I recently watched a video of how Jennifer Love, Senior Vice President of Communications at H&R Block, uses Social Media to engage their customers and relationship build with consumers. They research where their consumers like to go such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Blog writing and want to touch their customers where they are currently talking. 

H&R Block has an active fan page of over 16,000 fans in Facebook. They use social media to posts tax tips, help consumers get ready for tax season, post what questions to ask tax advisors, and even if going it alone and doing their own taxes, they post how to prepare your own taxes and post helpful content to help people through the process. 

They find Twitter is a great early alarm system for them. They post comments for customers having challenges out there and have had several instances where customers had checked in on foursquare, started Tweeting on Twitter about their experience at the tax desk. If the consumer’s experience was not favorable, they are able to monitor and give the consumer to a different tax pro to ensure their tax experience is what H&R Block wanted it to be. They also use the consumer information to find out when one of their tax pros are not doing what is needed and use that information as a learning experience to train the tax pros and staff to become more customer service related for consumer needs. 

Twitter is a great example to use information for monitoring quick content, but be sure to invite a person offline that may be saying negative things about your company to resolve an issue one to one and not turn into a public conversation. H&R Block finds that 6 out of 10 people they invite off line goes back online saying “thank you” for helping them solve their issue. Be sure to protect the privacy of each consumer that you talk offline with. 

Since we all work, live and play in an instantaneous world, we need to have a mass adoption of social media. Social media is the wave to make things happen and respond timely as needed to manage your reputation online. Here are some great takeaway tips you can learn from H&R Block to adopt in your own business. 

• Engage with customers on their channel of choice. When you engage with customers on their channel, then you have their attention, they feel comfortable and will respond better to your message. 
• Use different tactics on Facebook, Twitter and on your blog. Post tips and advice on Facebook. Twitter is used as an alarm system to alert when there is customer service problems. It allows you to be able to respond quickly and move the conversation offline. Blogging is used to have experts answer one-on-one questions, along with getting advice and help. 
• Share tips and helpful content as related to customer needs. By monitoring the conversations in social media, you are able to tailor your tips and advice posts to what your customers need. 
• Create a one-on-one environment by assigning an expert for monitoring results. Having a dedicated person or full department (if a larger company) that monitors social media for issues and questions. Consider having experts readily available to answer such questions. 
• Invite people to go off the grid to find solutions one-on-one. Be a good listener. Get to know the people you are conversing with and let them get to know you. Then they will be more likely to talk with you off of social media. (On average, (6 out of 10 of these people come back online to say how happy they are.) 
• Be empathic - think about solutions and try a variety of different things. When people come to you in distress or with problems, offer a variety of solutions to solve the problem. 
• Set up an internal social media hub. Have a social media savvy expert ready to respond to questions as they arise Set up a person in your company that has a lot of product and service knowledge or set up teams in each department with experts (if a larger company) so that when a problem arises, you have a quick and timely response ready. Set up a dashboard to be able to monitor conversations so you can be on top and react quickly. 
• Determine how to improve the customer’s experience. Jennifer Love uses Radian6 to manage trending topics, know who has answered what and can follow up timely. This is a paid social media listening dashboard. Lots of corporations use it. 
• Leverage generic answers to help thousands of people. Because people expect answers fast, be prepared with fact sheets and post answers to questions in easy to find places for more generic questions that arise.