A conversation that seems to repeat itself with my colleagues from our industry is: How many corporate twitter feeds or Facebook pages are the right number? It suggests a certain amount of indecision that it keeps boomeranging, which is never a good thing
More importantly that it comes up at all. The principle of marketing engagement, and indeed social is quite simple. It’s niche. Social is all about communities that share an interest, no matter how fleeting, coming together to discuss it. Successful marketing is based on focusing propositions to as specific customer group as possible. So the principle is simple, you need as many channels/feeds as there are identifiable, substantial and genuine interest groups.
The harder question then becomes: Should everyone be engaging with customers through social?
Well, probably not. Not everyone at my cable company answers my calls – that’s obvious by how long I have to wait on hold. However, we will all need to be able to engage with our colleagues, suppliers and other stakeholders using social media platforms.
Not everything is needed right here, right now, but as demand increases it will need to be.
A looming demand is increasing in our enterprises that mean that the whole business needs to be social. That is, have access and be adept as using the different tools and platforms. That means a single interface for managing multiple platforms, at the desk and on the go. With a single view of the customer, a simple robust access system with all the knowledge of the business at the user’s finger tips.
Now that’s what I call a really hard question: How do you build a digital business like that?
I think the mechanics of creating a single point of convergance of all the 'stuff' is easy.
ReplyDeleteI think one needs to understand how one then responds via the chosen access method taking in to consideration the capacity of each to handle what could be incompatible data return i.e. twitter maximum charactet capability - SMS text language.
I think we swing it round and go to customer and ask them what platform works best for them with the MO of their working profile - we then have to edit and re language the nature of our communication to accomodate the diffrent limitations of the platforms.
I do not see it as a hard thing as long as we know what the customer prefers for lightweight contact and how we deliver heavyweight contact should it be required which the chosen platform cannot manage.
To me it is all about language and making sure we are using the appropiate language versus the limitations or the digestive system of the chosen platform.
You make a good point Richard, thank you for commenting. However, few brands have the luxury of starting from a blank sheet of paper.
ReplyDeleteAdapting our existing tone of voice to emerging technologies, building on legacy systems and not loosing sight of the customer expereince is hard, in whatever language you use
Understood but I wonder if we sometimes fail to understand that the language we speak is not necessarily the language a customer understands or is an appropiate format for a particular deliver mechanism.
ReplyDeleteAlso the challenge is to be seen and heard above the clamour and noise created by the multi point attack most customers endure when they themselves have adopted all the platforms for receiving incoming stuff.
How many of us miss the key message with value as it fights its way through the crowd?
Two key questions to ask customers etc are:
One - what do you expect to receive from us?
Two - how would you expect it to be delivered?
I'll go now or I may just babble - remember you can txt me - fax me - phone me - mail me - email me - FB me - twitter me -skype me - instant message me - and......even send a pigeon to me but make sure I am going to be interested in what is said - make sure I understand why it has been said and make sure it was relevant to me in the first place.