Customer relationship management is often laser-focused on email and social media. reducing customers’ needs, hopes, and pain points to data points and milestones. These components are obviously crucial, but it’s to easy to overlook one of the most basic means of communication available to us: the telephone. Truly effective CRM utilizes the power of the human voice in direct, real-time communication.

Case in point: my car has been in the shop for over a week now. The nature of the issue required an insurance adjustor to look at the car, and special ordering some parts–each of which contributed to a longer time frame for repair.

Rather than renting a car, the dealership gave me a brand new loaner car to drive in the interim. While this alone would’ve been enough to satisfy me, it’s been the communication that’s made me a customer for the foreseeable future, if not for life.

Every day since they’ve had my car, I have received a phone call around 4:00pm with a complete status update. I have not for one day been left to wonder what’s going on, nor have I had to pester the shop for information. I have been proactively provided with everything I need to know, often before I have had time to think of it.

Of course, I receive regular targeted emails and paper mail offering specials and advising me of new features, sales and events. I also follow two different Twitter feeds related to the brand. These are both helpful and informative, but I know these means of communication originate from the corporate office.

My local dealer knows my name, takes the time to catch up on general life events when I’m in their office, and reminds me through their actions that they value me as an individual. I’m not a target demographic, I’m not an email address with a customizable first name field in a SalesForce database: I’m a person, and I respond to personal attention. And unlike most people, when they say they’ll call they actually mean it and follow up.

The digital realm isn’t the be-all and end-all in CRM. As this anecdote illustrates, humans respond to humans. Your customers, regardless of industry, deserve this type high-end treatment. Even if you are a huge retailer with hundreds of thousands of customers, when a customer service issue arises that person should feel that their patronage is appreciated and their needs are addressed.

So take the time to sit down and talk. Don’t make them wait. Remember to call. Your customers will remember why they became customers in the first place.

Raidious is pleased to welcome our newest full-time employee, Kaitlin Coons. Kaitlin joined the team this week as Social Media Coordinator.

A native of Chesterton, Indiana on the astoundingly beautiful Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Kaitlin comes to us as a recent graduate of Indiana University with a triple major in Psychology, Communications and Telecommunications.

Most recently Kaitlin managed Facebook and Twitter social media activity as an intern for the Grossbauer Group. She has done extensive volunteer work for the Middleway House Disabled Veterans Center, and continues to self-educate in intellectual property law.

Kaitlin is a smart, creative, energetic person and a talented writer. She’s also a gadget geek who loves her iPhone and her MacBook, so she’s fitting in very well.

We’re privileged and thrilled to have her on the team.

HubSpot and Watershed Publishing recently released their Marketing Data Box, a “quarterly collection of practical marketing tools ready for professional use.”

The free collection of 65 charts from information wizards MarketingCharts collects current data from The Neilsen Company, Harris Interactive, Pew Research, Kantar Media, Compete, comScore, Experian Hitwise and Mediaguide. It aims to provide marketers, social media and SEO experts, and just about anyone else with all the ammunition they need for presentations, blog posts and general insight into online trends across a multitude of platforms and channels.

The collection can be downloaded in either PDF or PowerPoint format (or both), and is the latest in the slew of reports, whitepapers, and other resources HubSpot has made available at no charge.

This treasure trove of information is cleanly presented and well organized, making it easy to find the answer to almost any question business professionals may have about the current marketing climate. It focuses heavily on digital, but also includes other relevant statistics from retail/consumer goods and lifestyle/community. It could easily be retitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Marketing But Were Afraid to Ask.” Or perhaps “Everything You’d Better Be Thinking About In Marketing.”

Not only is this package an invaluable research tool for market intelligence, as content producers it’s also a great resource for idea generation. If all the topics explored don’t spark a wildfire of ideas, there’s a problem between keyboard and chair.

I find myself in the position of giving more and more lectures and speeches at conferences and other gatherings. I also teach a college course in web marketing. In both settings, these free-to-use charts are proving to be a tremendous resource for backing up my points with real data.

Download this package immediately, and prepare to have your mind expanded.

While in Best Buy purchasing L.A. Noire for PS3 on release day, I perused the selection of external hard drives as I’m going to have to replace my backup media server soon. I found myself engaged in a casual discussion with the sales associate about Macs, and I mentioned that our entire office is a Mac shop.

Curious, he asked what kind of servers we’re running to support them. He was amazed at my response: we run everything in the cloud. And yes, I mean everything.

I briefly described the suite of tools that support all of our business activities, including Basecamp, Google Apps, Box.net, Skype, Fuze Meeting, and Yammer. I also told him about Raidious Control, with its iPad- and iPhone-controlled interface.

