Niall Larkin over on Chuky Flow draws our attention to an interesting paper by Daha Boyd at Etech2006.

The basic underlying problem is how and when do we want to “exposure our presence” or even our “existence” to unknown others? Would you be happy if just anyone could call you at any time? Can just anyone ping your messenger? I tend to think of this as being a bit like buying a book. I could go on amazon and buy it if I know what I want, I could ask friends for recommendations, or I could just browse and discover a book by walking around the store. For customer contact solutions, these nuances are important. Should you enable your customer to speak to other customers “like them?” in certain situations, and if so how do you “expose their existence and presence to each other?” When you you open up an invitation to speak with a customer service person to someone who is only browsing? Perhaps its not there yet, but I believe that a mix of “presence engines” like www.iotum.com and http://me.dium.com are leading companies looking to address this kind of issue.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: me.dium, voicesage ioutum talk-now

A found these guys when they launched and their name caught my attention, BazaarVoice. Their new service SyndicateVoice does something very interesting. It takes authentic customer reviews, and makes them searchable under natural language terms, i.e “is the dell x90 any good?”. They provide some good statistics on why “user reviews” are important:

* RoperASW reports the value of word of mouth as the best source of information on products has exploded from 67% in 1977 to 93% in 2001.

* BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews.

* Marketing Experiments Journal® tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating.

* The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion.

When combined with the potential of something like http://me.dium.com the pre-search environment is becoming very interesting from a marketing perspective.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: bazaarvoice, me.dium, syndicatevoice

Me.dium is an innovative new way to see who is on a particular web page, story of interest etc. It is interesting because it is a form of Presence technology, that potentially enables customers to find commonalities, areas of mutual interest etc. etc. I can see this being interesting where customers might be hovering over an FAQ section and instead dropping an email to customer service, they ask another person “visiting the FAQ” do they know the answer! If they “got stuck” a Call Centre / Customer Service / Advocate might step in and take a lead by asking can they be of assistance. You can be sure that with Brad Feld behind this one, it will make an impact.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact

Explore Tags: brad feld, me.dium, Social Computing, web 2.0