Frank is a pioneer in using social media for customer service and in this video he talks about what has changed over the last few years. He also shares tips for companies to improve customer support.

You’ll find more takeaways below. Be sure to leave your comments after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn from Frank:

• What needs to change in customer service
• Why your company needs to get back to the basics of customer service
• How to use stories to  improve your customer service experience
• How to use the different social media platforms to connect with your customers
• What it means to do service right
• A great tip to implement customer service 101 on Twitter
• Why Frank is excited about implementing click to call and click to chat features

And here’s some advice Frank has for his peers:

• If you company is controlling marketing and PR: be human about it. Let your team service your customers. Let them do what they do well and allow them to be who they are.
• If your service is not what it should be: it’s up to you to fix it. Don’t wait for someone else to fix it.

You can connect with Frank on his blog and follow him on Twitter.

How is your company using social media for customer service? Please share your experiences below.

The cost-effectiveness of social media has vaulted it to the top of the list of tools used to improve customer retention. But how do you measure whether social media is affecting your ability to keep customers?

To examine this, let’s look at a case study of a company that has excelled at connecting with customers in social media spaces.

What We Can Learn From Comcast

If you’ve been following companies using social media, then you’re sure to be watching what Comcast is doing.

They were presented with a difficult challenge of dealing with a perception of poor customer service and trying to change that perception.

This is evidenced by over 6300 people who are fans of the Facebook page called “I Hate Comcast.”

They did a combination of things in order to meet their objective. Frank Eliason, who Business Week called the most famous customer service manager ever, started the @ComcastCares Twitter account (he’s since moved on). This has now expanded to multiple Twitter accounts from their digital team that all start with @Comcast, my personal favorite being @ComcastBonnie. They also have several Facebook Fan pages with the Comcast fan page being the primary channel where they provide customer service to Facebook users.

My tweet to Comcast.

In my personal experience, I had an issue with Comcast that I tweeted about and several things happened. Almost immediately, I received a reply from @ComcastBonnie asking if she could assist me. My issue was then transferred to a national response person who told me he was following up on my issue and would get back to me.

It took a few attempts but my cable got installed and I spoke to an amazing person who addressed my issue and was determined to make me happy, despite the issues I faced. So how should Comcast measure whether their efforts mattered? There are a few key metrics I recommend you examine.

#1: Customer Retention Rate

Will I stay with Comcast longer than a customer who never interacted with Comcast’s social media team? Compare the retention rate of customers who interact with social media channels versus those who don’t, whether it is through your customer service efforts and separately for any leads that have been generated.

Each month the customer stays with Comcast is worth a certain amount of revenue to the company. Assign an average dollar value to customers at different points in the life cycle and compare the value of a social media customer versus a non-social media customer based on retention rates.

#2: Decreased Operational Costs

Do customers who get assistance from the social media team tend to contact the customer service phone number more or less? It generally costs less to service a customer online than over the phone, depending on the company’s operational setup. Report how many customers were handled, the average time to resolution, the cost and the savings.

#3: Increased Usage of Self-Help Options

Do customers who interact with the social media team use the online customer service option at your website more or less? Online help centers typically facilitate customers finding answers on their own, which is certainly less expensive than a customer calling the service phone number. Report on how many social media customers went to this section of your site versus non-social media customers and show how much the company saved.

#4: Customer Saves

How many complaints were you able to turn into opportunities? I call these saves. They are customers who exhibited some key actions that can lead to a cancellation, but the customer either comes back or doesn’t cancel as a result of social media interaction. These customers are worth money to your company, so make sure to measure their value in your overall return on investment numbers.

#5: Customer Complaints Turned Into Raves

Do social media customers share their experience with others more or less than non-social media customers? What percentage of social media customers are likely to recommend your company to a friend?

Customers who interact with the company on social sites are more likely to have a “viral” tendency and love to share their positive and negative experiences with their friends, followers and fans. How many shared negative comments versus positive comments do you see? How far did they reach?

#6: Cross-sells

Are social media customers more or less likely to buy additional services? How much revenue was generated from cross-sells directly from social media compared to non-social media customers?