The guy was green with envy, saying how he’d love to work in an environment like that: all Apple hardware, no servers to maintain, and of course the Big Board.

This exchange got me thinking about how right he was. Raidious is truly the office of the future, right now. Every kind of communication, collaboration and management is accessible no matter where we are in the world. Rather than a team of IT staffers, one person (our VP of Operations, Brian Wyrick) can manage and maintain our intraoffice resources. And it all just works.

To many in enterprise IT, placing the core management of infrastructure in the hands of third parties may sound like a frightening proposition. We all know the horror stories of cloud-based services suffering outages or attacks. But much like airplane crashes these incidents are deceiving, in that their high profile is purely a result of their infrequency.

I can’t speak to actual numbers, but anecdotally I can safely say that our uptime at Raidious is significantly better than any other organization in which I’ve worked that managed its own IT infrastructure. In fact, every outage I can think of has been a result of some fourth-party platform (Facebook, Twitter) being down, rather than the monitoring and management tools we use.

Cloud-based services for the enterprise can also save untold amounts of money each year by eliminating the need for hardware purchasing. There’s no need to upgrade servers and software every two or three years, because Google et. al. take care of it at no charge to us.

We also benefit from a large developer community contributing time and knowledge to new applications. While we do run into limitations and the occasional desire for features that aren’t currently included, we spend time getting work done rather than reinventing the wheel with the creation of custom applications.

Especially in the case of a start-up company, the benefits vastly outweigh the disadvantages. I can only imagine what the IT budgets of an enormous enterprise would look like were they to adopt the same philosophy.

As brands grow and mature, they take on a life and personality all their own. Now that companies are expected to actively participate in social media, this personality–their brand voice–can be difficult to establish, leading some to balk at this newfound responsibility.

This difficult transition is akin to a child approaching their teen years. My girlfriend’s ten-year-old son–who, to protect his anonymity, we’ll call Tron (he’ll think that’s cool)–is at the age where he is testing the limits of his freedom and exploring his own priorities. In child psychology this period of questioning and challenging authority is referred to as “being a pain the patootie.”

While most of the time Tron is a cheerful, obedient boy, he has his moments of resistance when, rather than unquestioningly following directions, he pushes back. Many of these excuses sounded familiar to me, and I realized that they are often similar if not identical to those offered by companies adjusting to the “everyone is a publisher” reality of social media.

Let’s take a look at some of his more popular challenges. Do you hear yourself or your executive leadership in any of these? If so, it’s time to ask yourself if you are indeed smarter than a fourth-grader.

“I’ll do it during the next commercial.”

This one invariably comes up when it’s time for his nightly shower. Tron is ensconced in a TV show and promises to take a five-minute shower so he doesn’t miss the next exciting development taking place on the Disney Channel. Never mind that the same episode will air approximately 4,327 more times this week, or that we can DVR his favorite shows. He’s busy.

Many companies pay lip service to the importance of social media engagement, but in practice dedicate a minimal amount of time and attention to it. Five minutes out of your day isn’t going to accomplish any goals or solve any business problems whatsoever (or get your stinky ten-year-old clean). Well-planned, well-executed strategies aren’t accomplished in whatever free time you try to fit them.

“That’s not what I meant.”

I find myself channeling my mother when I tell Tron to “engage brain before engaging mouth.” Regardless there are times when his opinion comes flying out before giving any consideration to how it will sound to others. When such insensitivity is brought to his attention, he’ll often say, “That’s not what I meant.”

Regardless of intent, the power of expression lies within how words affect others. It may not be sticks and stones, but as we have seen recently with both accidental (Chrysler) and intentional (Kenneth Cole) missteps, the words we use on social networking sites can indeed hurt. In the case of a brand, the party usually most hurt by our poor choice of words is us. The court of public opinion looks unfavorably upon those who misuse or abuse the social media pulpit. It pays to be acutely aware of the possible connotations and power of your words.

“I don’t feel like talking about it.”

When Tron has a bad day at school–whether or not we’ve received a call or a note home from the teacher–we know it immediately. A usually upbeat, singing, dancing, babbling kid is replaced by a sullen, disinterested slug. No matter what the problem, no matter whose fault it was, we encourage him to tell us about it. Of course at times he is less than forthcoming, saying, “I don’t feel like talking about it.”

The issue here is transparency; it’s easy to share your triumphs with others when you’re happy and excited. When the chips are down and you’re dealing with trouble, the natural response is to clam up. In the case of social media, you must remember that everyone on the web is a publisher. If you don’t talk about what went wrong with your company, others will.

