. In fact, some of these technologists have actually been the originators of better UX in organizations where marketing had only paid lip service to the issue.

The other positive angle to consider—and really this is where everything hinges—is if marketing is able to successfully collaborate with UX, they will acquire the vision and experience they need to help them generate and own the clear and executable types of technology plans that are key to success.

So, to wrap up:

1. Marketing needs to start integrating UX design processes into a holistic view of digital (and beyond) customer interactions.
2. UX practitioners need to acquire a better understanding of marketing’s priorities and brand management practices.
3. Once allied into a potent force, marketing and UX can engage in the kind of research that leads to the development of clear and executable technology plans and, as a result, engage IT as an enthusiastic partner.

About the author(s)

David Moskovic is Principal, Director Design Strategy at Pull Media. An entrepreneur and creative technologist with a keen eye for design solutions that deliver on strategic objectives, David has close to two decades experience designing and producing digital media and e-business applications. Over the years, David has accumulated a strong track record of providing successful and innovative digital media programs for some of the world’s largest organizations. You can read more of David’s thoughts on the Pull Media blog.

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I’m back with more details on improving sales, tomorrow, in three easy steps.

If you’re still with me after part one you’re likely to be in my camp: You think there’s more to emerging tools like Twitter and Facebook than just distributing coupons or links to white papers. Great. 

Today I recommend trusting your own instincts, questioning your consultants and
asking
yourself, “am I allowing myself to become a tool of the tools?”

Trust your instincts, question your consultants

What if “the experts” are wrong? What if they’re inhibiting your
ability to generate more sales, leads and meaningful customer
interactions that hit the bottom line? It’s time to ask difficult questions of your employees and
consultants.

You ask, “I need to sell more products, how can
the social web help?” The digital consultant answers, but with a
question, “Are you generating buzz about your brand on Facebook?” or
“Are you assessing your customers’ sentiment about your brand?” You have
no answer. Poof! Somehow your consultant’s question is more relevant
and urgent than your need to sell. Does this sound familiar?

You may adopt your consultant’s new questions, this new sense of
what’s important, as your own. Suddenly you’re playing catch-up. Your
brand isn’t in control after all.

You rush into the digital jungle with new-found
guides at your side, buzzing, posting and tweeting. But eventually you
wonder why your objectives aren’t met. The buzz, posts, tweets are
novel and real, but what about sales and leads? Does this sound familiar?

Are you being sold the wrong answers to the right questions?

I’ll admit: we’re all compelled to believe in a hyper-connected
world consisting of “new everything.” Facebook, Twitter, blogging,
iPhone apps. People are flocking to them by the millions. You can’t
sit idly by. But your gut still nags, “I think I’m relying on
well-intentioned but inexperienced guides; I think I’m just throwing
money at Facebook.” 

I say, don’t risk becoming a “tools of the tools” themselves. Resist becoming
bamboozled by “the
experts”, digital guru guides and vendors who all have a vested
interest in earning your “yes”, which means your budget dollars.

The environment has changed (ie. social media, mobile & our hyper-connected world). The rules governing your business stay the same. 

If we continue to believe the hype-and-spin that the rules of business have forever changed we risk believing that engaging, tweeting and friending is more important than making sales or capturing leads, or believing that somehow all we need to do is DO social media and the sales will roll right-on-in based on some kind of aimless “conversation” and mystical “branding.”

What you can do, tomorrow

• Press these book-writing consultants to
  answer business questions first and without using words like
  traffic,
  engagement, positive sentiment, personas or buzz.
• Ask yourself, “Are we hiring employees and vendors
  based on tactical skills rather than the ability to create strategic
  results? Do they ask the right questions or avoid ours? Might we already
  have many of the answers we’re seeking from the experts?”

  The answers
  may surprise you and prompt bold actions. Develop a means to learn how to hire social media marketing agency, as an example.  Focus on the quality of questions your prospective consultants ask of you. 

• In a staff/vendor meeting, ask if
  you’re using the web to interact with customers intimately or if you’re
  blasting and tweeting into the ether. If you’re interacting, is it
  organized? Or do strategies work apart from (or compete with) each
  other? What actionable information does each interaction produce, and
  where does that information go?

  Is there room for each strategy to
  cooperatively push customers down the sales funnel using the collected
  information? Find ways to connect each strategy to the sales funnel, or else consider eliminating it.

• Task your team to organize around logical customer
  behaviors and prompts. Behavior-creation is at the center of digital
  media’s value. And I’m not talking about buzz or positive sentiment or

  “conversation.” 

  To be clear… I’m talking about specific, measurable
  behavior that leads to qualitative
  outcomes. You may already understand what your customers want to do or like to do. How can you help them do those things, as I’ve discussed previously.

Here’s a great idea to get your creative juices going. Think about the best
social media example you’ve ever heard of. Now think about why
it’s the best. Why did it just spring to mind? 

It is likely to have some innovative or experimental qualities, but at the core you may discover how it drove behaviour: by design. What did it do to create a meaningful outcome for the customer and the business? Did it create something truly meaningful?

Experiment with digital marketing but with purpose. Successful companies are planning and designing digital media
to produce the tangible business outcomes they truly
need.

I’ll be back with more thoughts on how to create better ROI and meaningful outcomes by asking better questions of your team and consultants. Until then, what do you think?

Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust, and Whole Foods are among the early adopters, which is quite impressive.  Another interesting detail is that CoTweet isn’t exactly begging for clients; the program’s existence was discovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew LaVallee, and businesses in fact have to request an invitation to scope out the new offering.

As for what their interest (and monthly payments of $1,500) will net them, the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program offers engagement, influence, and reach analytics, along with archives of customer interactions and a couple other things.

Anyway, this development could provide a number of clues concerning the future of Twitter.  One point in the site’s favor is that corporate users are so fascinated by it.  This should give Twitter some staying power.

Also, although the launch of the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program might seem like yet another missed revenue opportunity (Twitter’s indicated before that it might try to make money by selling premium accounts and analytics services), Twitter could still presumably join the game at any point in time.

The interesting thing is that these well-connected companies didn’t wait for it to do so.  Microsoft and the others almost surely would have heard if Twitter had a service in the pipeline, and then would have held out another couple of weeks or months to use it.  So any sort of official offering may be quite a ways off.

One last item of note: a post on the CoTweet Blog made clear, "The CoTweet public beta remains free for consumers and enterprises."

Related Articles:

> 20 Goals For Business Social Media Use

> 8 Reasons You Need To Stop Ignoring Twitter

> A Suggested Users List For Twitter That You Can Actually Use

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