#7: Improved Process Innovations

How many issues handled by the social media service team led to process innovations to prevent the issue in the future? How much money will this save the company in lost customers each year? How much money will it save the company in employee time to handle the issues?

Because social media measurement is fairly new and many companies are just getting started, it’s important to measure everything against a control group so you can compare the rates of change.

For those in the early stages of their social media strategy, the numbers may not be “big” yet, but it’s the propensity of the customer to convert better, be more loyal, be more likely to use online resources and tell their friends about their experience that show the short-term and the long-term value for the company. Empowering customers and social media team members to become change agents and spearhead process improvements that will save the company time and money is priceless!

Comcast has a great story of how they’ve turned social media into a customer retention tool. We are all sad to see Frank Eliason leave Comcast, but we are looking forward to seeing great innovations from Citibank as he takes the helm as senior vice president of social media.

Related Articles:

How to Measure Social Media Return on Investment for the Complex Sale
4 Ways to Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand
How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance

How are you measuring social media’s impact on customer retention? Did I miss any metrics that are valuable to your firm? What challenges are you facing in your ability to measure? Let us know in the box below.

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adriarichards/4370031554/sizes/m/in/photostream/

During this interview, you’ll learn how Seth employed new media to promote his latest book and his thoughts on marketing and social media.  Note: Be sure to listen to the complete interview at the bottom of this article.

Mike: What exactly is a “linchpin” and how do I know if I’m one?

Seth: A linchpin is the person we can’t live without—the indispensable person who does work that matters, the person who is trying to stand out as opposed to fit in, the one who’s not easily replaceable, the low-paid cog in the giant industrial machine but, in fact, the person whom we seek out.

If someone says, “We’re going to see Bruce Springsteen,” you know that it isn’t going to be someone who’s like Bruce Springsteen performing. It’s going to be “the” Bruce Springsteen.

I guess the question is, “Can someone put the word ‘the’ in front of your name?” You are “the” Michael Stelzner. There isn’t anybody else who could be doing this interview about this topic because you’re him.

Now, thanks to the Internet, Google and the way the world is changing, anybody who chooses to become a linchpin can.

Mike: Do you think most people who are linchpins know it?

Seth: I think that anyone who is at the edge of what they can be doing is doing that on purpose. They are going through the pain and the difficult work and the risk necessary to do their art, to stand out, and to not just be a noisemaker.

Mike: Do you think anyone has the potential to become a linchpin or is this something that only a small percentage of society will ever achieve?

Seth: The first four words of my book are “You are a genius.” I honestly believe that.

When you were 3 years old and painted something with fingerpaints that had never been painted before, you were a genius. You solved the problem in a way that no-one else ever had.

Everyone has the capacity in some way to do the work of genius. I am not saying that everyone can build a profitable company, that everyone can start a Google, or that everyone can fill a stadium with screaming fans.

What I am saying is if you pick the right endeavor, you ought to be able to do work that matters.

Mike: I love the fact that you regularly talk about how you could even be a linchpin in your “day-to-day” job, like the guy behind the deli counter who’s smiling and greeting the customer. You can play a linchpin role in almost any endeavor, isn’t that true?

Seth: That’s right.

I got a note yesterday from a guy who has a fast-food pizza chain. His pizza is better than any other pizza in the chain. The people who run the chain are giving him a hard time, saying, “We want it all to be the same.”

The reason they want it all to be the same is because then everyone is replaceable. Then all the power goes to the person who writes the manual.

But if you look at your job as a platform for doing art, for being generous and for making changes in people, then you’re both getting paid and stretching yourself to become indispensable. When they hire someone to take your place when you move on to the next job, the place won’t be the same, because you won’t be there.

Mike: Let’s talk about you now. When was the first moment in your life when you realized you were a linchpin?  What was the turning point where you recognized that perhaps you were unique?

Seth: It was in 1976. I was on a lake in Algonquin Park, Canada, teaching a 12-year-old girl how to paddle a 17-foot-long canoe all by herself.

