An Old-School Social Media Success

Using social media can help you achieve lots of big goals—gaining recognition as a thought leader, generating leads, pumping up sales, etc.

But just as often, success in social media is simply about finding more efficient, effective ways to solve problems and increase customer satisfaction.

Take this Pitney Bowes example we just read about.

The postage meter people decided that maybe they were spending too much time and money on customer support phone calls. So they created an online user forum where customers could pose and answer each other’s questions, moderated by the company.

With the help of customers’ diverse content input—kind of a crowdsourced FAQ—Pitney Bowes’ forum quickly delivered robust answers to many of the most common questions that people used to call the hotline for. In the process, they’re saving the company money and customers lots of stressful time on the phone.

And maybe the most important (and reassuring) lesson here is that they did it without using the latest and greatest platforms. No Twitter, no Facebook, no StumbleUpon—just a clear objective and good ol’ forum, with great results.