Customer Service & Retention

Social Media: Who Needs a Strategy? You Do.

23 Jun, 2010

By: Carle Henry,Kathy van de Laar

So now that your interest is piqued about social media and what it can do for you, let’s talk strategy. If you’re company is like many companies, you know you need a strategy but you don’t know why. There’s a pressure to get involved and not be left behind that eventually triggers an action on the social media front. It doesn’t do anyone any good to invest in twitter, blogs or other social media if you don’t have a clear ambition, you don’t know what your goals are, and you aren’t prepared to measure the impact.

The focus of this article is to make sure you pause…ever so briefly…to develop your social media strategy. We want you to think big, but start small and act intelligently to deliver lasting value for your company and your customers. It pays to think it through first.

Why do you want to get on the social media bandwagon?

Are you feeling the pressure? Has someone in your company already thrown down the gauntlet by asking ‘what are we doing with twitter, Facebook, You Tube?’ You’re not alone. Lots of companies just start doing ‘something’ so that they aren’t left behind.

Unfortunately, many find themselves three or four months into it before they realize that two or three different groups within their organization are ‘leading’ social media efforts for their company. No consistent strategy exists (reminiscent of the days when ecommerce launched). Departments scrambled to create websites with little regard to their companies brand, policies, etc.

Some reasons to get on the bandwagon (from Eric Qualman and the Social Media Revolution, 2009):

  1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers, and 96 percent of them have joined a social network.

  2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years). Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

  3. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.

  4. 80 percent of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter - people update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

  5. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

  6. The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.

  7. 54 percent equals the number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily.

  8. 25 percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

  9. 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.

  10. 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations; only 14 percent trust advertisements.

     

Makes you think, doesn’t it. The only thing that is certain is that you can’t ignore this trend. If you want to reach the right people, if you want to be where your customers are, you need to have a solid social media strategy that gets you off on the right foot and helps you grow successfully into this space in the future.

It’s important to make good choices upfront about what you want to get from your social media strategy and which channels are relevant for your company and your customers. If your customers aren’t present in certain social channels, you can question the wisdom of making these channels a priority. Gather customer insights into your social options and challenge yourself to make choices about which channels you adopt first. It’s better to start small and gain some insights yourself before you step into the wide world of social media. Sometimes starting small is better and if you don’t have any experience with social media, this is one of those times.

Your goals and objectives with social media

There are lots of ways you can use social media to strengthen your company’s position in the marketplace. It’s important to make good choices upfront and to understand the consequences of your choices. Some choices mean long-term commitment to your customers so diving in and deciding after a few months that it’s just not for you can cost you big time in loyalty and credibility with customers and prospects.

There are many possible strategies. Most companies have gone down the public relations path (poorly admittedly) while others jump into Customer Service. We’ll focus on a few other options.

When your strategy is branding

Social media is a popular way to introduce new companies and new brands to the marketplace. It’s a cheap and easy way to introduce a large audience to who you are as a company. But you have to be smart about it. You can’t just show up one day to a community and ask what they think about you, or worse, try to sell them on your company. This type of social media is about building awareness, about creating exposure, about creating interest in, and demand for, your products.

The subtle approach works best by providing community members with information and where possible educating them about a subject that your company specializes in. You can start small by identifying a few relevant communities and experiment a bit. When you’ve gotten the hang of it and understand what types of social media channels are most relevant for you and your company, you can seek out similar forums and branch out.

Social media is also good for brands that have been around for awhile but haven’t really explored the frontier of communities, forums and blogs. These companies have an opportunity to expand their reach to other types of customers, and to make their products more relevant by making them more accessible and by providing new information and uses to an existing group of customers. In some cases the right positioning can help a company to revitalize its image. Companies with a stale brand have an opportunity to rejuvenate themselves and their customer base if they play the social media game right.

