By: Christien van de Sande

David Armano is senior vice president at Edelman Digital and successful blogger about digital marketing and customer experience design. He looks for new business opportunities around the social web to enhance the customer experience, connect individuals and innovate. We spoke with Armano at the last SOBcon and talked about customer experience and social media. David Armano: “Customer experience is the end touch point in how a customer experience your company. It’s the delivery of your brand’s promise to a customer.”

Increasingly important
According to David Armano is customer experience becoming increasingly important. “There’s more choice typically than there has been. And with more choice for customers comes the result of customer service being more important. And there is also a connection to social media. Social media amplifies customer experience. Word of mouth has always been hearing about something, either positive or negative, and you tell others about it, and it spreads. Social media is like word of mouth on steroids. It spreads faster, it has a wider reach, and it doesn’t stay within the social media system. It goes outside of it to mainstream, and that’s where the power is, and it happens very quickly.”

The definition of social media
“Social media affects marketing. It affects corporate communications. It affects human resources, in some ways, in terms of what your workforce is doing online. It affects IT in the sense, that it might make sense to connect yourself internally in a similar way. It affects many different departments. Social media is about the connection.”

“When you think of the Internet, and the origins of the Internet from the military, to consumer usage, it connected systems and computers into networks. Social media is the human version of that. Instead of the machines being nodes, now we have people that act as nodes. It’s the human network, which is very powerful, as we’re seeing in different manifestations.”

“A more complex definition is that there are different faces of social media, especially as it pertains to business. There’s certainly a communications aspect, which is basically the things that people talk about that are out in the space. There is a component that is directly related to customer experience, in the sense that the interactions that you have can become shared and amplified.”

“Not just listening”
“With social media it’s possible to listen what’s being said about you within the social spaces. And not just listening, but really understanding, kind of getting the temperature of what people think about your organization, your company, your brand. So listening is definitely a place to start. You have to start with understanding the landscape. And oftenthat landscape is very fragmented, it’s multiple ecosystems. Twitter is one, Facebook is another, blogs, the open web, these are all different ecosystems that customers say things about. In these social spaces is where you start. And, then determining if it’s worth the investment for you as a company. If as you’re listening people are either complaining about you, or saying good things, or looking for help and going unanswered, then there’s an opportunity there. And you have to decide if you’re going to invest in this.”

Measure success
“There are tools that allow you to measure the sentiment, what’s positive, what’s negative and what’s neutral. And you can try this for a number of months, and you can see if you have an effect on that. And if there’s more positive mentions that’s one way that you can measure. You can look at the engagement in terms of if you’re doing nothing in Facebook and then you start a presence, and then you have people that are talking to you, that can be a metric. Now you have to have some type of belief though that engagement is a good thing.”

“A more engaged customer is a better customer. They can be more loyal. They can help your business. You can measure engagement. You can measure things like number of comments, number of followers, number of friends, a product that you didn’t came up with the product idea that you manufactured. There’s all different kinds of ways to measure it.”

“But I think that at the end of the day you have to sort of do a check, and believe that these spaces in digital are the future. It’s where people are going to basically be spending their time and attention. Because there’s a lot of money that goes into these other channels, television, you know, mass marketing.”

This interview was held in April 2010 during SOBcon in Chicago. This year’ SOBcon starts April 29th, 2011. And -of course- we will be there!