Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! The digital world is no stranger to crisis It started with the .com bubble, Y2K, and any number of brand social faux pas. What effect this has on a brand depends heavily on how robust the brand’s marketing, community, and customer care systems are. In an age when everyone can be a video journalist or digital columnist, a brand’s simple mistake can end up costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.  Even when brands are in crisis and damage control mode, the wheels of business keep turning. This fact is especially true in the diverse world of customer care. For example, a company spokesperson makes a Freudian slip in a viral interview. Next, a group of people, through the power of social media, band together to make hundreds of calls to your contact center and tweet thousands of times to your brand in a day to display their disdain for your brand. This group of people bottlenecks your agent’s ability to help any of your “normal” customers who still need support.  Of course, the simplest solution is to unplug your phone system and focus all efforts on damage control. While this might save some face in the short turn, not reinforcing your care systems will affect more than just a few angry customers on Twitter. Look no further than above your head into the world of commercial travel for a real-world example of crisis mode care. Every day, thousands of flights take off and land; unfortunately, in recent times, thousands of flights have been canceled globally. At the time of writing, international and aviation-based travel has exploded to nearly 180% compared to 2021 levels. On top of the increased demand, major airline employee strikes have decimated staffing levels across Europe. It’s fair to say that airlines are in crisis mode currently.  How has this crisis mode ended up with major airlines across the globe? Some of the lowest rated NPS score across digital care, the longest TAR, and the poorest agent health. According to the New York Times, some people who attempted to contact an airline’s customer care team reported waiting on hold for 275 minutes.    Of course, some airlines nail digital care, and other industries facing backlash can still provide excellent customer care. These brands share a common thread that customer care systems widely center around being digital first. Here are the three fundamental ways they were able to keep their customers happy during a crisis. A Focus on Agent Health with Digital First Many people would argue that being a customer care agent is widely a thankless job. It’s stressful; agents face unpredictable hours, and generally speaking, customers only contact the care team when they are facing problems or issues.  Now mix in a time of brand crisis. Using the above example of an angry group of people clogging your customer care channels, your agents will have even less bandwidth to answer actual customer questions. This will lead to a lower NPS, wasted time, lower revenue, and a much higher agent attrition rate. Using digital care first, customers can get their answers handled by chatbots, self-service, and community. When their questions need to be elevated to a live agent, A.I. can auto-fill important information, detect customer sentiment, and be used any way your brand sees fit to improve agent health and efficiency.  Unclog Your Care Channels  Because of the one mistake by the brand spokesperson, your contact volume across all digital and traditional channels has exploded. As mentioned above, during a crisis, your brand should expect an explosion of volume. Now, if all customer contacts are legitimate customers will depend on the brand and the crisis. However, it’s fair to say that you can still use a digital-first filter the channel clogs versus customers with honest questions. A lot of the unclogging of your care channels can be solved via, queue-configuration or how customer questions and requests filter into your Care instance.  A seriously effective method is to enable Push Next. When enabling Push Next in your Care instance, it automatically pushes a new customer request to your agent rather than them choosing what ticket or request they want to tackle instead.  The Khoros effect Khoros was built on the premise that digital-first would be the tool that the future of customer care will use. No matter what crisis your brand has the misfortune of stumbling into, the Khoros Care platform can be used to reinforce your front-line workers to defend your brand from the ongoing crisis, your normal customers, and your NPS scores.  To explore more how Khoros and help defend your brand during a crisis and improve efficiency visit these Atlas Resources Below!    Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push Next [Podcast] Stop Worrying About the Channel, Start Thinking About the Customer Khoros Care Webinar: Choosing the Right Tool 2021 Customer Kudos Awards: Three Ireland - Best-in-Class: Care     ... View more

A how-to guide on planning for spontaneous social marketing. Something rather curious has happened since the inception of social media. Suddenly every brand now had a mainline into their customer’s entertainment feeds. While it’s easy to produce a well-crafted video or text ad, the ability to market in real-time is brand new in the marketing world. It’s still being tested and tinkered with to find the best method to engage with customers in real-time while still remaining relevant.  The question becomes, how does a brand create a well-crafted but still relevant ad in real-time? This question has been floating around Khoros for quite some time. Previously, brands planned “spontaneous” posts for significant cultural events. Think of making a Star Wars-themed post for “May the 4th” or posting something slightly spooky around the Halloween season. On the flip side, brands could make “spontaneous” posts with smaller events. This example is seen through clothing brands on Instagram or Facebook. They would make simple post templates about overstock sales or new product releases. This way, the clothing brand will always have a “spontaneous” ad to post whenever the timing is just right. To the customer, they’re only going to see a new “random” post that keeps them engaged with your brand and, generally speaking, influences them to make more purchases. This worked amazingly well a few years ago when Facebook and Instagram were the main game in town. This tactic will still work, but with the introduction of TikTok, this strategy is slowly losing its potency.    