What if they’re wrong? What if they’re misinformed? It’s one thing to issue a press release in an attempt to spin or explain away whatever mistake your company may have made. It’s another thing entirely to get out in front of the issue using your owned media channels and turn a potential tragedy into an opportunity. Believe it or not, your customers and the world at large will respect you and your openness (see also ComcastCares).

“Do I have to?”

Yes.

Just like everyone’s mother always said, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Or as my grandmother used to say, “Keep mouthing off like that and a bigger boy’s going to pop you one.”

The owned media vs. earned and paid media debate is apparently not immune from the same wisdom passed along by our elders: Google has officially popped Facebook right in the kisser for saying, well, not-so-nice things.

As has been widely reported all over the web, Facebook was caught red-handed engaging in a smear campaign against Google via public relations company Burson-Marsteller. After Facebook came clean on Wednesday, the PR firm admitted they had pitched stories to bloggers and other media with statements like “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day–without their permission.”

The source of Facebook’s ire is Google’s Social Circle, which permits users of Google Chat and Contacts to see public information about each other–including Facebook information, Twitter feeds, and personal websites.

To be fair, Google’s profiling isn’t exactly opt-in. Whether or not users have a Gmail or other Google service account, they must sign up for Google Profiles in order to customize and decide exactly what information is available to others.

But compare this to Facebook’s labyrinthine privacy and security settings, and the frequent complaints about user privacy issues and information sharing, and it seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

Facebook has since stated that it did not intend to engage in a “smear campagin,” but was merely trying to ensure the public was well informed. I don’t recall a public service announcement from Facebook “informing” people that they disclose user information to advertisers and other third parties.

Regardless of intent, in my mind it all comes down to the inherent transparency of owned media. Engaging a PR firm to propagate negative sentiment via earned media about another company, all the while asking that your company’s name be withheld, is a smear campaign whether you admit it or not.

Compare that tactic to using owned media channels to go beyond marketing your services to calling into question the business practices of a competitor. How far would you go, knowing that your official platforms were the source of potentially injurious (or worse, libelous) statements? Would you be more or less inclined to bite your tongue?

Not that any of this will ultimately matter to either company: users are more and more free with their personal information on the web, and to most people this is a non-story about two corporate behemoths pointing fingers at each other in the usual game of “Oh yeah? Well guess what they did!”

Despite the myriad complaints about privacy, Facebook isn’t losing users in droves, and people still depend on Google’s various services like they were oxygen.

White this is far from the first or last such incident, it is nonetheless embarrassing for any company to be outed for throwing such an obvious and ultimately useless low blow. If you’ve got something to say about a competitor and don’t have the sand to be completely transparent via owned media, do everyone a favor and heed mom’s advice.

In the past, digital marketing was all about “eyeballs,” making your website “sticky,” and drawing tons of traffic to your site. In today’s real-time, two-way distributed digital media environment, the notion of getting people in your front door and keeping them there is as dead as Dillinger.

The fact remains, however, that if you’re engaging in ecommerce you still need to attract users to your site and turn them into customers. So how do we do it?

It may seem illogical, but pushing your content–or rather, links to your content–out to as many sources as possible is the answer. Backlinking is one of the most fundamental components of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and now thanks to social media it can be one of the easiest.

Backlinking is, quite simply, putting descriptive links back to your website from somewhere else on the web. One heavily weighed factor in search is the quality of backlinks, meaning (among other things) that the site where the backlinks reside should be relevant, and the link should resolve on a relevant page on your site.

While there are still online directories, the link farming days of the past are long gone. Now, however, with so much emphasis on the social sharing of content it is possible to sow the seeds of your own link farm all over the fertile grounds of the web.

The Social Media Effect - click to enlarge

The smart folks at Social Reflexion created the infographic illustrating “The Social Media Effect” shown here in this post. Although it’s now dated due to the inclusion of Digg, the process and concept are still relevant.

The infographic shows the flow from initial content creation through Twitter and Facebook sharing to other blogs responding to your topic. Each of these steps along the path creates a link back to the original piece of content–yours.

Given that search engines index Twitter and Facebook, as well as the rest of the web, when shared properly and extensively your content unit has the potential not only to reach millions of potential visitors via the shared links but also to climb in search ranking. As Google, Bing, and other search engines index the web, they take into account the number of links back to a site or piece of content. If these links are reputable, your page’s ranking will increase.

If one major blog like Salon, The Huffington Post or Social Media Today (just to name a few) publishes a piece based on your content and includes a link, your ranking will climb even further. Your content is essentially being vetted for search engines by humans.

What this all means is that it’s absolutely essential to proactively share links to your content via social networking sites and platforms. The more interesting, relevant and valuable the content, the more likely it is to be shared by others, each with their own extent of reach and influence. The more quality backlinks that are created via these means, the more valuable your content will be in search.