As I was sitting there I realized that I had a tremendous responsibility because I could either just do my job, in which case this girl would go back to her day unchanged, or I could take a chance—I could lean forward. I could connect. I could do something that wasn’t asked of me and maybe, just maybe, I could impact her life and help her deal with her bad temper and help her see a different way of navigating through her day. I did it and it worked.

Mike: What happened next?

Seth: It was an extraordinary feeling. Joanna went from slugging people several times a day—anyone who disagreed with her, boy or girl, she would just deck them—to being somebody who was smart and generous and connected and kind and enjoying her life a lot more.

Fifteen years later, she contacted me and it had stuck. In that moment, I got the chance to matter. That’s sort of addictive.

Mike: Was there some sort of resistance going on in your head, like, “Should I do this? Is she going to snap at me? I’m just going to do this?”

Seth: In the book, I talk about the resistance, which was a term coined by Steve Pressfield in a book called The War of Art. The resistance comes from the lizard brain; the part of our brain that is afraid, that doesn’t want to get laughed at and doesn’t want to make a mistake.

If we look at the people who are reading Social Media Examiner and we look at the huge momentum to fit in and follow the standards, as soon as someone does something interesting on Facebook or Twitter, a hundred people copy it. A thousand people copy it. There’s a lot of desire to not get laughed at and to not be the one who did that thing that everyone talks about. That’s the lizard brain. That’s the part of us that wants to fit in.

What I’m arguing is that the last person in on anything happening on the Internet never profits. The people who win are the ones who figured out how to win before anyone else was even paying attention, before there was a manual, before there was a Dummies book and before it was the standard operating procedure.

Mike: Thanks Seth.  On another topic, did you promote this book any differently than your other books?

Seth: Every time I write a book, I try to take my own advice. With Permission Marketing, I set up a website, www.Permission.com, which cost $400. You give me your email address and I send you one-third of the book for free. That led to 200,000 people giving me permission, which changed everything for that book.

In initiating the Ideavirus, I gave the whole book away for free because it was a book about giving stuff away for free. If you Google the words “idea virus,” it’s still there. It’s still free.

With Linchpin, what I said was, “The mainstream media is clearly dying.” The number of book critics is diminishing.  So I’m going to ignore all those people. I’m not going to send out one piece of mail. I’m not going to send out one review copy to the mainstream media. Not one.”

Instead, I reached out to bloggers and people with followings online and said, “Let me do an interview with you, if you’re interested, because you are the new media.”

The second thing I did was go to the people I have permission to talk to, readers of my blog, and said, “If you make a donation to charity, I’ll send you a review copy of my book a month before anybody else gets it. No strings attached. Review it and share it when you’re done if you like. The only reason we’re asking you to donate money to charity is because we can’t give one to everyone. We just want to give one to people who really care.”

Almost 3,000 people took me up on that offer. The book has been reviewed online probably more than any other book I can think of. The day the book went live and Amazon opened its doors, more than 110 people gave it a review.  All of them had read it. None of them had any other incentive to review it.

The end result of this is that it was the biggest launch of any book I’ve ever done and one of the most successful book launches of the year.

Mike: I’m looking at your book right now and on the back cover, there are a thousand little pictures. Tell me what that’s about. Note: That’s me holding the back cover up…  See any subliminal messages?

Seth: Last year I put a post on my blog that said, “If there’s someone you can’t live without, someone indispensable in your life, send me their picture.”

Flickr has a feature that gives you an email address where you can email pictures to yourself and they show up in your Flickr account. I published that email address. Everyone was sending me pictures that ended up in my Flickr account.

I downloaded those pictures and put them into a mosaic. Here is a gallery of people—ordinary, everyday people like you and me—who matter. That’s the essence of the book.

Mike: I thought that was really brilliant.  In your book you talk about gifts.  Can you explain what gifts are and how social media plays into the whole gifts concept?

Seth: A gift is not a gift if you give something to someone hoping they will give you something back. That is sort of an unequal transaction. It is not a gift.

A gift is what Pablo Picasso did when he painted a painting and you get to see it in a museum. He knew you’re never going to be able to buy one of his paintings. He wanted you to see the art. The point of the art is to change people.