If you’re unfamiliar with the various brand strategies that Khoros offers with TikTok, check out these resources!  Don’t Make Ads for TikTok: Make Outstanding Content TikTok Analytics The Next Frontier In Digital Engagement [Podcast] Your Brand on TikTok: Learning to be Authentically Vulnerable    Now how exactly TikTok will change digital customer engagement is currently being studied. Still, it is more than fair to say that it is the crux of today’s social marketing paradox. TikTok has now allowed brands to utilize this paradox of planned spontaneity truly.  TikTok is known for its unique, causal, and sometimes downright weird content. Brands can leverage this by making random videos that play on viral trends, songs, or themes. If done correctly, a brand could make an entire catalog of content for TikTok, Instagram, or whatever their chosen channel is.  It’s important to note that certain challenges come almost instantly. TikTok can indeed be casual. However, other platforms will still need a higher production level to make it engaging. The next challenge is knowing what kind of content will connect with your customers. You’ll have to make something engaging with your customers that’s relevant without seeming like you’re trying too hard. The last challenge is housing all of this spontaneous content in a centralized, secure, and reliable place.  This is where brands could use Khoros Marketing to help solve social marketing and the paradox of planned spontaneity. With Khoros Marketing, you expand your current use case to more than publishing in-app and dynamite analytics.  Two challenges of both creating and housing a wide variety of content are solved in one solution. Khoros Marketing’s API can secure house any type of content, from pictures and videos to tweets and any other kind of social media post.      Most social media platforms indeed have a “draft” area or other means of publishing unhoused content. This is more than enough for the causal non-brand user to store ideas. For brands, this could spell disaster for several reasons.  Firstly, there’s no full visibility from everyone in your social marketing team. This slows down publishing time and makes your “real-time” marketing less than so. Second, if a team member leaves the team and takes the main password or access with them, your content library is now up a creek without a paddle. Lastly, suppose a new event or random social happening is going on, and your team needs a post out yesterday with a simple native draft library. In that case, you’ll have to message your social media manager and hope that they respond quickly, have an idea ready, and content can pass it up for approval before the moment is gone.    This system of communication and governance is all well and good, but before you get into the weeds of this system, you’ll need to listen to your customers as they talk about your brand on your social platforms. Comments, threads, and mentions are the name of the game here.  Now you could assign one of the front-line staff members to manually read and watch every single comment or video or mention your brand receives. This is, without a doubt, horrifically inefficient and, in all honestly, quite impossible.    This is where Talkwalker and Khoros step in. Talkwalker is the cutting edge in social listening. In short, it crawls through your social feeds and pulls every single comment and mention your customers make about your brand. With Talkwalker and Khoros, your real-time marketing can be as “real-time” as possible.    To learn more about the Khoros / Talkwalker partnership, click here!   The social ecosystem is constantly changing and evolving. How brands will interact with social media in the future will forever change, and real-time marketing will continue to morph in ways not yet known. It’s Khoros’ mission to stay on the cutting edge of social marketing so you can make customers for life.    Further your knowledge of the extended capabilities of Khoros Marketing by visiting the links below.  Khoros Marketing Deep Dive Webinar  Conversational Marketing | Khoros  Khoros Marketing Hub    ... View more

Proving ROI in marketing takes a vastly different approach than the next day's Metrics.  The vast number of platforms people interact with is rapidly ballooning into a complete social media circus. There is T.V., movies, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, heck, and even podcasts these days. Due to all of these channels, marketers are nothing more than a band of shouting songbirds in the consumers' eyes. The principal problem for marketers is that while they do their song and dance for consumers to purchase their product or service, it’s becoming increasingly unclear how to measure success and, most notably, how to track it.    A Common Challenge: A commonly cited issue by Khoros customers is that they struggle to fully integrate with the Khoros platform. In turn, they are struggling to make the transition from native publishing and analytics to entirely using Khoros marketing. As a result, sometimes it’s a challenge to see the forest for the trees and, in turn, the full value of using the Khoros marketing platform. Now why exactly this is happening could range from any number of reasons. It’s no secret that change management is challenging. Here’s what can happen if not all your team is using the Khoros platform.    Mismatched Analytics  Khoros Marketing’s analytics tool is designed to blend all your stats, comments, views, and likes into one place. However, while Khoros analytics can absorb natively published content analytics, having things siloed means not everyone is on the same page and causes riffs in the team flow and understanding.    