Social Email Marketing

Jim Sterne: social media KPIs are dependent on the individual organization and its goals

Earlier this year I interviewed Jim Sterne, a few weeks before the SES conference in London, where Jim was a keynote speaker (you can read the interview here). The purpose was that I would attend the event, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it.

However, I closely followed the event online and saw an interview with Jim by Byron Gordon on YouTube (you can watch it below). In the interview Jim announced that he was writing a new book, on measuring the business value of social media marketing. Good news, for me anyway. So I thought it was time for a new interview and asked Jim to give a sneak preview of his book.

He was kind enough to send me much more than a sneak preview. However, let me start with the answers Jim gave to the questions I asked him, before sharing some takeaways from Jim’s book that will be published by John Wiley & Sons.

Mark Price: do you know how much poor customer service is costing you?

The research firm Greenfield Online and Datamonitor/Ovum released a study last week, “The Cost of Poor Customer Service,” that estimated the amount of money lost by U.S. firms due to poor customer service. They estimated the cost to be $83 billion per year. 61% of the time, the lost money goes directly to a competitor.

71 percent of consumers interviewed said that they had ended a business relationship due to poor customer service. In terms of industries, as would be expected, the greatest churn occurs in cable/satellite, financial services and consumer products.