Hey Retail! It's time for your business to get serious about social engagement. Learn more in our whitepaper.

1. hey, retail! get serious about
social customer engagement

2. 2
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lithium.com | © 2013 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Lithium social software helps the world’s most iconic brands
increase loyalty, reduce support costs, drive word-of-mouth
marketing, and accelerate innovation.
Lithium helps brands to build vibrant customer communities that:
contents
1 intro
2 social customer engagement for retail
4 what does ‘enaged’ look like?
5 relationships, deep engagement
6 how to build stong relationships with customers
7 trust vs. relevance
8 co-creating long-term value
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Imagine a time when your acquisition
strategy is roaring.
Your brand’s message is set to go viral, your sensational
social media strategies are clicking away, and you are
launching the greatest virtual cocktail party social has ever
seen. The music is great; the drinks are flowing; and the
crowd pulses to the beat of your brand. Through Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc., your foray into the social
customer experience has now attracted the perfect set of
consumers. These consumers, or as we call them, superfans,
are fully engaged and really dig your products. They are
both interested in and capable of bringing serious value to
your company.
These superfans are so passionate that they will donate their
time and skills to help your company with support, marketing
and innovation. If you play your cards right by effectively
engaging, empowering and inspiring them to do so, these
customers will keep your social party happy and growing,
now and far into the future.
Social customer engagement, however, is no easy task.
Your customers are constantly swamped with invitations to
connect with other brands through social media. Their limited
time and attention, together with their invaluable loyalty, will
go to those who win on the social customer experience. That’s
why your engagement strategy is so important—in order to
take on the competition.
intro

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social customer
engagement
for retail
Social engagement is not just about technology. It’s
about social customers themselves who have permanently
disrupted the traditional, sales-based business model.
The opportunities of this tectonic shift challenge retailers
to engage their social customers with more than price alone.
Market share now increasingly goes to brands that master
the customer experience in stores and online mastering the
social customer experience in stores and online.
Engagement is about nurturing prospects and cultivating
customer relationships. It picks up what your social customer
acquisition strategy delivers, and then ratchets it up to the
next level. Taken together, your acquisition strategy and
customer engagement form the tactics that sustain the social
customer’s attention span and make customers want to stay
with you rather than give their attention to other competitors.
US social commerce sales, 2011-2015
Sales of physical goods through online social networks
will grow by 93% per year in the US, reaching $14 billion
by 2015.
Source: Booz & Co.
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
$1B
$3B
$5B
$9B
$14B

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Let’s dig deeper into these relationships in the context of
the customer experience and discover how brands can
build strong, lasting and valuable relationships with their
customers. We’ll unveil the essential differences between
public social networks and communities highlighting topics
like interaction, trust and relevance. Then we’ll show why
social networks are better for acquisition, but that channels
like Facebook and Twitter have some deal-breaking
limitations when it comes to customer engagement.
Finally, we’ll explore how to co-create value with and
between customers, and how communities and superfans
play special roles in winning the social customer experience.
80%
74%
72%
42%
32%
because of social media,
I am more likely to:
Try new things based on friends’ suggestions
Encourage my friends to try new products
Stay more engaged with the brands I like
Share any negative experiences with brands or products
Not buy certain products because I learned of a negative
customer experience
Source: CMO Council

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what does
‘enaged’ look like?
Truly engaged customers are more than enthusiastic fans.
They’re interactive participants in activities that help define
your brand’s value. Consider the following social customer
activities and behaviors:
From consumption to co-creation, social customers engage
at various levels of activity. To foster engagement, we need
to find and nurture users inclined to progress through those
increasing levels of activity until they are co-creating value
with you. This process involves moving your social customers
from simply connecting with your brand to interacting with it.
Connection vs. Interaction
Your acquisition strategy is naturally designed to help you
make lots of connections (e.g. likes, fans, followers, and
friends) which are fairly simple to make and easy to maintain.
Think of connection as the active engagement.
Measuring success solely by the number of connections
you’re able to make through social media is a very common
practice for businesses today. While it is important to connect
with customers, just having a lot of likes and followers does
not constitute a business. To be competitive you need those
connections to engage in a way that is profitable for everyone.
It’s critical to remember that each connection we make with a
social customer only has potential value.
Interaction is what turns simple customer connections into
valuable assets—assets that drive influence and build loyalty.
They’re what fuel the social customer experience to make your
social investment really pay off. So, while connections certainly
have value, interactions (a much stronger form of engagement)
have much greater value. Connections must interact with your
brand and other customers in order to drive:
1. Influence—through interactions, customer
connections generate stronger, more trusted
relationships, higher participation (support, help),
and user-generated content (reviews, knowledge
articles, or advocacy) that can significantly affect
consumer purchase decisions.
2. Loyalty—interactions build the stronger and deeper
customer-brand relationships that lead to persistent
consumption of your products and services.
Your role is to empower your best customers to interact in
ways that benefit them, you, and other customers. Those
interactions—and their resulting relationships—are what you
are trying to make fun, easy, and mutually rewarding.

