Creative Concepts

Amber Naslund recently touched on a big disconnect in social media: the gap between the employees who oversee a company’s web channels and the employees who actually have the power to improve a customer’s experience.

Her points lead to a valid question: are you using social media to evaluate your customers, or to engage them?

Evaluating means you’re doing things like…

• Monitoring what’s being said about your brand
• Reporting those brand perceptions to your company’s decision-makers
• Predicting the likely impact (good or bad) of those perceptions
• Measuring those perceptions over time, against evolving feedback
• Changing your messaging strategies accordingly

Engaging means you’re also doing things like:

• Contacting happy customers to thank them for their business
• Contacting unhappy customers to help solve their problems
• Rewarding your best customers with perks and benefits
• Soliciting feedback and suggestions from your customers (or detractors)
• Implementing those suggestions to improve customers’ experiences

The problem is, the employees who are often best-trained or best-equipped to monitor your brand online are not always similarly trained (or even allowed) to contact a customer directly, much less to implement incoming feedback in a meaningful way.

Of course, not every company wants their public-facing employees to be able to make changes to company policy on the fly.  The key is to find the right balance between your information-gathering structure and your ability to respond directly to a customer’s needs without creating more complications in the process.

Because there’s technically no wrong way to use social media tools, but there are ways to use them more efficiently.  And if your end goals involve improving your customers’ overall experience, you need to ensure that your monitoring tools and your critical thinkers are working together to make positive changes in real time.

Wondering how you might do that? Contact us; making your messaging more effective is our specialty.

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There’s a great conversation happening on Amber Naslund’s blog, where she asks: What does the next generation of marketing professionals need to know?  The answers from her readers are practical, including:

• Critical thinking
• Storytelling
• Consumer behavior
• How to engage with multiple (and quickly-changing) demographics
• The difference between actual value and spam

All of which I agree with.  But Amber’s question stems from her observation that the field of marketing is changing dramatically thanks to the Internet — which means the rules you’re taught today may result in disaster tomorrow, when the tools you’re using (if not the entire playing field) changes.

So instead of tactics, marketers need to focus on strategies.

Tools always change.  Twitter, Facebook and Flickr were fictional* words a decade ago, and they may be cultural footnotes tomorrow.  Their rise and fall shouldn’t have anything to do with long-term consumer awareness of your brand, but what your brand stands for should.

Demographics always shift.  What the Baby Boomers wanted in the ’60s isn’t what they want today, and Facebook was a college hub before grandma sent you a friend request.  How people communicate may change rapidly, but what they value rarely does.

Make sure your brand is something consumers value, and the marketers will always have something to talk about — regardless of the tools.

* Yes, twitter has long been an actual word, but its meaning has most definitely changed since 2006.