New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“Free users won’t convert or tell others if they can’t get past first wall,” Muller said, adding, “Support needs to be embedded in the product. It actually needs to be a consideration in product development. Freemium only works if customers are delighted.”

According to Muller, most application providers follow the support strategy of starting out ad hoc, followed by implementing a help desk, forums, and social support (social engagement, communities of interest, word of mouth).

He added that Mint.com took its support model public and not only dropped weekly support tickets from 6,500 to 1,500, but picked up more than 50,000 ideas on how to improve its products. Yola, meanwhile, created a customer community and placed it front and center, which was good, but the company actually responded too quickly at first and wasn’t giving customers the ability to respond to each other.

“Is it worth supporting free customers?” Muller asked. “If it isn’t worth it and you don’t make a change, then you end up creating a customer slum.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Why we should care about marketing

If you live in the state of California or at any point held a job at a start-up you know what it means to be “online.” With 200+ likes (which used to be Facebook Fans) and 600 average friends, its hard to keep up. Besides information overload, some companies are great about getting a ton of useless information across, while others struggle to get important information to show up on news feeds. Where does this new algorithm based behavior come from? Mostly social networks, which is run on ‘liking algorithms.’ Yammer just emailed me this week telling me they thought my activity was filled too much. In fact I’m quite happy but nonetheless next week will need to make changes to settings, which I would rather not.

Is all this a bubble bust or long-term?

If we look at other traditional markets and trends its obvious the internet is not going anywhere, but how companies connect with consumers is. What’s the financial point of having a helpdesk half across the world? Or even worse: does the expense of a customer support department in a lesser developed country even make sense if your customers are going to get upset and tweet anyway? How much does twitter actually affect new business? Unsure how to answer these questions? You probably do note have a realistic marketing plan for the upcoming year. If these questions seems silly, you are already ahead of the mark. Marketing is the new internet.

Who is in the Ring?

Conversation Monitor earlier this week launched new features listening in on the Twitter conversations around brands. Think your email wasn’t heard? Even on a small scale Webs.com now offers ContactMe which puts your customer service inquiries into a CRM system for small businesses to help with maintaining online appointments and interaction. Older media companies are trying to leverage their “edge” while newer companies are trying to give optimal products with little risk to the consumer. Who will win this battle? Despite eyes being on mobile and gaming, the winning of 2011 will not be a nifty social media tool that can put out fires the fastest, but the company that can deliver the best product with the best conditions. Think Zappos but for several industries. Great customer service should never been a low priority for any industry anyway.

The beauty of democracy and having a fast-paced (and now) consumer based economy is that the level of quality and expectations will be greatly exceeded. Will people expect a greater deal than they deserve? Absolutely. But will that force companies to bring their best face forward? Absolutely. Ignore mobile for a bit, there is business to be had.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For the longest time I just didn’t get it but the site’s new overheard feature makes a lot of sense. As MG Siegler pointed out this morning, the Overheard feature integrates a Twitter stream (via Summize) centered around your product right into your company’s Get Satsifaction page. There are a number of companies using Get Satisfaction but currently those companies appear to be limited to web based services for the most part. That appears to be expanding though as Chase bank,Comcast and Verizon Wireless all have their own pages.

So far Comcast, O’Reilly, Seesmic and MyBlogLog have signed up to leverage the Overheard service but a number of others will be joining soon. One other product that Get Satisfaction just announced is the Help Center which enables companies to put a support area directly on their site while still using the Get Satisfaction service. What’s great about this is that companies who don’t know about Twitter can immediately take advantage of it just by using the Get Satisfaction service.

Previously, I had not been very active in Get Satisfaction forums but I’m definitely going to become a more active user. Have you used Get Satsifaction? What do you think of this new service offering?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.