The New Yorker magazine is currently engaged in a fairly aggressive digital strategy. Rather than going the New York Times/Wall Street Journal route of hiding content behind a simple pay wall, the venerable culture and literary publication is going the freemium route and putting exclusive owned media content behind a Facebook “Like” wall.

While paid subscribers will be able to read the full story (an essay by National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Johnathan Franzen) in the print version of the magazine, access to the full piece online requires users to “Like” the New Yorker’s Facebook page. This move is akin to recent initiatives in the music industry, debuting singles by artists like Jennifer Lopez and Lil Wayne via a Facebook “Like” unlock.

Coupled with the recent in-app capability to purchase individual issues of their tablet edition on the iPad and Kindle, this demonstrates a concerted effort by the print industry to remain viable in the digital age. The New Yorker enjoys a high subscriber base and renewal rate (85% as of 2009, one of the highest reported rates in the industry according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation), but seems to be keenly aware of the ongoing shift toward digital content across a variety of market segments.

According to Alexa Cassanos, spokeswoman for The New Yorker as quoted on Mashable.com:

“Our goal with this isn’t just to increase our fans. We want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level.”

So what does this all mean?

• The print edition of The New Yorker had over one million subscribers nationwide as of 2009;
• The average age of its readership was 47 years;
• Average household income of readers was $109,877;

The website NewYorker.com boasts similar numbers:

• An estimated average of 1.3 million unique visitors per month;
• Overwhelmingly older with 66% of visitors 35 years or older;
• 30% with a household income over $100,000.

Clearly not the demographics Mark Zuckerberg and Co. had in mind when they first unleashed Facebook upon the world of the young and hyper-connected.

With such a solid and loyal readership, why bother with digital editions and Facebook fans? Clearly The New Yorker is banking on a long-term digital strategy that values reaching out to and engaging with readers via the channels for which they are showing an increasing preference.

At the base level, the publication is striving to retain the three qualities that comprise quality content: making it interesting, relevant, and valuable.

The basic digital edition–available at no extra charge to print subscribers–includes a limited selection of content, usually truncated down from that which appears in print. The tablet edition features a more robust selection with complete articles and bonus content. In concert with exclusive content contingent upon a higher level of engagement (a Facebook “Like,” etc.) the magazine is seeking to add value to the experience of being a reader, utilizing digital platforms.

This new digital strategy has two likely positive net effects on readership: attracting younger readers by engaging with them in places and means to which they’re already well-accustomed; and taking older readers through the baby steps of the digital shift. By making it easy for both potential and existing customers to take advantage of content unavailable anywhere else, The New Yorker is exemplifying the kind of forward-thinking digital strategy that should be at the top of any brand’s list of priorities.

This week we welcome our new Account Management intern, Topher Howden, to the Raidious family.

Topher came to us via Matt Chandler’s Web Marketing course at the Art Institute of Indianapolis where he is majoring in Web Design and Interactive Media, but his skills are so wide-ranging that he’s going to try his hand at the client service end of the business.

We are all excited to have him on board for the summer as he completes his required internship hours. And if we become angry with him we will call him by his full four names.

Topher will be working directly under P.J. Gindling, VP, Client Service, assisting with the general functions of that department including file organization, gathering reports, and client communication. Topher’s internship will offer him the opportunity to learn all sides of Raidious business from an Account Management perspective.

And we won’t even make him go get us lunch.

Today is the open house at Raidious Control, our new office space in downtown Indianapolis. What better way to celebrate moving into our new digs than with a hundred or so of our closest friends, colleagues, clients and partners?

We’re pleased to open our doors to one and all from 4:00-7:00 pm, on April Fool’s Day of all days. But it’s no joke. We’re serving appetizers from Harry & Izzy’s including the famous St. Elmo shrimp cocktail, a selection of fine red and white wines, and two kinds of local beer from the fabulous Sun King Brewery.

Entertainment and ambiance are being provided by funk and soul maestro DJ Kyle Hodges, and vintage stand-up arcade games will be downstairs in the lobby for your gaming and geeking pleasure.

Of course the whole point–besides eating, drinking, jamming and gaming–is to tour our wonderful new facility, Raidious Control. We designed the space from the ground up to be mission control for digital media. And, you know, to be awesome.

While you’re here we’ll be happy to show you the enormous array of technology built into the soul of the historic Morrison Opera House, including our 150-square-foot video wall that’s the heart of our social media monitoring operation. Did we mention it’s all controlled via iPad and iPhone? Cocktail napkins will be provided to catch the drool.

By the way, there’s still time to RSVP by heading over to the Raidious Control Open House page.