When you help somebody out who asks you a question on Facebook or Twitter because you hope one day they’re going to become a consulting client, you’re making a mistake. While that might be an interesting marketing strategy, it is not a gift.

My argument is that linchpins make art. Art is a generous gift that changes other people.

Mike: If I’m a marketer and my goal ultimately is to market a product or service, can I still give a gift even though my intention is to try to sell something?

Seth: I don’t want to call that a “gift.” I want to call that an opportunity to put ideas in front of people so that you can up-sell them after they trust you. That’s fine, but let’s not get confused.

There are plenty of people who read your site who are happy to respond to a pop-up window: “Welcome to my blog. Sign up for my free newsletter.” That newsletter is designed to have valuable content but also to up-sell people. That’s all good. But that’s not a gift.

What I’m talking about is somebody who gives $100 to charity and doesn’t sign his or her name to the letter. There’s no opportunity for anything to come back to the giver, except for the fact that he or she now feels closer to the mission.

Mike: At the end of your book, you mention Frank Eliason from Comcast as a great example of a linchpin. Why?

Seth: Frank works at one of the most hated companies in America, a cable TV company called Comcast.

On his own, without permission, he started searching Twitter for mentions of the word “Comcast.” If you mentioned Comcast in a tweet, he would get back to you, sometimes within five minutes.  He would tell you who he was and ask you to call him directly, or he would try to troubleshoot you right then and there so that you could get back online or back to TV.

It worked. It worked because it was so out of the box, so generous, so remarkable, so opposite of the way people felt about Comcast.

As a result, Frank’s standing at Comcast goes way up and so does his career.  That’s not why he did it. He did it because he clearly loves the company and he wants to help people. The side effect of his generosity is that he’s set for life now because he’s “the” Frank Eliason.

Comcast then hired a whole bunch of people to sit next to Frank because once the word got out that this was the shortcut to customer service, lots of people started tweeting the word “Comcast.”

The lesson from Frank is “do something that hasn’t been done before.” Do it out of sheer generosity. That’s the lesson.

Mike: One of our Twitter followers asks, “What is the catalyst or tipping point that pushes a follower to be a leader?”

Seth: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a great book that I recommend.  It’s about social movement. I don’t think there’s a tipping point for an individual to go from follower to leader, but I do think there are plenty of catalysts.

The real catalyst, in my experience, is no-one goes from being a follower to being president of the United States. There are lots of kinds of leaders. You can be the president of the safety patrol in fourth grade and you’re doing a little bit of leadership.

What really shifts is if you decide that you’re going to take tiny steps toward leading. Those can be leading in your family or leading in your community.

I really believe that this is a path and not an event. The path starts with leading a few people, volunteering at your local animal shelter and then leading a corps of volunteers to make a change happen.

Mike: Talk to me about your time working with Lester Wunderman. He’s the marketing guru behind the American Express Card and Columbia Record Club. What did he teach you about marketing?

Seth: Lester invented the term “direct marketing.” What Lester understood is that it’s not particularly difficult to hire people to follow the manual. His firm, Wunderman Cato Johnson, grew to be a multibillion-dollar firm, with lots of people doing direct mail and direct marketing for lots of companies.

You don’t need Lester to do that. What you need Lester to do is sit down and invent the gold box on the Columbia Record Club so they can go on TV, or invent the American Express Card as a charge card, not a credit card. These sorts of insights and innovations are what he does for a living.

It only takes a minute to come up with one. The other eight hours a day are spent going to lunch and walking around and smiling at people. But in one minute a day, he’s creating billions of dollars worth of value.

We get so hung up, particularly in a tweetified, Facebooked, blogged world where there’s always one more email to answer. We get focused on how busy we are or even how measured productive we are, as opposed to saying, “What did I do today that was important? What did I do today that no-one else can do?” If you spend a little bit more time on that work, you’ll discover that you have enough money to hire people to do the other stuff.

Mike: So what Lester taught you is to focus a little more of your time on coming up with innovations?

Seth: He helped me see that that’s my only job.

