We even had enough demand and interest that we ran specific benchmarks focused entirely on online privacy. We would capture huge amount of data about opt-in, marketing and data sharing practices but over the years, consumers seem to have come to accept that doing business online is a necessity and resistance and concerns have reduced. Less people read the privacy policies and companies have learned that carefully phrased assurances at key data entry points satisfy many customers. Now, privacy is back on the agenda because of the practices of a single company, Facebook.

Facebook grew up serving college students who have a different view about privacy. As one well-educated, intelligent but under-25 year old colleague stated recently, “we have no expectation of privacy, we just want an audience”.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is credited with the following exchange, apparently in early 2004 by Business Insider. Facebook apparently has not disputed the authenticity of the transcript.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks

Zuckerberg’s views may have matured since that time but not changed radically, earlier this year arguing that privacy is no longer a “social norm.”

The latest storm revolves around a feature called “instant personalization,” This allows Facebook data, including your birthday and your friends, to be available to partners like Pandora and Microsoft Docs. All Facebook accounts are included and opting out is a complex, multi-step process.

So far, the service has been limited to three partners — and they have promised to “behave appropriately”. CNN recently documented an example with a 24-year-old who considers herself social-media savvy. She was especially concerned when her Facebook friends visiting the music site Pandora could see which bands she likes.

“I was like, that’s really creepy. I haven’t logged in. I didn’t give it permission. I didn’t do anything,” she said.

That’s a quote from a 24-year old, but a much different user has now adopted Facebook with the largest single group in the age range 35-54 and they do care about privacy.

Has Facebook gone too far? Can we expect a backlash or is Zuckerberg correct that privacy is no longer something we can take for granted.

According to a recent report by Comscore, 29.4% of US mobile consumers use their phones to browse websites. This represents a 2.4 point increase over the previous quarter. This compares to just 22.2% for European consumers, who it seems, have a higher liklehood of downloading applications than their US counterparts. The European data is however very disparate with the UK market at 30.8% browsing the internet  down to the Germans at just 17.4%.

Fully 50% of all mobile web traffic come from smart phones. The iPhone has over 25% of the smart phone market but Android is making up ground at a 9% share and news that in April, Android outsold the iPhone. The Blackberry continues to be the dominent corporate player and holds 42% of the market.

So what does this all mean?

• Consider carefully your overall web strategy – you still have a large number of customers visiting your web sites, not opting for the latest iphone/Android app.
• The public spat between Apple and Adobe/Microsoft resulting in no Flash/Silverlight support for the iPhone/iPad does effect your overall web development – so many sites now make use of these technologies especially on home page
• You do need to consider a mobile-only site with reduced functionality and a tighter understanding of key customer tasks

Wireless posts are in the majority on the three top sites.  As the fourth major wireless carrier T-Mobile have an unexpectedly low number of fans.  If device specific pages are considered, the T-Mobile Blackberry and Sidekick pages have about 100,000 and 250,000 fans respectively.  For comparison the top 3  iPhone pages have about 750,000, 425,000 and 250,000 fans.

The AT&T Facebook page has an explicit CustomerCare tab which invites customers who need help to post to their wall. It is also clear that they respond to these posts. The CustomerCare tab also provides links to AT&T’s Twitter and Youtube support channels allowing the customer to decide how they want to get help. Charter have even more explicit Twitter support by providing a Twitter tab on their Facebook page.

AT&T offer customer care on their Facebook page

Relative strength of connection back to Twitter

*Dish and Qwest have a Twitter logo/link at the bottom of the page

Two sites, Qwest and Dish, have Twitter links on the bottom of the home page. The Verizon, AT&T, DirecTV and Charter search results provide an obvious link to a social media summary page. Search on Dish returns a link to the company information page, which refers provides Social media information rather than a link to the community page.  Qwest and TDS have social/media summary pages which refer to Twitter, but the search in Qwest only returns links to press releases and TDS returns nothing, which could be more indicative of a search maintenance problem.  Search in both T-Mobile and Sprint return numerous results for Twitter, but only T-Mobile seem to provide a link to a page with a Twitter follow logo and it is not particularly obvious in the search results listing. Although Sprint has a community page it does not display Twitter follow information and the search results are more about using Twitter on phones than using Twitter to contact Sprint. Despite Comcast’s extensive outreach on Twitter there appears to be very little about it on their web site and Comcast does not appear to have a social media summary page on their main site at all.  Century Link do not feature Twitter on their web site either.

If you had clear evidence, backed by objective data, of which tasks were critical for a large proportion of your consumer interest, would it influence your priorities for the next site revision? Would consumer task completion make the site much more effective. We are all overwhelmed with data and information and the website is such an anonymous experience, we need to stop and ask ourselves – “why do consumers come to the site” and not “what can we give them”.

Based on over 10 years of online research by world-renowned web content expert and founder of Customer Carewords Gerry McGovern, Task Identification is a unique technique that allows your customers to tell you about their top goals and tasks in precise, statistical terms. Unlike focus groups and clickstream data analysis, Task Identification reveals what site visitors actually want to do – described in their words  and terms (‘Carewords’). It has the ability to move the focus of the website from a company-centric to a customer-centric view. Most crucially, it is based on evidence and data, not opinion and design trends.

Gerry, as is his way,  will be presenting a highly engaging webinar on February 22, we highly recommend attending.

Click here for a complementary registration.