Underused labels  Khoros’s marketing labels were created to help cut through the fog of social media. By using specific labels, a social marketer can see who, when, where, and what their customers are writing on their social posts. A commonly cited pain point by Khoros customers is that they're struggling to get this data but aren’t using labels properly. It could be either they aren’t using labels at all, not labeling their posts properly, or a mixture of the two.    If you haven’t used labels yet or want more information, please visit our how-to guide on social marketing labels!   Inefficient Publishing Workflows  Some Khoros customers have reported that getting content out at a reasonable rate is taking too much time. Strictly why this happens heavily depends on the team and their dynamics. However, it’s fair to say that if half of your team is siloed to content creation and the other half is publishing. Then a quarter of the publishing team only publishes natively, and the path from idea to social post is filled with more roadblocks and speedbumps than a back-country road.  Now, what do these three things have in common? They are costing you money on all fronts. Much like any tool or solution, you and your team will see the most value when using it to the maximum of its ability.    Khoros Platform  While it feels like common sense, it’s essential to remember that 95% of people aren’t ready to buy a product or service when exposed to advertising. With the common pain points and the U.S. economy on the edge of an economic recession, it could quickly feel like a safe bet to slash all marketing budgets, including the Khoros solution.    It’s no secret that running a social team will generally cost at least $1000 a day. This hefty sum comes from salary reporting from Glassdoor for social media managers averaging $75,000 dollars a year or roughly $35 per hour. Plus, the general cost per click for Twitter and Instagram averages around $0.70 per click, and most social teams have a minimum of three social managers on staff. After you pay your social media team, your photographers, writers, editors, and your design team, the true cost of social begins to show. Of course, you could save that money by going into duck and cover mode and hoping you come out the other side. However, as our director of strategic services, Matt Deluca, said it best in a Khoros expert interview:    “If you are willing to go dark and not have your brand be front and center and present in people's minds when they're in their purchasing decision, you're basically conceding to your nearest competitor.”    So you can’t simply slash your budgets, and leaving your team siloed will only cost more money. Khoros can solve all the abovementioned problems by merely centralizing your platform into one unified place.  If you are already a fully integrated Khoros customer, your reduced time to post saves daily cash, no matter how your campaigns perform. Your analytics get a booster for clarity and real-time stats. You’ll already know if your customers are engaging positively or negatively, and you’ll be able to adjust your campaigns accordingly. This keeps your brand top of mind for your customers, which highly increases your sales down the line.  Take Khoros Marketing into the real world. It’s easy to point out when other brands make mistakes or do not use their resources “properly.” It’s even easier to say do this, or that, or whatever to improve your marketing campaigns without providing real-world examples.  Instead of giving you a vague idea of how to improve your marketing, let’s introduce an impressive H.R. company Randstad as our primary case study. Randstad has been a Khoros customer since the Spedfast and Lithium merger. According to their director of social and content marketing Karen Pace, they couldn’t be happier partnering with Khoros to achieve their marketing goals.  Karen had this say when asked about why precisely what Khoros does to meet her marketing goals.  “I need dashboards to be able to give me that 30,000-foot view. If I need that information, I need to take 2 seconds and go get it right now. I then take the data and translate it into user-friendly slides using Excel, and I then translate that into visuals. I need non-social people internally to understand the impact of what we're doing day-to-day and integrate my reporting into enterprise-wide reporting.”    If you’re curious to learn more about what Randstad has been accomplishing with Khoros, check out the Titans of Customer Engagement Podcast where they were featured in “Audience-First: Lessons & Strategies for Building a Better Brand”!    In addition to Randstad being a top Khoros customer, Karen Pace found the value of having our platform being as unified as it is. When she talked about having her “non-social people” understand the impact of her team’s work, this applies to every single brand working in social marketing today. Whenever your entire team can clearly and easily see what the analytics are showing, how the workflow is getting completed faster than ever, and how your customers engage with your brand, it’s nothing less than a piece of cake to prove the ROI of social marketing.    Leave a comment below to get connected with a Khoros staff member to answer any questions you may have to expand your knowledge.  Tell us what Thought Leadership topic you want us to cover next!   Subscribe to our BRAND NEW Thought Leadership label and never miss a new article or blog.    Can’t wait for the next installment of this cost-saving series? Take a look below at the resources to deepen your learning!  Khoros Marketing expert interview  Khoros Change Management expert interview  Khoros Marketing Deep-dive webinar  Getting started as a Marketer Video Guide Interested in marketing on TikTok? Take a look at how to guerrilla market via TikTok Need some more real-world stories? Check out BMW’s Kudos Award!   ... 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