Mike: To the aspiring future linchpin, what would be the best piece of advice that you would give him or her?

Seth: Ship. Fight the lizard brain. Fight the resistance. Whatever it is you’re working on, ship it out the door. Ship often. Put things out there and fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The person who learns the most wins.

Mike: Seth, thank you very much for your time. You’re an incredible fountain of knowledge.

Seth: It was my pleasure. Thanks for doing the great work on the site.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) and learn a lot more about Seth and marketing…

What do you think about Seth Godin and his marketing ability? Have you read his books?  Did they leave a mark on you?  Leave your comments below.

Have you ever wondered how a business handles more than a million Twitter fans? Want the inside scoop from the largest retailer on Twitter?

Even if you’re a small business, there’s some great insight to be gained from Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market. Marla was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Twitter.com/Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people.

If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s the leading natural and organic food store in the world with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom.

Whole Foods Market is the most popular retailer on Twitter and is a leading example of Twitter’s power to build millions of relationships a single customer at a time.  Here are key excerpts from our interview (you can listen to the entire exchange at the end of this article).

Marla Erwin, Whole Foods Market

Mike: Marla, what was the tipping point that got Whole Foods to say, “We need to get involved with the social media thing?“

Marla: As far as timing, mainly it was there. Twitter was getting big. It hadn’t really broken out into the mainstream – full of celebrities and a lot of new sources just yet.

But when we hooked up with it about a year and a half ago, it was clearly going to break out and we thought, “We had better get on this. It’s where people are.”

As someone said at a conference I recently attended, “You want to fish where the fish are.” We realized this is where our customers were going to be.

Mike: What were you hoping to achieve in the beginning?

Marla: We wanted to just connect with people. It’s very easy for people on the outside of a company or an organization to see you as a monolith. You’re a corporate entity or you’re a building or you’re a logo or you’re this giant chain of stores, when really we’re a whole bunch of laid-back people with pretty idealistic visions of what we want to do.

It was a good way for us to communicate that and also to let people know some things about us that maybe they didn’t realize; for example, the philanthropic mission of Whole Foods in terms of our Whole Trade programs and our Local Producer Loan programs and so on.

I feel like social media is falling into buckets right now where people are using it for sales and marketing, people are using it for customer service, or people are using it to establish a corporate personality and corporate culture. We’re trying to do a lot of these things, and depending on the venue, one medium might have a greater percentage of one of those than the other, but they all balance out in the end.

The first thing that we did, even before we got on Twitter or Facebook, was just to incorporate some user-generated content on our website – recipe reviews, product ratings and so on, and comments on our blog.

Mike: How do people get to your blog?

Marla: It’s Blog.WholeFoodsMarket.com. Or if you’re on our main website, just look for links to our blog, which is called “Whole Story.”

The blog has a lot of editorial content, everything from articles on how to conserve and recycle to cooking tips and profiles of some of our local producers.

After the website and the blog, we started with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is very similar to our blog in that we have a lot of editorial content. It’s a little bit more conversational. We invite engagement more. We ask people, “What do you think?” or “What are some of your ideas?” We try to get more of a conversation going.

On Facebook, unlike Twitter, everyone can see each other’s comments, so it becomes much more of a group conversation.

Twitter we use primarily as a customer service tool. We do promote our blog content and we may mention, “We’re having specials for the holidays,” and that sort of thing. But our number-one focus on Twitter is customer service.

Probably 90% of our output on Twitter, if you go to Twitter.com/wholefoods, is directly responding to people who have questions. They’ll ask us, “Can I get this at my local store?” or “What are your holiday hours going to be?” or “Can you tell me a gluten-free alternative to cornbread stuffing?”

Whole Foods has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

Mike: I understand that you have over 150 different Twitter accounts. Can you give me the rationale for having so many different accounts and maybe how you use the different Twitter accounts?

Marla: We started out first with our global account Twitter.com/wholefoods. For about a year, that was all we had.

