Natalie Petouhoff
Social Media Analyst, Ex Forrester Research

Website | @drnatalie

Dr. Natalie was a Social Media and Web 2.0 Analyst at Forrester Research. Her focus was on creating customer-facing strategies that incorporate traditional CRM and Customer Service interactions with social media and enterprise 2.0 capabilities to truly create organizations that are based collaborativeness, open, honest and authentic communications that increase transparency and trust.

Natalie’s newest research is on The ROI of Of Social Media. In this research, the unexpected and surprising finding was that social media is a very effective business transformation tool. When deployed properly, it is one of the most effective organizational transformation tools ever. It easily garners CxO support, alignment among generally desparate silo’d departments and a true commitment to doing things right.

The premise of the research looks at the issues of the early applications of social media to applications like listening platforms and the subsequent ability to do things like monitor customer sentiment. These early applications did not always show the direct, bottom-line financial correlation the business world was looking for to fully adopt social media as a serious business tool, even though those in the social media world could clearly see its business value.

Apply social media and web 2.0 to something like… Customer Service. Customer Service, regardless of industry is awful. Customers are sick of poor service and showing their dissatisfaction by not only posting their discontent on the internet, now reaching thousands and millions of other customers, but they are also choosing to vote with their feet and pocketbooks/wallets.

The reaction of customers to poor service presents critical business issues that can no longer be ignored, especially in an economic downturn where companies can not afford to loose even one customer.

The research shows how the application of social media to an enterprise issues provides not only a large ROI for customer service but its ROI may be the tipping point for business to exponentially adopt social media.