Are your recruiters, HR reps, and hiring managers hurting your brand?

Over the last eleven months I’ve interacted with a number of recruiters, plenty of HR people, and various hiring managers. From my experience in most of the interactions (not all), their representation of the brand left something to be desired. At a time when the unemployment rate is 10.2%, and a percentage of that population is interacting with your company, it seems like this would be a prime opportunity to be an ambassador of your brand. I realize that companies are getting hundreds of applications and resumes for each job posting right now, and the load is overwhelming. However, instead of just looking at this situation as “OMG all these people are bombarding us” or treating people as if they are cattle; why not take a different perspective? Look at the people as potential clients or customers and not just potential candidates or interviewees. No, you may not hire them, they may not be a fit for the position, but they still may be an existing customer or a prospective one.

Would you treat your customers negatively? So why not give candidates a positive experience with each and every interaction. I know through my job search if I had a bad experience with a phone interview or lack of response or disrespectfulness, that memory stayed with me the next time I came in contact with the particular company’s product or service. Not out of spite, but the negative experience was now associated with the brand and it was a data point that stuck in my head the next time I made a buying decision. Emotions play a huge role in both a job search and a purchasing decision.

We talk a lot about building communities and conversations with our customers. The social media craze has reconceptualized the notion of listening to our customers. The sales force has always been taught to be customer focused, marketing and PR spend years building brands and trying to protect them, and we now have customer service and marketing listening to tweets, comments, and status updates and responding all to build the brand. So why don’t we teach all our employees that they are basically a walking billboard for the company? They need to represent! And what a better time than now when there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people knocking on your door, coming to you. This is prime time to boost the brand especially during a recession where every little bit helps.

Action Item: Use the mystery shopper or quality control scenario with your hiring process. Send someone through your companies’ hiring process as a candidate and have them report back as to how the process went, how were they treated, was it a positive or negative experience? Find out the impressions that potential candidates and potential customers are walking away with when they interact with your own people, your company, your brand.

Modernizing Corporate America

I was at King Street Station the other day, and read the building’s timeline describing the life of the edifice. In the 1960’s, the crown molding ceiling was covered with a drop ceiling in order to “modernize.” As I read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and thought about the “invention” of the institution, the org structure and the way we do business, it reminded me of the “modernization” of the train station. We tried to make something better by throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it came to business. We regressed when it came to collaboration. Caste systems were formed inside corporations. We’ve been “modernizing,” but really going two steps back.

The crown molding at the train station was beautiful, so beautiful that this year they are finally removing the “modernized” drop ceiling to reveal the crown molding again in the city’s restoration efforts. We too are starting to see a restoration effort in business by cutting out middle management, communicating and collaborating in self-made groups, and flattening the hierarchy. I’m glad to see the drop ceiling (aka: big corporations) be ”removed” in a sense to reveal the crown molding!

Measuring Influence

With word-of-mouth being the most trusted and valuable source of information, influence then plays a huge role in how we connect. But what is influence and how do we measure it? This is where the worlds of sociology, discrete mathematics, and marketing begin to collide, three of my most favorite subjects!

The study of influence is a “fundamental property of social structures” (Hanneman, 2005) in sociology; however, determining exactly what influence is and how to describe it is not so fundamental. To look at influence, one first must consider the social network which is “a map of all of the relevant ties between all the nodes being studied.” (Wiki-social network) Social network analysis studies the relationships and connections of the people in a network; therefore, network theory and graph theory can be used to begin to understand how to measure influence.

I will not even attempt to fully describe social network analysis, network theory and graph theory in this setting, nor would I be able to do it justice. So my goal is to get you thinking about the different ways influence can be viewed and some of the high level tactics of measuring those perspectives.

Note: I will refer to nodes or vertices as people and edges or paths as connections or relationships.

There are many different approaches to measuring influence and each depends on the particular calculation and the structure of the network. At the core is centrality. Centrality measures a “rough indication of the social power of a node (person) based on how well they "connect" the network.” (Wiki-social network analysis) It tries to describe how close a person is to the “center” of the action in the network. "Degree", "Betweenness", and "Closeness" are all measures of centrality.