Then we thought, “It might be neat to niche a couple of accounts.” So we have an account for cheese. It’s called Twitter.com/WFMcheese. That’s our cheese expert who has a quadruple PhD in cheese. She’s one of the world’s leading cheese experts. It’s a terrific niche account.

We also have a wine account and an automated account for recipes.  So that’s four accounts. The rest, the 150 plus, are our local stores.

Mike: For businesses that might have stores or chains, what kind of oversight do you have or recommend? Is it typically done by an employee, a manager of the store, or a cashier? Or is it somebody special who’s not actually working at the store?

Marla: The first thing we found is that not every store has someone who’s really familiar with social media or with Twitter specifically. So we did provide some guidance to these folks in the form of a very, very casual document that was part tutorial: “What’s the difference between an @reply and a direct message?” It was also part guidelines: “Here are some things you shouldn’t do and here are some things you should do.”

For the most part, we’ve pretty much let them run with it. A tight control from a corporate level would be exactly the opposite of what we were trying to achieve, which was to decentralize the responses.

I definitely think that people who tweet on behalf of an organization need to be in it. If you can find the wonderful combination of someone who really knows your business and really knows social media, then that’s the person to use, even if they’re in the meat department or they’re a cashier.

Mike: I want to talk about your master account, your main Twitter.com/wholefoods account.  A lot of the social media pundits out there say that you need to have a physical face behind a brand. I know Whole Foods has not done that. Why did you choose not to put a face behind the Whole Foods Twitter account? What are your feelings and rationale about whether you should have a face behind the brand?

Marla: That was a conscious decision, definitely. We considered both sides of that question and I do see both perspectives. When I was trying to articulate our thinking on this, it fell into a natural ABC thing, which is “authority, boundaries and continuity.”

Authority, to me, just means that it is very clearly a corporate account. With the verified accounts now, this is less of an issue. But we wanted to make sure that it was very clearly the official voice of the company and not one person’s opinion.

Boundaries just means that if you keep your personal account and your professional account separate, go ahead and talk about whatever you want in your personal account. Talk about your favorite football team and talk about where you took the kids for dinner.

Then there’s continuity. When we first started our Twitter account, there were three people in on the account. We would all sort of jump in and tweet or take turns or handle different areas of it.

Now we’ve got one person, Winnie Hsai, who has really stepped up to the plate to manage our social media presence. She does most of our tweeting. If she were to win the lottery tomorrow and leave us, we wouldn’t have to worry about introducing a new person. It would still be the Whole Foods account. There wouldn’t be that sort of jarring disconnect.

Finally, another one that is important to me because I’m a designer is a distinctiveness to having a logo in your account. For example, Frank Eliason at comcastcares is definitely one of the trailblazers of customer service on Twitter. Yet when I’m scanning my Twitter feed, he looks like 10 other guys that I follow.

But when I see Starbucks, instead of seeing Brad Nelson’s face, I see the Starbucks logo and that jumps out at me. I like that distinctiveness of having our branding there.

Mike: Do you think if you were a smaller retailer that you might give the same advice to your peers who are really small?

Marla: That’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked that because I do see a lot of benefit in small businesses having a more personal face.

There is a local dog grooming place that I follow. I’m going to take my dog there because I like the individual I’m corresponding with. I feel that personal connection and I think, “Yes, I’m going to bring my business to you because we’ve talked.”

I think for a small business the rules would probably be quite different than for a large company.

Mike: Let’s talk about Facebook a little bit. How are you using Facebook? How are you using it differently than Twitter? If Twitter is predominantly for support, what is Facebook for?

Marla: Facebook is a really good extension of what we’re trying to do with our blog, which is to promote more of our editorial content. Because so many of our stores have Facebook accounts as well, it allows us to do more local promotions.

But on our global account, we exploit its strengths and weaknesses as opposed to Twitter’s immediacy in one-to-one. We are able to expand a little bit more in Facebook. We can have longer posts, we can post photos, and we can post videos.

The tradeoff is that Facebook is somewhat more passive. People come to you. People will subscribe to your feed on Facebook, but it tends to get lost more, I think, than on Twitter. That’s just my personal experience.

