Social networks and other manifestations of the online applications and platforms collectively described as ‘Web 2.0’ are playing an increasing role in the lives of consumers.

Consumers are not only spending more time using Web 2.0 applications like Facebook to socialise and stay connected with friends and family; they are also using them to become more informed about a broad range of issues and topics – ranging from potential holiday destinations and career plans to world events.

Importantly, they are using their new found social connections and research power to make purchasing decisions, by making enquiries about other consumers’ usage of specific products and services and experiences in dealing with vendors.

Web 2.0 is having a dramatic impact on the way companies like yours interact with customers, and in particular how they use the online channel as a customer acquisition, customer service and customer retention environment.

If your company sells directly to consumers, then it is very likely that dozens of current and potential customers are researching your company’s brand and product or service quality reputation while you’re reading this.

Hyro has identified four key trends that you should factor into your plans for customer engagement via your company’s digital channel:

Consumer preferences
Customer preferences for brands, products and services are no longer based exclusively on information communicated via traditional media or even company websites. In fact, consumers increasingly report that they consider traditional marketing an unreliable source of information, reflecting mass media’s diminishing effect.

Customers’ preferences, decisions and perceptions of your brand, products and services are increasingly influenced by information communicated via channels beyond your direct control, such as peer reviews and recommendations (or “positive word-of-mouth”).

Consumer decision-making process
As these uncontrollable factors influence consumer behaviour, the traditional customer purchase process is evolving. Influencing customer behaviour by traditional marketing media and practices is becoming less and less effective, and new approaches to influencing the consumer decision-making process must be adopted.

Customer advocacy
In this new environment, a greater emphasis must be placed on enhancing the customer experience of your company and its brand, products or services. This includes meeting customers’ information needs prior to purchase, and satisfying their customer service expectations during and after purchase. Meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations is the key to generating positive word-of-mouth.

One-to-one marketing
Consumers are increasingly expecting organisations to respond to this rise in consumer empowerment and individualism by providing personalised products, services and product/service experiences. Whereas this is quite difficult in traditional offline customer service contexts (such as call centres and retail outlets), it is comparatively easier and cost effective to achieve in the online channel.

The role of your company’s website, and other customer engagement activities conducted via online channels should be reviewed in this changed context, with a view to identifying opportunities for achieving meaningful customer interaction and communication that not only drives customer acquisition and loyalty but also positive referrals and recommendations.

The digital age continues to revolutionise the way organisations deliver goods and services. In addition, the proliferation of mobile devices and the associated instantaneous delivery has also exponentially increased the expectations of consumers and constituents.

If we think of this as the digital challenge, an enterprise must balance the diametrically opposed constraints of being more responsive and agile while keeping information, applications and services secure.

A key enabler that businesses need for the Digital Economy is a toolset to manage identity on a contextual basis.

In a business sense a person may also hold employee, prospect, partner, shareholder or other relationships. While all of those contexts are clear, the things that make them different are also the things that make them the same. Thus organisations need to manage digital identities that truly reflect the real world where people are part of various communities, business roles, customers, consumers and constituents.

Some of the challenges an effective identity management solution must meet for the digital age include:

• federated access
• single sign on
• authorisation support
• cloud readiness
• platform independence
• identity lifecycle and role management

If you are interested in discussing your identity management needs with please contact Hyro.

It is not often that one hears the word Microsoft in a conversation about an open source software project. That’s why I was interested to chat with the MahTweets project overlord Paul Jenkins (@Aeoth) at Microsoft’s REMIX10 Conference (#remixau) about this social media aggregation client.

I asked what is special and different about this project, and Paul said:

“unlike a lot of other clients this one focuses solely on Windows, rather than trying to be all things to all platforms”

He also noted that “this enables us to personalise it a lot better, it’s an open source project too.”

Then I asked what are some of the cool features of MahTweets? And Paul’s answer was:

“Streaming realtime search is probably the best feature. During the ABC program Q and A (#qanda) there are so many tweets it’s hard to keep up and our streaming search pushes all of the tweets to your MahTweets client.”

I noted that it’s pretty unusual to see both ‘open source’ and ‘Microsoft’ in the same sentence. Then Nick Hodge from Microsoft explained that “the reason why MahTweets is so advanced is that it uses a lot of pre-existing open source elements such as TweetSharp, Hammock, Json.NET, IronPython along with the goodwill and effort of the development community.”

Nick also commented that “it comes down to making a client you can use day in and day out for things like Twitter and Facebook”.

Paul noted that there are about 2,500 users each for Twitter and Facebook via OAuth.

Which had me asking how they have found working in with Twitter and Facebook APIs and OAuth?

Paul said “I like OAuth; Twitter’s API is shaky at best - they’ll change things that break 90% of the clients and change it back because it doesn’t work; and Facebook is worse. The Facebook documentation is very bad.”

You can checkout MahTweets at www.mahtweets.com