Written on a Friday but posted on a Saturday, here are six posts from around the blogosphere that caught our eye this week. As always, if you have any thoughts on these posts or would like to point us at some of your favourites then let us know in the comments.

1. Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet [VIDEO] – Jennifer Van Grove

Thought we would start off with a video (made by Jesse Thomas) – mainly because we are too lazy to write the stats out plus we all prefer to watch a video than read on a Friday.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

2. The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute – Olivier Blanchard

An excellent post from the Brand Builder on how there is a huge amount of focus on strategy and not enough on implementation which means that the customers never get the experience that was laid out in a strategy. Brands need to plan their social media programs from start to finish and look for additional value propositions outside of talking to customers on Facebook and Twitter in an authentic way.

3. Ten of the World’s Strangest Social Networks – Kristin Burnham

This slideshow of some of the most niche social networks you can think of is, A – fun to look at and B – a good example of how like minds are finding eachother online and defining their own communities. Expect this to continue and for brands to seek them out more and more as a more efficient alternative to the major networks.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Social Media Marketing - John Jantsch

Read the quote in the post by Douglas Adams, it’s a good philosophical thought on the perception of new technologies depending how old you are. A sweeping generalization, yes…but nice none the less!

5. Do websites even matter any more? – MARK W. SCHAEFER

Of course they do. A good post highlighting the need to make use of your ‘homebase’. It is probably possible, for the first time to be engaged with your customers online and not have a website. But the website is still the best place for registrations, transactions and ‘official contact’.

6. 3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age - Dallas Lawrence

There has been a number of high profile brand social media implosions in the last couple of years and this post looks at the new rules for crisis management and response. Walls of silence, advertising your way out of a crisis or being slow to respond are not viable tactics brand protection tactics anymore. Social media loves spreading bad news and people have got each other to get the ‘truth’ from.

I had to buy some new hardware over the weekend, in fact I should have bought it about a year ago but have been delaying but that’s a different story. This was not a happy shopping experience, and got me thinking about how some organisations have lost sight of how to provide their customers with the service they need…and instead focus on the service they think is important.

Every company or organization (large or small) has one big question to ask itself before any program and that includes marketing, customer service and research  – How can we make the organization more useful?

For every business this will be different depending on what they do. If you are a restaurant, then it could be how can we make it easy for customers to book or how can we let them know how good our food is? For lawyers, it might be how can we get free, understandable advice to potential clients? For a sports team it should be how can we build closer relationships to our fans? The store in question was a major high street retailer so, n this instance, it should have been how can we make it as easy as possible for him to buy from us. To give you an idea of my pain, it went something like this.

Saturday – A reconnaissance mission online and then to the physical stores identified the hardware needed. (I should add at this point, I couldn’t buy the goods at that point due to a curveball from the bank), when asking if I could reserve the products, the answer was No as they only had one in stock and couldn’t reserve their last one.

Sunday morning – I call the companies central customer service line who said not to return to the store nearest me as they still only had one in stock and instead, I should drive twenty five minutes to a different store where “they had over six in stock”.

Sunday early afternoon – I arrive at store with my reservation code. (note – a frightening number of store employees were on the floor, but all rigorously sticking to their patches, which were empty but it seemed they couldn’t take any initiative and help a customer in a different zone). I was told to go and queue up for the reservations and spend those fifteen minutes wondering why one of the available staff couldn’t jump in and help? Finally I reach the front of the queue to be told to go back to the floor staff as they have to get it from the stock room. A store assistant returns looking worried and calls for reinforcements. Four of them huddle round their in store stock system then one breaks off to inform me they have none in stock.

I ask the usual questions, which get me no where so decide (with my limited but comparable IT knowledge) to have a look at the stock system. After a couple of minutes I start to sympathize with the staff as whoever implemented this isn’t giving them a chance to do their job. The system was clunky, and more importantly was lying to them, apparently there were four of the items I wanted in stock! The good news was they ‘definitely’ had some in stock at their store another twenty five minutes away.

Sunday, late afternoon. Finally manage to buy what I wanted a day and a half late.

When the red mist dispersed, I was left contemplating the following points from the experience:-

- It wasn’t the staff on the floor’s fault. They aren’t being trained properly on the importance of customer service.

-  They aren’t being given the technical tools to do their job properly even if they wanted to.

- There were too many bodies on the floor. Stores think that having more bodies on the ground will equal better customer service, it doesn’t – better trained and motivated staff equals better customer service. Having lots of people there while not providing excellent service adds insult to injury!

- They aren’t being paid enough to care  (unconfirmed but a good guess)

To re-iterate , If you are in the retail game, the answer to “how do we make the organization more useful to the customers” is  - Make it easy for them to buy your products. This means looking at the holistic experience a customer will have online and offline. As soon as it is established that this customer wants to buy from you, there should be multiple touchpoints to facilitate the sale – over the phone, in the store, through the website, via social media channels...wherever the customer wants!

Christmas 2009 was not a happy time for Eurostar and was even worse for any travelers who used the service. The short version is, the week before Christmas hundreds of passengers were stranded under the Channel for over ten hours as three trains broke down in the tunnel. To add insult to injury, Eurostar’s only active Twitter account was being used to push out promotional deals when many Twitter users were on the trains trying to find out how to get home. The usual social media malestrom ensued, I wrote about the incident here.

This morning, I recieved an email from Eurostar reaching out to people who had written about the incident and explaining the measures they have taken to improve communications in the future. While it takes more than an email to a few bloggers to rectify a brand implosion, the first step is to acknowledge there was a problem, take it on the chin and then outline the steps that will be taken to improve. The full email is below for your viewing pleasure (Eurostar were happy for me to post it)…

Hello

You posted about the Eurostar trains that broke down in December, and made the point about the need for better communication with our passengers.

While you don’t normally post on transport issues, I thought you might be interested to see a copy of the Independent Review into the events, and our response.

You can find our response here http://bit.ly/9idW1l together with a visual representation of what happened on the day.

We are extremely sorry for what happened, and take the situation very seriously. We’ve already taken action to address many of the Review’s recommendations, and we are committed to implementing all of its recommendations as quickly as possible. Above all we are focused on:

• Improving passenger care in disruption
• Improving communications, and
• Strengthening the resilience of our trains

The Eurostar communications team will be providing information and updates at @eurostarcomms where we’ll be working closely with @little_break and @creamoflondon. You’ll find us making corporate announcements there as well as reporting back should there be any key service updates.

I hope you have time to look at the review findings, particularly on the communications side of things.  If you have any thoughts please don’t hesitate to let me know.

All the best

Of course this only the beginning of a rebuilding strategy but you have to start somewhere. The next steps are to implement and sustain the improvements but it is a good example of listening to your detractors and instead of adopting a ‘we know best’ strategy and hoping it goes away, taking it on board and using the negative to create a positive. With all the social media channels and tools now at the disposal of disgruntled customers and bloggers, as painful as it may be for big brands to swallow, it is the only way to start rebuilding.