At the ATA: Steve Herlocher Talks Social Media

Interactive Softworks EVP of Sales and Product Strategy, Steve Herlocher, discussed his featured speaking slot at the American Teleservices Association Convention and Expo.

Q:Steve, you were at the ATA Convention and Expo in Orlando in September as a featured speaker. What was the topic you were speaking about and can you give us the broad strokes of your presentation?

A: The topic of the speech was “Reaching Your Customer 24/7 Where They Live.” Really, what we were talking about is the fact that the dialogue is shifting to the customer’s point of view. Social media, blogs, and different forums available to customers today has accelerated the pace of the customer not only knowing more and having more information about products and services and companies, but actually starting their own dialogues that don’t include the companies at all.

What we were recommending to the people in the audience – and it turned out to be a very good discussion – was that companies really need to reach out and join those social media conversations and do it before there’s a problem or before there’s an opportunity.

So, it’s really a challenging environment for companies to deal with. Most of the infrastructure and tools they’ve worked with historically are focused on helping the company control the dialogue, manage the cost of it, decide what they’re going to give, decide when to stop the discussion, all of these types of things. And now that these discussions are happening without companies, it’s quite a change for them in terms of both culturally and technologically how do they adapt, how do they do that.What we were recommending to the people in the audience – and it turned out to be a very good discussion – was that companies really need to reach out and join those conversations and do it before there’s a problem or before there’s an opportunity. Reach out, become part of that community, ask if you can join that conversation and add value without any expectation. Become a member of the community; and then when the conversation turns negative or there’s an up-sell opportunity, you’re already a member of the community and respected there, and you can interact there.This should be relevant for any industry. The people our the audience were from different industries, from travel and entertainment, performance marketing organizations, student acquisition companies in terms of universities/online universities, these types of folks. And they’re all struggling because they’re looking at what their social media strategy should be, and everything they’re hearing right now suggests a reactive posture. Again, our advice is to go out there and react to what’s happening in the industry, listen to who’s saying bad things, and then try and engage them in a conversation.So it turned into a very good dialogue. We ended up talking very much about each industry and how each of them could benefit by joining the conversation and potentially becoming part of another dialogue and reaching out and putting their company outside of their own barriers or our boundaries, if you would.

Q: Give us an idea of the attendants of the convention: what industries were represented, and what level of professional was there and what issues were driving them?

A: The event was attended by a broad array of industries. In addition to those industries I mentioned earlier, there were people from the credit and credit card industries, gaming and entertainment; and folks from retail-type companies, and particularly online e-tailing type industries.Even outside of our presentation, social media was the topic of interest. And again, it was the same type of response, maybe a bit more generic because the dialogue wasn’t as focused by our presentation But the main questions being asked by everyone, really, were “How do I reach outside? How do I take my current business processes and take them outside my firewall, take them outside my control and let people pull those processes into their discussion?” And all of the discussions were very nascent because people had never really interfaced with a vendor before that said “We’ll help you take processes out and put them in the social space. Other vendors are saying, “There’s a great new social space out there; use our tool to go look at it and analyze what’s happening and then ask people if they’ll talk to you on the phone or send you an email or something like that.”We mostly talked with VPs and directors, most of them from operations but several from marketing. And again, we received a fairly consistent message from them that they don’t have a good roadmap or a good plan today on how to actively engage in those social environments.