Social media can also help to personalize your company, to extend its look and feel to create a ‘personality.' This personality can help you become more approachable, more trusted, more helpful. But be careful, your social media ‘personality’ has to fall within the parameters of the brand values. It has to combine the desire to be personal with the values that the company stands for. Depending on what kind of market you’re in, this can be tricky business and shouldn’t be left to the junior communication specialist. Once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

You may think that social media is just for the big boys. The opposite is actually true! Social media is the great equalizer for many small and medium-sized businesses. Today when you have an effective website, no one knows how big your company actually is. And as long as you follow through on your commitments, no one is going to give it a second thought. Everyone has their customer service horror stories so when a company gets it right, customers are satisfied. When a company gets it consistently right, customers are loyal. Small companies are using this as a competitive advantage.

When your strategy is product awareness

When a company already has an existing fan base (Apple, anyone?), social media can be a great way to introduce a new product to your biggest fans. This boosts your product awareness. It’s also a great way to reward your loyal followers by giving them the first-look at your new products.

By providing customers and potential customers with insights into your products you can create interest and demand even before your products hit the shelf. One provider of net-enabled TV’s launched their product via a series of trade introductions with a goal of creating buzz. It worked. Within a day, the techno-fans were speculating about the product online and providing good insights into what information was needed by the hard-core technical fan base, alongside the more lifestyle oriented buyers.

When your strategy is customer feedback

Gathering customer feedback is another reason to turn to social media. Customer feedback is a step further than listening. Using social media for customer feedback is all about actively listening to your customers, taking the good (new uses and other ideas) with the bad (think complaints here).

There are some low-hanging opportunities if you’re looking for some smart ways to start:

  • If you have a blog, ask readers of your blog for feedback. This is low risk, personal and will get you off the ground. You can ask for feedback on new products, new ideas about usage or tips for existing products. Southwest Airlines is a good example of a company that uses its blog to gather feedback from customers

  • Run your ‘not-ready-for-primetime’ product ideas past some interested users. It’s a great way to get the customer perspective on some things that can help you to make better choices about what you do with these products. And your fans will appreciate having a preview of the product before the rest of the world.

     

Customer feedback is a noble goal, but with this strategy, you have to be prepared for the consequences. If you ask them, they will answer. And they will also have expectations of what you do with their comments and feedback. You have to be prepared to get into it for the long-haul with this type of strategy. So take the time on the front-end to think this through and get your process worked out before you start talking about it in the social space. If you don’t deliver, you run the risk of alienating your biggest fans.

When your strategy is customer engagement

Customer engagement is the highest form of social media strategy and implies a true long-term commitment. This strategy is not for the faint-hearted, but the real visionaries are already playing in this space. Dell is a good example of a company that has taken their social media strategy seriously and built it into a customer engagement channel. Another good example is Sears. While considered an older brand, they have jumped on Social with the "mysears" approach. They have about 1.9 million visitors monthly who offer product advice and recommendations to other shoppers.

Customer engagement involves true customer interaction. It’s listening, interacting, advising and advocating in a transparent, trusted, and authentic manner. This is a great ambition for every company, but no company should start here. It’s too risky if you haven’t taken the time to build your skills by experimenting on other levels first. Before you can really engage your customers, you need to prove to yourself and to your customers that you can listen, provide trusted information, and gather and use customer feedback. When you’ve mastered the basics, then (and only then) is it time to join the big leagues.

And finally…

If you’re really committed, the sky is the limit in what you can do with your strategy. But remember, you want to think big (develop a multi-year strategy), start small (decide where you can start without being overwhelmed) and act intelligently (use your learnings to branch out and expand your horizons).

The real winners of the next decade will be the companies that can effectively connect with their customers and potential customers. The true leaders in this space are already busy creating and capturing buzz and using it to drive above-the-line marketing as well as below-the-line, one-to-one channel activities. There are lots of tools out there that can help you to do a better job of implementing whatever strategy you choose. Next time we’ll take a look at which ones are best suited to support you in translating your strategy into practice.