A New Direction for Seek Social Media

Dear Colleagues, Associates, and Friends:

In business, as in life, it’s important to evolve and adapt. If you’ve followed Seek for a while, you likely remember that a little over a year ago I announced that I was moving our client focus to music industry professionals. While I’ve enjoyed working with many great musicians and industry professionals over the last year, more and more I’ve been pulled in a new direction.

As 2013 draws to a close and I plot our course for 2014 we will begin to move in this new direction: working with companies that are seeking to expand their overall digital presence and improve customer experience and customer service efforts on their website and social media properties. We’re adding services and developing products to best address the needs of our new clientele. We believe this to be a more scalable business model, and one that will allow us to help more people in bigger and better ways. We’ll work with clients to exceed customer expectations in the digital world (not to mention saving consumers from bad digital experiences!) and creating plans to protect brand integrity.

Now more than ever, companies thrive or die by their reputation. Reputations are built on quality products and services and the way customers experience the brand – both online and off. As more customers turn to our websites and social networks for purchases and customer service issues, their experience on these platforms becomes an even higher priority. Online reputations can be severely damaged and even destroyed within a few hours (or minutes!) when customers’ perceptions of a brand are tainted by negative online experiences.

Seek will focus on consulting with companies that have an established digital presence, helping them increase engagement and brand loyalty by elevating the customer experience and providing exceptional customer service through social media and digital properties. We’ll also work with clients to provide clear and thorough social media policies for daily interactions along with crisis communication strategies and  protocols. Some new services to be added are Digital Presence Assessments, Social Media Policy Creation, and Crisis Planning and Management.

Below is a sneak peek of what’s coming in January 2014:

Consulting | Training | Speaking

Customer service has always been a high priority in business and, in the digital age, customer experience is an integral part of customer service. We’ll consult with companies to develop strategies to maximize the customer digital experience. We’ll train team members to ‘think like the customer’ when creating initiatives and conversations. We’ll also streamline the systems of managing urgent customer needs in ways that empower team members and protect brand integrity.

Carole will also be available for event speaking on a variety of social media topics. If you’d like more information on these topics or to book Carole to speak, please click here.

Digital Presence Assessment

Your digital presence is vital to your brand’s success. It is your online storefront and often the first experience your customers have with your business. If their first impression is that your website is too slow, difficult to navigate, impossible to find the information they’re looking for, or purchases don’t go smoothly, they will move on…to your competitor.

Seek Social will analyze your total digital presence and provide a detailed report from user interface and customer service perspectives and evaluate implementation of best practices in brand consistency, marketing, and social media.

We’ll show you what you’re doing well and give detailed recommendations for making your brand shine in the eyes of your customers, and consult with you on how to best implement the recommendations.

Social Media Policy Creation | Crisis Planning & Management

Social Media Policy Creation: Seek will work with you to create or strengthen your corporate social media policy. Set expectations for your social media team, employees, and C-suite to protect your brand.

We’ll analyze any existing social media policies and, in partnership with the appropriate departments, (i.e. legal, HR, marketing), we’ll create social media policy and protocol. We’ll also develop an action plan for implementing the social media policy within your organization.

 Crisis Planning: Whether internal or external, a crisis will happen at some point. In this age of digital communication, the crisis can grow exponentially in a matter of minutes (even seconds!). How your organization deals with it can make or break your brand’s reputation. Being proactive by having a crisis plan in place will help your team maintain resolve while putting out fires and communicating swiftly and appropriately with your audience.  You wouldn’t operate your business without an emergency plan and a social media crisis plan should be a part of that emergency plan.

 Crisis Management: If your organization is in the midst of a crisis and there is no plan in place, you need a first responder who’s capable of putting out the fire quickly (cue Ghostbusters theme! Who ya gonna call?). Seek will quickly and capably work with your team to mitigate damage and restore goodwill – and your good reputation – with current and potential customers.

Current clients have been notified and we will continue working with them through the end of their contracts and will provide support to them for the foreseeable future.

To new directions!

All my best,
Carole

Carole Billingsley (@YouSeekSocial) is a social media consultant and trainer. Combining her social media expertise with her decades of experience in entertainment and education, Carole founded Seek Social Media in 2011. She is known for her ability to make technical and social media topics easy to understand for even the least tech-savvy business owner. Specialty areas: social media, customer experience, digital presence, crisis management.