Richard Pachter: Social Media

Social Media

My title at TracFone was Online Brand Marketing Manager. My primary mission was establishing a social media presence for its brands.

The company had a challenging relationship with its customers.

Its cellphones are “prepaid” (no bills; airtime and data are purchased in advance) and are relatively inexpensive, but customers mostly posted about service and technical issues on message boards, blogs and social media.

TracFone had three brands: TracFone, NET10 and Safelink. The day I joined, Straight Talk, a partnership with WalMart, was introduced as a fourth brand. This presented a genuinely unique opportunity.

We created a Facebook page for Straight Talk customers. It was immediately embraced as the go-to point for any issues with their handsets, service, billing — anything and everything related to the new brand.

Within a fairly short amount of time, this Facebook page chalked up 200,000 fans despite no advertising or outside promotion. There weren’t even any links or social media logos on product packaging or in any advertising, just a link on the website to the Facebook page.

After creating several alias accounts on Facebook, I responded to each post, answering questions and referring some customers to “executive resolution” in the main office (rather than the usual customer service person, who may have been based remotely). I also posted daily sales messages and “engagement” posts — not just on the Straight Talk page, but also on the TracFone, Net10 and Safelink pages, plus blog posts, tweets and YouTube videos.

I had no training in customer service but got great support from the technical staff and eventually created accounts for several of them on each brand's page, though Straight Talk grabbed the majority of our time and attention.

We also created separate technical support pages on Facebook for each brand, in an effort to move the posts off the main page. This effort was unsuccessful, so we established separate off-site technical support forums but continued to handle issues on each brand’s main Facebook page by deploying Parature, a customer-support tool.

I worked closely with the tech people, monitoring their posts, ensuring the proper tone and procedures, and answering their questions (which was interesting, given my lack of technical and customer service experience). I monitored the forums for the same things and manually removed spam and inappropriate posts (as I did on Facebook for all four brands).

My department was principally charged with acquisition, not retention, but we owned the online space for the company, so I was essentially a one-person social media squad.

And since acquisition and sales were how we were measured, I continued posting offers, promotions, new product announcements and more on Facebook and in blog posts. I also regularly posted on YouTube.

In addition, I reported weekly and monthly on social media activity, including sentiment analysis through Radian6 and Infegy’s Social Radar applications, as well as Facebook Insights, AddThis ShareThis and other measurement tools.

Following are examples of my social media marketing for TracFone and its brands.