Shoppers Put Big Demands on Social Media

CONSUMERS looking for an instant response to their inquiries and complaints are turning to social media sites in their droves.

Gerd Schenkel, executive director of Telstra Digital, says the number of round-the-clock staff waiting to deal with customer inquiries has grown six-fold in the past 12 months.

"The live chat is growing very strongly because our digital channels as a whole are growing," he says.

"The growth rate for live chat is up about 600 per cent from last year to this year and this month we expect to offer about 140,000 chat sessions with our customers."

Time-poor Australians are among those who use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to have their queries answered at a quicker rate, rather than phone or send an email.

Schenkel says Telstra now has several hundred employees working in their chat team to deal with real-time online customer inquiries.

"Live chat is often more convenient for customers because they are already on the website or they're already on a mobile," he says.

"They've seen a bill or a product and they have a question about it, so we find it easier for many customers to just click a button and have a quick chat session as opposed to making a phone call."

Self-employed massage therapist Belinda McLeod, 39, recently used social media to interact with her telecommunications company after having some problems with her broadband connection.

"I get frustrated when I contact call centres and am put on hold for half an hour," she says. "I couldn't find instant messaging and the customer service wasn't open on Sunday, but there were people online.

"I thought by raising issues publicly (on Twitter) they would do something about it."

She says the telco responded to her query on Twitter several hours later.

Matt Travers is the founder of new comparison website ServiceRage, which analyses customer feedback, and says the growing presence of social media is forcing companies to deal with customers in the public domain.

"Anyone can see an exchange happening between the company and the individual if they are using Twitter or Facebook," he says. "The balance of power is in the consumer's favour. Now more than ever it's important for companies to deliver good service."

Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn't see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Ms Lewis highlights the importance of having a “real business, with real influence, that interacts with its clients – real people – and is active online.

I admit that at sometimes this new approach to SEO can be a bit frustrating and I am sure that many internet marketers will pass through some hard times switching to these new methods. I’m already doing everything Google wants, but that doesn’t mean that I can pull my hair down and relax. SEO will never be about laziness and relaxation.”