Ever wake up in the morning and sit down for breakfast to find out someone’s executed one of your ideas better than you could’ve imagined? No? Well it happened this morning when I read about Dachis Group’s new launch of the Social Business Index. Touted by TechCrunch as “Klout for companies,” the service ranks companies based on countless social media metrics.

We’d fantasized about building a similar service, dreaming of a day when companies would compete to get a better score and hopefully raise their standards of customer engagement in the process. The SBI goes several steps further, tracking industry performance and trends down to a strategy graph that tracks internal constituents’ behaviors.

It’s left me wondering how we’ll all use it. Will companies vie for competitive positioning? Will it become relevant to customers who would rank best/worst companies on sites like The Consumerist? Will we, as agencies, consultancies, etc., look to the lowest ranks for leads? In any case, it’ll be fun to watch and I applaud the Dachis Group for putting in the massive effort to provide us all with this great resource.

Photo: jurvetson

In his recent article on the Software Advice blog, Houston Neal builds a case against the existence of Social CRM. I think the real issue is that the technology providers haven’t caught up to the somewhat overhyped promise of how companies should manage social relationships with their customers.

From the moment we started Trustworthy, we envisioned a day when our services would integrate seamlessly with a client’s existing CRM software.

The implications were huge. We imagined responding to customers with complete purchase histories, tech support tickets, and demographics in front of us. Armed with all this automated info, we could respond in record time with the perfect answer tailored specifically to each customer. In turn, we’d log our interactions into the system, adding valuable intelligence about communication preferences, product usage and analytics.

The writing was on the wall, too. Software giants like SalesForce.com were already hinting at social media features that seemed ready to deliver everything we’d dreamed.

It’s 2011. Where’s my jetpack? Where’s my flying car?

So far, the best we have is a lot of talk about Social CRM from analysts and pundits but none of the providers are actually connecting the dots. Overall, monitoring tools monitor and enable engagement, while CRM tools offer shallow products integrating Facebook and Twitter tracking.

In a valiant effort to bridge the gap, Radian6 announced integration with Salesforce.com in 2009. From the R6 dashboard, you could add Cases, Contacts and Leads to a record in Salesforce, and store histories of online interactions. But just like the old-media-marketing dinosaurs the Social Age has pushed towards extinction, this conversation is too one-sided to provide much more than better lead generation and targeting. This might improve the company’s experience, but the CRM provider needs to meet them halfway if we’re going to improve the customer’s experience.

Right now, unless your company has development resources to patch together API’s and create your own custom bridge between monitoring, response management, CRM, and analytics (our approach here at Trustworthy), you’ll have to manually manage multiple services because no one provides a turnkey solution.

And while we’ll be the ones jumping up and down like a New Yorker with a Verizon iPhone when someone does finally offer a complete Social CRM suite, the real winners will be the customers who benefit from what will surely be the next level of customer service.

Watch as the Director of Social Media struggles with response even after following the advice from gurus, blogs and books to a T. Lucky for him, ”Watercooler Wanda” is there to school him on the importance of letting a specialist like Trustworthy handle the response so he can focus strategy and culture internally.

Aaron leaves us with some valuable words of wisdom for companies wanting to emulate his success in community building, growing and sustaining.

Thanks, Aaron!

UPDATE: Be sure to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of this interview!

But more importantly, what’s with the nickname, “Tank”…?

Aaron Kaufman is not one of them. He’s the Community Manager of UFC and WWE brands at THQ, a worldwide developer and publisher of video games, and he’s one of the best I’ve seen.

I first worked with Aaron at Electronic Arts when my other company, Real Pie Media, redesigned the website for the real-time strategy (RTS) genre franchise, Command and Conquer. As “APOC”, Aaron became the face of EA as far as C&C fans were concerned. He was their covert operative inside the company, fighting for their rights to annihilate the enemy more effectively in the next iteration of the game. Now, I have the pleasure of working with him again on the Smackdown VS Raw Community Site for THQ. He’s reborn as “THQ TANK” on forums, fansites, Facebook and Twitter – and crushing it with the exuberance of a WWE Superstar.

Recently, we sat down to talk social media response and community building. Aaron generously shares his secrets and wisdom from over six years in the trenches (So generously in fact, that I’ve had to break the interview into three parts). Video game fans are notoriously the most avid and critical fans a brand could hope for, and Aaron makes nurturing and earning their trust look easy.

In Part 1, we discuss how Aaron sees his role sandwiched between customer service and online marketing, if his communities have virtual boundaries, and what it means when he signs his forum posts:

“When I am not posting, I am working for YOU”

So you set up a Page on Facebook for your company.

How are you going to manage the content that people post on your Wall?

Is it incumbent upon you to play by open, community rules and allow any and all posts and comments to run amok because you’ve deliberately created an outpost inside their community?

Is Facebook even a community like other communities?

