I am fed up with seeing courses and ideas about ‘Social Media’ touted around trying to persuade businesses that it’s a universal panacea, and, if you come on this course, new customers will come flooding to you.     

  Bo***cks

Social media is just new technology that can be used effectively or ineffectively.

Everyone loves conducting and receiving Appraisals, don’t they?

Here’s a recent quote from ‘The Times’

the problem with appraisals is extreme. They take different forms in different companies, but what they have in common is that they are usually annual, usually involve a tense exchange between employer and employee, have a knack of being timed to coincide with the employee making a major cockup, and invariably leave both parties depressed.

Here's an extract from a fantastic UK Government report (is there such a thing?) called: 'The Stupid Company'

‘The Stupid Company’

Eight emerging trends in Customer Service for the 2nd decade of the 21st Century

1. Customer insight propagation - customer insights will drive decisions across the organisation. Still too many decisions are made without any real customer insight but there is an increasing realisation that companies need to get better feedback and act upon it. That's why Voice of the Customer programmes are increasing.

2. Unstructured data appreciation - text analytics will become a crucial capability. Companies will increasingly identify and collect unstructured sources of data from inside and outside their organisation.

The dictionary defines a “promise” as “a declaration assuring that one will or will not do something, a vow”.

Stephen Hemsley, CEO of Domino’s Pizza, is quoted as saying: “The underlying business strategy is to deliver what you promise …

Our credibility would have been blown if we had gone out with extensive TV advertising and the experience that the customer enjoyed did not meet or exceed what we promised”.

Almost 50 years ago Ernest Dichter, the father of motivation research, did a large study of word of mouth persuasion that revealed secrets of how to use social media to build brands and businesses. The study was reported in a 1966 article in HBR.

A major Dichter finding, very relevant today, was the identification of four motivations for a person to communicate about brands. The first (about 33% of the cases) is because of product-involvement. The experience is so novel and pleasurable that it must be shared. The second (about 24%) is self-involvement. Sharing knowledge or opinions is a way to gain attention, show connoisseurship, feel like a pioneer, have inside information, seek confirmation of a person's own judgment, or assert superiority. The third (around 20%) is other-involvement. The speaker wants to reach out and help to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship. The fourth (around 20%) is message-involvement. The message is so humorous or informative that it deserves sharing.