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relationships,
deep engagement
The goal of engagement is to build and strengthen
relationships with and between your customers. Building
any relationship, however, requires interacting with the other
party. You can’t bring your social customers home with you
like a team of enthusiastic new recruits, run off to the office
for a week, and then expect them to wear your jersey or go to
bat for you. You must faithfully, consciously interact with them
in order to get them to respond to you, know and value you
just as you do in return.
Interactions are much harder to maintain than connections
because they require persistent actions over time. Social
networks determine who connects with whom, but they don’t
determine who interacts with whom, or how. That’s up to
the social customers themselves—and what drives those
interactive decisions is their own personal inspiration. Your
job is to find out how to tap into that inspiration.
Strong and Weak Ties—We Need Both
Not every relationship within a social network is equally
strong or reciprocated. We all have a range of relationship
strengths and interaction depths. This is what we mean by
tie-strength. Some relationships in social networks are
strong and some are weak depending on your relationship
with that person.
In social networks, we need both. Weak ties give your
messages reach, helping you to reach a wider audience. By
virtue of their diversity and sheer number, weak ties tend to
propagate brand messages further and to more disparate
parts of the social network. Strong ties, on the other hand,
are what lead to loyalty, repeat purchases, persistent
consumption and ultimately, advocacy.

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Here are the pillars of a basic social strategy for
strengthening relationships with (and between)
your customers.
1. Time
Time spent together increases tie strength. Most importantly,
the desire to spend time together has to be mutual.
Strategy: Know when your customers want to spend time with
you and be there for them.
2. Intensity
Intensity is the most difficult component to control. The
intensity a customer feels for a brand will always be less than
it is for a friend, however, when you tap into your customers’
passions, finding topics they care about, your chances for
creating that intensity improve.
Strategy: Appeal to greater causes—things that have higher
meaning that your customers feel strongly about—not just for
your brand.
3. Trust
Transparent communication channels create an environment
that’s more conducive to building trust. In this case we’re talking
about two types of transparency: B2C—business-to-customer
(your outbound messages on social channels), and C2C—
customer-to-customer (peer-to-peer community discussions).
Also, because people trust themselves, they tend to trust
brands that co-create with them. Here we’re talking about
two types of co-creation: passive co-creation (listening
and collecting customer input), and active co-creation
(crowdsourcing and collaboratively filtering customer-
generated ideas).
Strategy: Create transparent and authentic communication
channels to and among customers, and co-create with them.
4. Reciprocity
Reciprocity means two-way reciprocal services—both from
B2C, and from C2C. Your job is to make it easy for your
customers to help other customers of yours, and then to
reward them properly.
Strategy: Let your customers help you—and one another! A
small investment from the customer is valuable in building
deeper relationships, but it must be voluntary.
how to build stong
relationships with
customers

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Deep engagement requires both trust and relevance. When
either quality is lacking, the odds of conversion plummet.
Creating trust and relevance, however, are not equally
possible over any social media channel. Social networks and
communities have different strengths and an effective social
strategy plays to them.
A social network is there to maintain
established relationships.
A community is there to build relationships
around a common interest.
Social networks have high levels of trust because they’re
comprised of people we already know and trust. Communities,
on the other hand, have high levels of relevance, because
everyone gathers there around a common interest.
Relevance is what gives you depth—without it your
engagement tactics will stall. Without relevance your non-
photographer friends might still look at the camera you
recommended because you—a strong tie—recommended it
over Facebook, but they won’t actually buy it. They won’t buy it
if it isn’t already relevant to their needs, interests and desires.
Conversion requires relevance.
Here’s where it gets interesting: It is vastly easier to build
trust than it is to create relevance. Specifically, it’s easier to
create trust within a community that already has relevance,
than it is to create relevance within a social network that
already has trust.
We can build trust within a community, but relevance is very
hard to create—especially among strong ties—unless it
already exists.
trust vs. relevance
Social networks feature high levels of trust.
Communities feature high levels of relevance.
It is vastly easier to cultivate trust
than to create relevance.

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Within a community it’s shared interest without ulterior
motive that forms the foundation for trust-building
communication. That’s your engagement strategy’s target:
common interest. Connect and build weak ties based on
a common interest, then strengthen those ties through
engaging interactions within the community. In turn, the
relationships that grow into strong ties get maintained over
social networks.
Public sites that use stream interactions (like Facebook
fan page wall feeds or Twitter streams) are great for
news discovery. On the other hand, they tend to be very
noisy channels and only support relatively shallow
conversations. Deep conversation is key to engagement
and to building relationships.
What keeps your customers engaged for the long term
isn’t rank, special icons or points so much as the sense
that they are helping you create something of actual value
to themselves, other fans, the company and society. We’re
talking about things like contributing ideas that make it into
products, authoring articles for knowledge bases, answering
questions for support forums, or spreading the word far more
efficiently than your company ever could.
Loyalty itself is a long-term value. The long-term strategy
for your social customers’ engagement is about setting up
a trusted community. It’s about creating an engaging social
customer experience through which consumers can access
trusted, relevant content, where you can build and strengthen
relationships, and where you can foster value co-creation
between customers and the brand. Value for everyone means
everyone wins.
co-creating
long-term value
awareness
interest
desire
action
.