Degree is the count of the number of relationships to other people in the network. This is also known as the geodesic distance. Simply stated, degree is the number of friends a person has or the number of followers a person has. However, which is more influential, a person with a high degree or a person with a low degree, but high connectivity? For instance, Person A has direct connections with 10 other people and Person B has potential to influence 15 people through the indirect connections that he has with his 4 direct connections.

Betweeness is the number of people who a person is connecting with indirectly through their direct relationships. Let’s suppose I’m looking for a job and a friend’s mother knows the hiring manager. I need to make contact with the hiring manager, but since I don’t know him personally I need to connect to him through my friend who connects through her mother. The people (my friend and her mother) who lie “between” me and the hiring manager have the influence. The betweeness centrality is higher when the person falls on the geodesic paths between other pairs of people in a network. In other words, the more people that depend on Person A to make connections with other people the more influence that Person A has.

Closeness is the degree a person is near all other persons in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the "grapevine" of network members. (Wiki-social network analysis) People that have short geodesic distances to other people within the graph have higher closeness. Influence “comes from acting as a “reference point” by which others judge themselves, and by being a center of attention whose views are heard by a large number of people.” (Hanneman, 2005) In the most basic sense, closeness is shortest-path length. People who are able to reach other people at shorter path lengths or who are more reachable by other people at shorter path lengths have more influence. Another way to think about closeness is reach.

Eigenvector centrality “is a measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to nodes having a high score contribute more to the score of the node in question.” (Wiki-social network analysis) Using eigenvector centrality you can attempt to measure indirect influence. “A person’s influence is proportional to the total influence of the people to whom he is connected.” (Farmer, 2007)

Now that we’ve described the main terms related to measuring influence let’s switch gears and take a look at two tools that are trying to measure influence in regards to Twitter, Twitalyzer and Klout.

Twitalyzer measures “Influence”, “Signal”, “Generosity”, “Velocity” and “Clout.” According to the website the Influence calculation is based on the following:

• Your relative reach in Twitter, measured by the number of followers you have
• Your relative authority, measured by the number of times you are "retweeted"
• Your relative generosity, measured by the number of times you "retweet" others
• Your relative clout, measured by the number of times you are referenced by others
• Your relative velocity, measured by the number of updates you publish over a seven day period

Klout measures influence by looking at the user's social graph. They calculate the size of a person’s audience by determining the “True Reach.” True Reach considers how active a user's network of followers actually is, as well as, how engaged a person's followers are. This calculation takes into account more than just follower count to determine the size of someone’s audience. Next, Klout analyzes the size and strength of a person’s likelihood that someone will listen or act upon any specific message by looking at interactions across the social graph. Then they use +25 variables to answers 6 types of questions:

· Engagement

o How diverse is the group that @ messages you?

o Are you broadcasting or participating in conversation?

· Reach

o Are your tweets interesting and informative enough to build an audience?

o Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

· Velocity

o How likely are you to be retweeted?

o Do a lot of people retweet you or is it always the same few followers?

· Demand

o How many people did you have to follow to build your count of followers?

o Are your follows often reciprocated?

· Network Strength

o How influential are the people who @ message you?

o How influential are the people that retweet you?

· Activity

o Are you tweeting too little or too much for your audience?

o Are your tweets effective in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies?

The variables are normalized across the whole data set and run through an analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics Klout applies a specific weight to each data point. Then the factors are run through machine-learning analysis and the final Klout Score is calculated showing a value for an individual’s influence.

Klout goes a step further for businesses and also provides insight into who you want to be talking to about your brand and spreading the word about your product allowing Klout to calculate topic-specific scores. And finally they help you understand who the user actually influences by measuring the strength of influence between every relationship on a user’s social graph. (Measuring Twitter Influence)

Twitalyzer takes a simple and straight forward approach to calculating influence whereas Klout bases its calculation on a more complex approach. Since Klout doesn’t reveal their algorithms we can only assume that they use a variety of methods that we have discussed above to calculate influence.

This review is not exhaustive nor does it attempt to dive into the depths of linear algebra and graph theory that serve as the backend, but it illustrates that there are many ways to calculate influence. In addition, this post shows how the art and science of marketing, mathematics, and sociology come together in order to fully understand the dynamics of influence. Within each of the above concepts there are multiple algorithms to compute a value to represent influence. It’s important that we are aware of this so that when we discuss PageRank, Facebook’s newsfeed, Twitter influence, etc. we understand what data the “visualization” is showing us and that on the backend there is a calculation that is being done to assign a value to where someone lies in the social graph. This social graph is key for marketers to maximize exposure to their products.

