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Author Offers Key Tactics To “Empower” Store Associates & Extend Social Outreach

As retailers are tasked with delivering an integrated approach to customer service, social media has offered the opportunity to cultivate a community of enthusiasts who are able to extend a brand’s ability to communicate effectively with customers. In 2008, author and Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff brought the novel Groundswell to life, and now in 2011 is emphasizing the need to empower store associates to become “HEROs” (“Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives”).

Retail TouchPoints had the chance to catch up with Bernoff and discuss the need for retailers to identify impressions on social environments and their impact on marketing, as well as the retailers who have created a band of “HEROs” for social success.

Retail TouchPoints: In Empowered the “IDEA” strategy helps companies view customer service as a marketing channel rather than a customer service cost center. Can you elaborate on how retailers can utilize “IDEA” to connect with customers more effectively?

Josh Bernoff: IDEA stands for the four steps in treating your own customers as a marketing channel: Identify mass influencers, Deliver social customer service, Empower with mobile information, and Amplify fan activity.

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Retailers need to understand that their own customers and the impressions they share in social environments online are a huge part of marketing. By monitoring social channels, they can head off customers that are upset and about to spread bad word of mouth, and they can identify and delight their own fans to create a positive buzz about the company. Retailers like Best Buy and McDonalds are already doing this very effectively.

RTP: In Empowered, you cite Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that trend-spreaders are separated into three categories: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Can you give a brief overview of how each affects the overall customer experience, and in turn, profit for retailers?

Bernoff: Malcolm’s brilliant insight was that connections between people cause ideas to spread, and that some people have special qualities that make them key elements of that sharing ecology. We’ve actually quantified this. The Mass Connectors are the 6% of online Americans that account for 80% of the word of mouth in social networks, and the Mass Mavens are the 13% that account for 80% of the posts in places like blogs and discussion forums. Retailers can actually profile and identify their Mass Mavens and Mass Connectors, and set up their sites and social network profiles to reinforce what those folks are saying. The point is, your best customers may not be the ones who buy the most, but the ones who talk the most.

RTP: How is the growth of social media affecting how retail marketers approach and connect with consumers both in-store and online?

EmpoweredBernoff: The best retailers know it’s all integrated. The experience may start online, continue in a store, and then generate comments on Twitter or Facebook. Social media has given retailers a new way to reach out to their fans — and not just to drive them to a web site. As social media grows, this will affect more retailers: it’s clearly crucial to the young audience of a place like Urban Outfitters, but it’s spreading to mass-market retailers.

RTP: Your case study of Best Buy’s Twelpforce is an example of a “HERO-based customer service solution.” Can you explain the “HERO” concept, what other retailers are key players in this area and what can be learned?

Bernoff: A HERO is a “highly empowered and resourceful operative” – the employee at your company who figures out a new way to reach out to customers and gets it off the ground, often despite corporate resistance. Twelpforce, Best Buy’s Twitter response program, is a great example. Ben Hedrington at their web site was one HERO: he figured out how lots of employees could share one Twitter system in a trackable way. John Bernier is another – he rolled Twelpforce out and took care of challenges like training and labor laws. And Coral Biegler, one of the 2,500 employees who spend time connecting on Twelpforce, is an everyday HERO – she connects with lots of people asking for Best Buy’s help every day. A company that enables this sort of customer outreach and innovation is ready for the challenges that come from today’s empowered consumers.

RTP: In Empowered, You revisit some of the turnkey concepts in your 2008 book Groundswell. How does “groundswell outreach” integrate into an overall marketing strategy, and what is its role in customer service?

Bernoff: The groundswell is our term for the social web that has grown so much in the last few years. Now social is even more important, as trends like connected mobile devices and cheap video make it easier to use and more powerful. Groundswell outreach means listening to customers, responding, enabling them to share with online content, amplifying that content, and finally, changing your company based on what you’ve learned. It affects elements of marketing strategy from market research to merchandising to advertising to customer service. They all need to be woven together to make the most of the customer as a marketing channel.


Josh Bernoff is Senior Vice President of idea development at Forrester Research. Bernoff also is the co-author of the BusinessWeek best-selling book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008) a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies. Amazon’s editors listed Groundswell as one of the top 10 business books of the year. In 1996 as a Forrester analyst, Bernoff created the Technographics® segmentation, a classification of consumers according to how they approach technology. Forrester has used this segmentation as the basis of its consumer research offering, also called Technographics, since 1997. Previously, Bernoff spent 10 years as an analyst in the television industry.

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