Social Media in the Telecommunications Industry

The telecommunications industry has social media on the agenda but the task of equating social media activity to ROI is a challenge. Leading players such as Comcast and Verizon have adopted community forums to enable peer to peer support. Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, in an interview with The New York Times detailed how he needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service. If customers provide support (from free) then call defection comes into play but how do you cultivate activity? Verizon has invested heavily in online customer support, receiving in the process many awards including one from my own organization. Comcast has on staff, a Director of Digital Care who heads up a team of 10 employees that surf , tweet, host a blog and generally act as evanglists for the company with customers and industry influencers. Bell Canada has long hosted a forum with some mixed results as it has attracted quite a few negative threads especially about account management issues that customers have no role in contributing.

So what is the role for social media, is it customer relations and feedback , more often associated with public relations or is it customer service and support. Social media clearly has a role but in a massively competitive environment for project resources, how important is social media?