References

Farmer, J. (2007, November 2). Graph Theory: Part III (Facebook). Retrieved from 20bits by Jesse Farmer: http://20bits.com/articles/graph-theory-part-iii-facebook/

Hanneman, R. A. (2005). Introduction to social network methods. Retrieved from http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/

Measuring Twitter Influence. (n.d.). Retrieved from Klout: http://www.klout.net/twitter/influence/

Wiki-social network. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis#Metrics_.28Measures.29_in_social_network_analysis

Wiki-social network analysis. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis#Metrics_.28Measures.29_in_social_network_analysis

Pre- Industrial Revolution Communication

Whether it’s crowdsourcing, user generated content, community building, or “collaborative competition” there’s a movement going on here. It seems we’re evolving in a sense, but at the same time reverting back to before the Industrial Revolution when we didn’t depend on “the firm” to spoon feed us our news, our products, our thinking. This evolution can be seen in the many ways we’re “thinking outside of the box” (oh, the irony of using corporate-speak) to innovate and change the way we communicate and do business. The reason we change is because there’s something more to be desired from what we’re getting now. What is it that we want that is driving this movement?

Passion and Spirit. In Touch, Real People. Authenticity. Transparency. Innovation.

In Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe describes how Jack Hughes came up with the idea for TopCoder:

“He started it because he had a bone to pick with the software industry. “It’s soft,” he says. “Software development has this reputation that nothing ever comes in on time, that it’s always over budget and that it’s always full of bugs. There’s a reason for that: it’s true.” Hughes wanted to inject the field with some of the discipline and quality control more common in the manufacturing of traditional, tangible goods. During downtime at Tallan his programmers had competed against one another in informal contests. Hughes had noticed that the resulting code was better than what he was paying them to write. Why not make them compete against on another all the time?”

Hughes has built a community of developers that create innovative solutions with better code in terms of quality and time, but why? Because there’s passion and spirit behind the work that’s brought out by the competitive environment, the freedom and autonomy, and the desire to contribute their talent.

People are turning to hyperlocal blogs (WestSeattleBlog.com, CapitolHillSeattle.com, MyBallard.com) to get their community and neighborhood news versus relying on their local newspapers for this information. The audiences of sites like these continue to grow across the country because of the people “behind the scenes.” The audience connects with the writers because the writers are their neighbors. They can relate. They are more in touch with the community than “the firm” who is only “in touch” with the community when the bigger news stories hit. The stories coming from the hyperlocal blogs are more authentic because the people writing and reading them are connected, there’s a conversation happening allowing for transparency.

Another example of audiences relating to “real people” is The Sartorialist blog, but this time with an eye on fashion. “When I worked in the fashion industry (15 years), I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.” Scott Schuman photographs real people on the street that he deems “stylish.” This form of fashion magazine is a real turn from the models with stylists and personal shoppers we see in Vogue and InStyle. These are people that got out of bed and dressed themselves. Not only does he show the authentic style, he has created a community around fashion by “articulating his point of view.”

Zooppa really epitomizes all that’s driving this movement by creating a community of passionate people producing truly innovative media that tells the story of each brand through the authentic perceptions of the audience. There’s no formula; there’s no corporate messaging; there’s no spin; it’s real people making real stories for each client.

Although we could go on and on describing the many ways people are using community building, user generated content, and crowdsourcing to create a new product, a new community, a new business model, etc. one thing is clear, we are thirsty (better yet, parched) for something more than force fed, corporate fluff.

So maybe it’s time for “the firm” whether it’s a software firm, media firm or a PR firm to take heed and listen a little to the crowd instead of continuing to be bureaucratic cogs, spinmasters, handlers of diva execs and start becoming a part of the community, joining the conversation, listening and interacting to produce products that we want, transparent and authentic messages, and innovation that moves us out of the Industrial Revolution firm mindset and into the new counterculture.

I'm now Google Analytics Qualified!