Or, since Facebook plays by different rules, are you within your rights to moderate (ahem, delete) content posted on your Wall as you would your own personal Facebook? How would the troll like it if you went on his Wall and called him an idiot? Wouldn’t he remove it ASAP?

Are you setting up a representative extension of your polished brand in a popular new channel? Or are you participating in an exchange of opinion and feedback with people who feel strongly (one way or the other) about your brand?

Remember, even the trolls had to Like your page in order to comment on it.

UPDATE: AT&T’s open approach was profiled in this morning’s Marketplace Morning Report.

We can easily imagine this flashpoint – it comes at the moment the customer discovers the additional charge, most likely at the point of payment or later, when the bill arrives.

Reading one of these grievances, one might quickly surmise that the customer is angry about being charged more than expected. She is the victim of another greedy company out to nickel-and-dime her. But that view is short-sighted.

We haven’t identified the trust betrayal yet as defined in my previous post, Consumer Motivations. To do this, you’d have to know that more often than not, these objections come after the customer has paid a discounted rate. This changes everything. Now, we’re talking about someone who may not have the means to afford the product without the discount. This person made a purchase decision out of necessity rather than convenient frugality. As it happens, customers who pay full price rarely complain about the “hidden” fees.

The trust betrayal in this case is less about perceived value and more about the perceived trust itself. The perceived value is high; in fact many customers praise the value while taking issue with the “hidden” fee. The unbalanced trade swaps trust for value and now looks like this: High perceived trust (misplaced) outweighing low perceived trustworthiness.*

From this, we can interpret additional emotional motivations like self-esteem and even financial insecurity. Addressing the superficial anger and cheated motivations would be ill-advised, potentially prompting further argument in the public forum.

Can you think this hard on each and every complaint in any meaningful and scalable way? Yes, but it takes intuition, research and careful planning to effectively communicate and reestablish trust in social media channels.

*This is not to say our client is untrustworthy. Remember, “perceived” is the key word here. It’s up to the company to address the cause and rebuild trust if needed (that’s our job).

I reached out to Joshua, who graciously agreed to sit down with me over piña coladas and discuss my favorite topic, social media response. More Today Show than 60 Minutes (hey, I was on vacation after all), we discuss the strategy behind his new position, corporate oversight, tools, scalability, and get another perspective on how companies are building loyalty with social media response.

Yes, it’s my dream-job; strolling around the balmy, eden-like grounds, iPad in hand, helping people with social media.

Treat the cause, not the symptom.

From mental and physical wellness to sociology and legislation, it’s a truism that’s earned its mettle. So why are so many well-intentioned companies responding to their customers’ issues at face value? There are real people behind each tweet, status update and blog post. Their expressions reveal passion and complex emotions. The grievances are just the symptoms and it’s the responsibility of the responder to address the cause.

After all, there is a lot riding on the brand response. Beyond immediate satisfaction and problem solving, there are greater, long-term benefits like loyalty and social-evangelism. Being there is great. Offering a fix is even better. But can the violation of trust that motivated the complaint really be repaired? That replacement part or adjusted bill simply stops the bleeding. It cures the symptom. But rebuilding trust requires more than that. Imagine the moments between the first spark of frustration, as emotions escalate, until the customer complains in public online. That’s the part that demands mending. That’s the cause that needs to be treated.

Flashpoint. Motivation. Communication. Response. Satisfaction. Trust.

These are the six steps to focus on, but we start in the middle with the customer’s communication. From that communication, we must decipher the first two. We may never know what the flashpoint was, but as long as we identify the motivation correctly, our response will have a greater chance of building back trust. The purpose of the flashpoint step is less about identifying it and more about recognizing its significance in the chain of events. In many cases, if we address the motivation in our response, the satisfaction of a fix is secondary. Often times, there is no reasonable fix, but we can rebuild trust by treating the cause.

Of course, treating the cause also means fixing what’s wrong with your product or service, but that’s another blog post.

Praise also has motivations that should be addressed with the same considerations.

Trust Betrayal

All consumer motivations start with one commonality; the customer’s trust has been betrayed. This happens when the perceived effort is higher than the perceived value and the trade becomes unbalanced. The moment the customer arrives at this conclusion is what I call the flashpoint. It’s the moment when the widget breaks, the software crashes or the service is slow. Unless it was delivered on the doorstep for free, an unbalance occurs and triggers an emotional response AKA the motivation.

Motivated to express dissatisfaction publicly.

Now we’re at the point of communication, looking back. Communipathology, if you will. What drove the customer to tweet in ALL CAPS, punctuated by a #FAIL? It wasn’t that the widget broke or the software crashed or the service was slow. It was how that flashpoint made them feel . Understanding how it made them feel is the key to identifying their motivation for expressing their discontent in a public forum.

So, how do we ID motivations? I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear your’s in the comments below.