The Challenge

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Social Media, Metrics, The trap: brain collage (part 2)

Published by Esteban Glas on January 30th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Marketing, Web Marketing, philosophical rant

Social Media Marketing has a different approach than traditional marketing does (Ain’t I good at stating the obvious?!). This is not due to any sort of altruism, but by a clear and simple business need. As people started having conversations, companies were left aside, losing influence, eventually loosing market share and, more importantly, falling in positive public perception charts and brand influence.

I won’t quote any comeback examples for this, those are well known: companies that were getting a lot of heat, started listening and acted accordingly. It paid dividends for a couple of companies so we witness how the trend becomes mainstream on a daily basis.

Why is social media marketing effective? Because it treats human beings not as potential buyers, but like people who do more in life than carrying a credit card. We all like to be treated in a special way, the small details matter. Mark noted this after a vacation. Personalized touches can mean everything. It can turn a detractor into a promoter, an angry and unpleased customer into a brand loving individual.

Of course such turnarounds are only achievable if words are backed up with actions. It is the combination of the human touch (saying “we care”) and a swift resolution (demonstrating “we care”) that makes this possible.

Customers with voice don’t cope well with canned replies from a call center, or the rigidity of traditional press releases, just to give a couple examples. That model will not disappear, but rather reduce the place it occupies in companies. The great disadvantage of more human interactions is that they cost more. For example, a help desk employee that can try to solve an issue and think by himself is prone to require a higher salary that those that can only stick to a pre-written script.

The days of the automated customer and the automated reply are over. Technology has given everyone the potential to be listened. Sure enough, there are changes that will occur. As novelty wears off and ranting your guts out if you had a lousy experience with a company becomes mainstream the signal to noise ratio will, most certainly, change. Yet there is a lesson to be learned, a lesson that can be applied not only online but throughout all areas of a company that ever get to contact customers: the human touch, the one on one interaction is a powerful force that we have only started to unleash.

Social media in general is only bound to get more important in the future. The straight talk of blogs, the peer support of forums and the collective knowledge of wikis will only grow in importance over the next years. Being mainly human-driven activities pinpointing the right resources is as important as the ideas themselves. Building a blog, for instance, is relatively cheap an easy. Getting the right people that can talk in a way that reaches people is much harder. Individuals become key. Great individuals working together build great companies.

This changes should mean a profound change in corporate culture. The minute customers become more than just walking targets for cheap advertising for the decition makers a transformation in much of how we used to do business needs to change. If the change is just superficial, all text and no substance people will notice it and regard the efforts as what they are: lame attempts to mimic what others have done.

Part 3 of this series will deal with the approach to analytics under the light of this line of thought.

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