Quick Start Guide to Online Analytics

The tide is starting to shift from the days of “Mad Men” to the days of Madison Avenue meets Wall Street. We’re seeing more reliance on data when it comes to advertising, marketing, and communications. We have more and more tools at our disposal to help us with the metrics, whether they’re free like, Google Manager, Ad Sense, Analytics or whether you pay for them like, Omniture, WebTrends, Radian6, and Coremetrics. We now have so many ways to track and measure that we get lost in the numbers, ROI, CTR, CPM, CPC, CPO, ROAS, Bonjour, Adios, Guten-Tag, Buongiorno,… what? I got lost, what language are we speaking? Big corporations and small businesses alike need to show ROI, but with so many things to track your ability to do so can quickly turn into garbage in, garbage out.

Another challenge is analysis paralysis. Where to even start? Whether you’re a big company or a small company, there are two things you need to do immediately….1) think about how to match your goals with your metrics, ok stop thinking…. 2) start doing. Once you’ve thought through your goals and determined metrics to match the goals, then get out there, you can tweak the report later, but do something!

The important thing is to have solid goals and to be able to show metrics that tie back to those goals. The experience of presenting to the execs will be much more positive if you can correlate goals with numbers than if you dump a whole bunch of numbers and data in their laps without any meaning. The data, numbers, and algorithms might make you look like you can do differential equations in your sleep, but if you can’t tie the metrics back to the goals and explain it, you’re report is worth the paper it was printed on.

Like with most marcom plans, you start with determining your goals and defining your audience. Once this is thought through, consider which metrics match each goal. You need to define what success looks like, your metrics need to be able to tell you if you’re hitting that mark. When it comes to metrics you want to be able to see the overall picture; therefore, you need to know the what, the why, the where, and the how. In other words you need quantitative, qualitative, listening, and engagement metrics. You can’t rely only on clickstream data (page views, unique visitors, visits). Relying on clicks data won’t give you the full insight. By choosing metrics that measure quantitative aspects, you begin to see what your customers click on. By choosing metrics that measure qualitative aspects, you begin to see why your customers do what they do on your site. By choosing metrics that measure listening aspects, you begin to see where your customers are talking and where your reach is actually reaching. By choosing metrics that measure engagement aspects, you begin to see how you are joining the conversation. Each type of the four metrics described then feeds into your outcomes metrics (the so what? Metrics), and this is the Holy Grail. This is what your execs drool about. Outcome metrics consist of conversion rates, ROI, revenue….bottom line, which in turn equals money. (In the Quick Start Guide below, example metrics for each type are listed, this is not by any means an extensive list, just a sampling.)

Next, choose which media channels best suits your goals, but strongly consider what vehicles your audience uses currently and what tools that they are willing to try out. Most people want to jump to the vehicle selection because it’s the sexiest, from Facebook to Twitter to Wetpaint and it just keeps going. But if you don’t consider your audience and “where” they are or what they’re willing to try, you could find yourself using a tool all by yourself with the crickets chirping. If you have an audience that happens to still be using the mimeograph copier and you’d like to try to gently “push” them into the 21^st century, try the crawl, walk, run approach before jumping head first.

When it comes to choosing your web analytics tool, Stop! Instead of going out there and buying some whiz-bang-boom product that is going to cost you an arm and a leg, start with Google Analytics. Get a feel for what you need and what your reports should look like. Understand the data. Then once you have gotten the basics down and have started producing reports that show numbers that you can tie back to your goals, if you still need more data then consider buying a more robust, customized tool. You may find out that a free tool gives you exactly what you need.

So now you have your metrics lined up with your goals and strategy, your final deliverable is your story. Yes, story. You need to understand what your data is telling you, and better yet, you need to be able to put it into words that a group of execs are going to understand. People relate better to stories, so if you can tell a story with your data, if you can explain it in terms that people can understand then you’ve accomplished two things 1) it means you, yourself, understand the numbers and they aren’t just numbers that were spit out by the tool 2) you’ve taught the execs a little about online analytics, why they are important, and how they are helping the company and the bottom line.

Finally, rinse and repeat. Or it’s more like, rinse, tweak, and repeat. As your numbers tell you the story, review and revise your goals, as needed. As you revamp your goals, don’t forget to continue to revisit your metrics!