Companies can also mine forums for unvarnished customer feedback, solutions to technical problems and marketing information.   Customers can use forums to find solutions to problems or to get a feel for what a particular supplier or product is like before purchase.

If service providers host their own forums they can more easily manage the process and achieve the full benefits forums offer. Customers will also be reassured that the forum they are using is the best place to find answers. This survey looks at which service providers host their own forums.

Forums on Telecommunications sites

*Comcast has a forum but only allows registered customers to see its contents.

Cable companies are missing an opportunity to engage customers

The most apparent pattern in the above table is that the cable companies have fewer hosted forums than the traditional telephone companies.  Comcast is the only cable company with its own forum and that is for registered customers only.  Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, Sprint and T-Mobile all host open forums.  AT&T community members spend 25% more than non-registered customers (http://www.lithium.com/customers/#/att/ .)

Comcast have a considerable lead in outreach, followed by Charter. AT&T is the company to watch as their outreach index has increased significantly in the last couple of months as the staff up a large twitter team. At the opposite end of the scale, DirecTV is responding to problems but not searching them out. The monthly case-load is an estimation of the number of cases the twitter team get involved with but it is clear and obvious that outreach increases the caseload. 

 Twitter Support Process

Twitter is not the ideal medium for customer support; it is public and limited to 140 characters. It is mostly used to initiate a conversation between the company and the customer and companies often request the customer to ‘follow me’ to allow for DM or ‘direct and private’ messages. Some companies continue to support customers by private twitter messages; Comcast is a good example of this practice whereas other companies look to switch channels such is the case with Verizon Wireless to the telephone. Complex support issues are usually switched to other channels. Charter view their Twitter role as customer advocates; working to find the answer on their support website, and providing where a link when possible and requesting an update when not found. This same team monitors independent forums, which provide advanced solutions to sophisticated customers.

 While it is difficult to accurately calculate the caseload on Twitter, the volumes remain low compared to call centers and it is possible to provide an informed estimate. Estimates can be calculated using a combination of follower count, tweets, and the conversation index, a measure of tweets sent specifically to individuals.

Using this method, the number of cases per month (and this is changing dramatically for some companies) is currently:

Twitter support is relatively new for many companies, which is indicated by the monthly case load as a percentage of total cases. AT&T has the fastest growing Twitter presence with 80% of their total caseload within the past 3 months. Verizon has a similar growth but activity levels are significantly lower.

Comcast has the most mature caseload, spread across ten individually named operators. Charter has adopted the Comcast approach with five operators. AT&T uses a central coordinator (ATTCustomerCare) to co-ordinate work between their 14 (mostly newly employed but named) operators. Verizon has 2 twitter support ids, VerizonSupport (newly manned by 7 operators without individual identities) and VZWSupport. manned by 7 operators, who do sign their tweets but cannot be contacted directly.

Facebook has not been used extensively for customer support but AT&T and Charter has started and this will be reviewed in this blog.

DVR’s have already established themselves as a desirable product.  TV Shows need to be scheduled.  The ability to do it on the web or phone while away from home is a significant benefit to the customer.  The significant benefit to the telecommunications company is that the customer has to register and login to use the service. This exposes the customer to paperless billing, online and automatic payment options offering significant cost savings. The next step is to improve facilities for incremental online service upgrades and purchases such as PPV.

Todd Spangler at Multichannel News first posted on this back in April, where it appeared that we could expect developments from various Cable companies by the end of the year and he recently posted about Cablevision’s release in this area:

http://www.multichannel.com/article/354904-Cablevision_Debuts_Web_DVR_Scheduling.php?rssid=20059

Like Verizon FiOS, in addition to web based Remote DVR, Cablevision provides an interface for the mobile web.  Companies like AT&T u-Verse and DirecTV have also introduced iPhone applications.

The surprising takeaway is not that Verizon promote their fan page and recruit fans, it is that they are in a minority. Verizon now have close to 400,000 fans. Sprint boast 100,000 fans, AT&T and DirectTv have about 27,000 each and Charter 1000 fans. AT&T countered Verizon’s recent TV ad campaign by writing to their Facebook fans, presumably some of their most loyal customers. Other telecommunication companies have yet to embrace Facebook, despite significant marketing opportunities, which are increasing.

Facebook includes an option that allows companies to advertise to friends of their fans. The new “Friends of Connections” feature could improve conversion from Facebook Ads because users might find the implied endorsement more compelling. In Facebook’s roadmap, users will be able to become fans of any website not just Facebook and web pages will be allowed to publish stories to its fans’ streams. Facebook (and Twitter) have the potential to supplement or even replace existing email marketing. Fans, as well as publically ‘opting-in’ to company messages, commit to maintain their information, including if and when, to ‘unfriend’ providing a maintenance free database.

Given the significant potential marketing benefits Facebook and broader social media, there are concerns about ongoing maintenance and consistency of these social media ‘outposts’. Developing Facebook pages does not require major input of the web development team and as a result, we are starting to record duplicate and rogue Facebook pages, broken links, dated material, and neglected user comments and questions. As an example, Comcast, often seen as a vanguard of social media, appears to have no official Facebook page. They are represented by an inside sales rep based in Las Cruces, NM, who admirably has recruited over 2,200 fans. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter pages, while easy to set up, are an important customer facing representation of the company and need the same level of critical attention as critical corporate websites.