There is also that community aspect where people can respond, not only to us, but to each other, which, because of the way @replies work on Twitter now, has fallen off quite a lot, but is still quite strong in Facebook.

Whole Foods has more than 175,000 Facebook fans.

Mike: Have most of the folks who have discovered you on Facebook and Twitter discovered you through the good old-fashioned viral nature of the two networks?

Marla: I believe so and I think there’s an awful lot of dissemination from the global account.

On our website, wherever we had a link saying we’re on Twitter, we used to send people out to Twitter.com/wholefoods. We realized we were doing that wrong. What we needed to do and what we have done is built out a page at WholeFoods.com/twitter. On that page, we list all the different accounts we have so people can see, “Oh look. There’s not just this global account. There’s also an account for wine, which I would be interested in, and there’s also an account for my local store, which I would be interested in.”

Because Whole Foods has 150 Twitter accounts, it created a page on its main website to help customers determine which accounts to follow.

Mike: I understand that you also have an iPhone app. Can you tell me a little bit about what it does and how it has helped you?

Marla: It’s called Whole Foods Market Recipe and it’s primarily a recipe search app. We have a database of recipes and the iPhone app lets you search those recipes and then not only search by ingredients, but also filter by special diets such as ” vegan recipes” or “gluten-free recipes.”

It also has a store locater. When you find the store nearest you, which you can do either by the automatic GPS location or by typing in a zip code, it takes you out to the page for that store. From there, that page links out to the Facebook account if they have one and the Twitter account if they have one as well.

Mike: Let’s talk a little bit about the future. What do you see happening from a social media perspective down the road?

Marla: I think the same thing will happen with social media that has happened with everything else. They will begin to consolidate and to align quite a bit more than they are now.

Social media has taught companies an enormous lesson about breaking down walls. But the applications themselves don’t seem to have learned that. They’re going to have to learn to be more open and transparent.

Twitter is especially interesting to me right now in that it’s being driven in two directions simultaneously. The individual users are driving it from the bottom up and Twitter, working very hard on its business model, is trying to drive it from the top down in some directions that will be more attractive to businesses.

Mike: What is on the horizon for Whole Foods as far as social media? Is there anything that you are working on that you could share with us?

Marla: We actually, for the size that we are, have a really tiny social media program right now and I would love to see that expand.

As new apps come along, for example, we’re looking at some of these location apps and trying to figure out how we can participate in some of those. We’ll definitely expand our presence as much as we can.

Mike: Thank you so much, Marla. If folks want to learn more about what you’re doing or more about Whole Foods, what sites would you recommend they go to?

Marla: WholeFoodsMarket.com is our primary website. On the top of every page, you will find links to our Twitter and Facebook pages as well as to our blog. Those are WholeFoodsMarket.com/Twitter, WholeFoodsMarket.com/Facebook, and also our blog at Blog.WholeFoodsMarket.com.

Mike: Thank you so much for all this great information. It was very, very insightful.

Marla: Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it.

Listen to the rest of this interview (below) and learn a lot more about how Whole Foods sets up and manages its social media efforts.

What do you think about Whole Foods’ social media programs? Do you shop Whole Foods and have you engaged them online?  Leave your comments below.

In this interview I talk with Frank Eliason—the senior director of national customer care for Comcast—and the man behind @ComcastCares.

You may have heard that Comcast is on Twitter, but Frank talks about the channels Comcast monitors and how they engage customers. Frank mentions a concept called “peers helping peers.” In the video Frank also talks about what types of employees are best for handling Twitter support. Frank shares how Twitter helped Comcast rapidly identify a problem during the NHL playoffs in less than three minutes. He also shares the biggest mistakes businesses make with social media.

VIEW VIDEO HERE NOW:

I wanted to provide a bit of the back story on this interview. I was attending Blog World and saw Frank on a Panel discussion. I tweeted to him while he was on the stage, saying I would love to interview him.

He responded back almost immediately (via his iPhone), “Sure thing.” And we proceeded to do the unscripted interview you see here right after his presentation. Just goes to show you the power of social media!

What did you think about the video? What are your thoughts about Frank and Comcast?