Below is a Quick Start Guide to get you going…

Quick Start Guide to Online Analytics

· Determine Your Goals

o What does success look like?

o Are you trying to build a community?

o Are you trying to convert?

o Are you selling a product?

o Are you creating buzz?

o Are you wanting more readership?

o Are you selling more advertising on your site?

· Determine Your Audience

o Who are your customers?

o What is their motivation?

· What Metrics Measure Your Goals (you need to answer the What, Why, Where, and How questions)

o Quantitative (the what)

· ClickStream

· Site Overlays/Heatmaps

· Bounce Rate

· Referring URLs

· Keywords

o Qualitative (the why)

· Customer Satisfaction

· A/B Testing

· Surveys

· Usability Testing

o Listening (the where)

· Sentiment type

· Positive and negative attitudes consumers express

· Demographic

· Location, gender, age

· Competitive analysis

· Share of voice

· Crisis management

· Conversation volume

· Topic frequency

· Campaign Analysis

· Level of influence (# blog comments, # Twitter followers)

· Message reach (# of sources covering topics and # potential page views)

· Virality (# of different entries around same topic within time period)

· Conversation buzz: (# of responses to blog posts)

o Engagement (the how)

· Adoption

· Bookmarking

· Tagging

· Collaborative Filtering

· Rating

· Voting

· Commenting

· Content Creation

· Uploading

· Blogging

o Outcomes (so what?)

· Orders/leads

· Revenue

· Conversation rates

· Problem resolution

· Disruption

· What Media Vehicles Are you Using

o Choose your vehicles that your audience uses.

· What Web Analytic Tools

o Start with a free tool to get perspective and insight.

o Tune and tweak.

o When you are more familiar, if you feel you need a more robust tool pick one that serves your needs.

o If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, there’s no need to spend the money on tools that aren’t providing you the numbers to meet your needs and tell your story.

· Let the Numbers Tell the Story

o Fully understand what the numbers are telling you

o Use the data to teach through storytelling

· Rinse and Repeat

o Actually rinse, tweak, and repeat

References

(n.d.). Retrieved from Engagementdb: http://www.engagementdb.com/

Clifford, S. (2009, May 31). Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. New York Times .

Ghuneim, M. (2008, March 28). Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer. Retrieved from Wiredset: http://wiredset.com/root/archives/008589.html

Kaushik, A. (2007). Web Analytics An Hour a Day. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.

Vittal, S. (2009). Listening Metrics That Matter. Forrester.

Customer Service Via Twitter Can Help Business Reputation

Great customer service can be the ultimate marketing tool. This isn’t anything new or earth shattering, but it is sometimes forgotten and plays in the shadows of big time advertising and marketing campaigns. In the world of social media, we are always formulating strategies to engage customers by listening to them, participating in conversations with them, and building communities to support them. We have tools from Facebook to Twitter to Wetpaint to facilitate all the above. We have online ads, sponsored blogs, and affiliate programs to draw customers to our products and services. But when it comes down to it, what is it that the customer wants? To experience a personal interaction. To have a voice and be heard. To trust.

Customers are engaging in global conversations about your products, and if you’re not engaged and listening, it isn’t going to matter how creative or how glossy your ad is, your customer will be clicking on your competitor. However, with more and more social media tools becoming main stream, you as a privy business can engage. But first you need to realize that gone are the days of passive customers.

Customers are using communities to tell their friends about products, they are writing online reviews for all to see, they are tweeting about their positive and negative experiences. Customers are reaching a mass audience shouting praise or resentment for your business. “This rallies in an exciting new age for consumerism and how we do business. The internet is word of mouth set on fire, and can be your best friend or your worst enemy.” (Singer, 2008)

One way to make it your best friend is to use Twitter as a customer service tool, and if done properly, it will serve as a great marketing tool as well. As Grunig, Grunig, and Dozier said in Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations:

[W]e show that the value of public relations comes from the relationships that communicators develop and maintain with publics. We show that reputation is a product of relationships and that the quality of relationships and reputation result more from the behavior of the organization than from the messages that communicators disseminate. (James E. Grunig, 2002)

Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago my bank statement arrived showing I had a service charge of $5.95. I didn’t know what the charge was for so on Monday morning I called Bank of America (BoA) to ask why I was charged. The customer representative told me that because of the type of account I have I’m required to have a monthly direct deposit, and since I didn’t have a deposit last month I was charged the fee. The reason I didn’t have a direct deposit last month and the reason I wasn’t going to in the foreseeable months to come is because I had recently been laid off. Needless to say, I wasn’t too happy about this policy the bank was now enforcing. After learning what the charge was for, I hung up the phone wondering if there was anything I could do. I decided to test the waters of the social media world. I tweeted about my experience with BoA. Within 15 minutes, someone at the other end of the cloud answered my tweet to my surprise. In less than an hour, I was connected to someone who could help me, I spoke to a very nice gentleman in the Chairman of the Board’s office, and he was able to solve my problem. I was astonished at the level of service I had just received from BoA. I honestly couldn’t believe I had such a personal interaction with one of the biggest banks in the world. I immediately tweeted about my experience in which I received this tweet. Throughout the day, I updated my Facebook status to tell my friends and family about my BoA experience. For the next week, I told people about it when I spoke to them. It really made an impression on me. Just by using Twitter and listening to their customers, BoA was able to help and build a relationship while at the same time improving their reputation, marketing their services, and enhancing WOM.

BoA isn’t the only company providing customer service via Twitter. More and more businesses, large and small, are learning that there are low cost, flexible, measurable ways to improve customer service, and in turn, relationships and reputation. (Brogan, 2008) Matt Jurmann at Chromatic, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb , and Jon Swartz at USAToday list just some of the companies using Twitter for brand management and customer service:

· Comcast

· Southwest Airlines

· NetworkSolutions

· Dell Computers

· Twirl

· FireFox

· Verizon

· DISQUS

· PepsiCo

· JetBlue Airways

· Whole Foods Market

Lastly, there are tools that are available for companies to use to measure and track customer satisfaction. The key is to listen so you can join in the conversation. Here are just a few tools:

Pipes: track brand, product, company, CEO mentions on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Twitalyzer: is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media

TweetScan: performs real-time monitoring

Monitter: Monitter makes it simple to track multiple keywords on one page using columns. Create a new column for each new keyword or keyword variation you want to track. Monitter will update in real-time whenever those words are mentioned on Twitter.

Tweetbeep: If your brand isn’t getting dozens of mentions per hour, or if you want to be sure you’re catching everything, Tweetbeep will check Twitter for you and send you emails with all of the mentions of your brand, as well as links so you can easily save tweets or write a response.

Radian6: are now offering social media analysis and monitoring solutions for PR and advertising professionals

Remember it’s not the few tweets alone that make or break you, “it’s the exponential potential of “ReTweeting” (RT) by other Twitter users that can rapidly spread across the micro-blogosphere, to the blogosphere, and eventually to highly trafficked news websites and blogs. Just as negative tweets have the potential to quickly spread and destroy a company, positive tweets have the potential to quickly spread and strengthen the image and credibility of a company.” (Jurmann, 2009) It reminds me of the line in Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Build the credibility, increase the transparency, show you care all through customer service and the reputation and customers will follow.

Works Cited

Brogan, C. (2008, April 9). Customer Service Needs New Channels- Or Does It. Retrieved from Community and Social Media: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/customer-service-needs-new-channels-or-does-it/

Ibsen, D. A. (2009, March 21). Customer Service & Support: The Forgotten Marketing Tool. Retrieved from Five Blogs Before Lunch: http://daveibsen.typepad.com/5_blogs_before_lunch/2009/03/customer-service-support-the-forgotten-marketing-tool.html

James E. Grunig, l. A. (2002). Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

Jurmann, M. (2009, February 13). 7 Impressive Twitter Customer Service/Brand Management Cases. Retrieved from Chromatic Blog: http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/impressive-twitter-customer-service-brand-management-cases/

Parr, B. (2009, May 9). HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service. Retrieved from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-customer-service/

Perez, S. (2008, April 10). How to Get Customer Service Via Twitter. Retrieved from ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_get_customer_service_via_twitter.php

Singer, A. (2008, August 7). Great Customer Service: The Ultimate PR/Marketing Tool. Retrieved from The Future Buzz: http://thefuturebuzz.com/2008/08/07/great-customer-service-the-ultimate-prmarketing-tool/

Swartz, J. (2009, June 25). Businesses Use Twitter to Communicate with Customers. Retrieved from USAToday: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-06-25-twitter-businesses-consumers_N.htm