You can’t outsource the conversation with your customers
Social media and Web 2.0 present big challenges for large companies. And the fact that the tools and communities that use them are so very accessible just makes those challenges so much more frustrating.
What we all want to do with social media is dialogue and share. For large enterprises, the opportunity is to engage with their customers in a more transparent and effective way than ever before possible through ‘linear’ marketing campaigns. But it ain’t easy…
Here’s my take on the obstacles facing Big Corp:
1. Understanding – social media is typically approached as just another route to market and this leads to a campaign approach with businesses majoring on ‘viral’ marketing and tapping up the blogosphere as a PR channel. By thinking in campaign terms, ‘social marketing’ is driven by the tempo of the marketing plan and is at the mercy of the quarterly campaign focus. However, conversations involving your business can start at any time and judging when and how to engage simply can’t be planned. Inconvenient I know, but nothing you can do about that!
2. Skills and confidence – marketing in Mega Corp is coming down to a reporting, budget and program management function with the doers being the rostered agencies. As a rule, traditional marketers, including those with an online background, have neither the skills, nor confidence to enter into a conversation with their customers using blogs, podcasts, and video or through forums, or social networking sites.
3. Process: One reason that marketers are uncomfortable getting stuck into the social graph as their day job is that they are not empowered to do so and may even be explicitly barred from doing it. In effect turning your marketing team into ‘spokespeople’ for your business is not something companies do lightly. But changing or indeed writing for the first time policies that enable employees to take part in online conversations is essential if businesses are to benefit from social media as a customer engagement tool.
Also the team developing an engagement plan using social media needs the freedom to procure services they need from a variety of suppliers most of whom won’t be on the roster. I’m convinced that as social marketing becomes core to the ‘plan’, purchasing of marketing services needs to become more like software procurements (project based) and less driven by the dictates of who is on the roster.
An outcome of these obstacles is that forward-thinking marketing departments that do see the potential of social media often turn to their agencies to define the strategy and lead the campaign. This approach is simply doomed to fail. Effective social marketing demands as its foundation transparency and proximity to the customer and cannot be done by proxy. Social marketing even transcends the boundaries of the marketing department. The best people to engage with your customers are those closest to the topic of conversation with the customer and this could be someone from the product, customer service or sales team.
So my advice to any enterprise looking to put Web 2.0 into the marketing mix is don’t get worked up about digital influence or going viral, but simply look at what your customers are talking about, understand what matters to them, and let your people join the conversation.
Posted by Ivan Croxford on August 23, 2008
Tags: social marketing, Social media
I’m a digital strategist and I like building new businesses. This blog is an opportunity for me to air some of the insights, issues and themes that I come across in the course of my work. I’d love for some/any of these to be picked up as part of the broader conversation on digital disruption.
I’d like to suggest a fourth obstacle – Pan Mega Corp buy-in!
In all Mega Corps there will be pockets of people that understand the value and benefit for engaging with customers using Web 2.0 tools. You’ll find the odd Product Manager and Sales person getting stuck in and engaging on-line with their customers. However, these are few and far between.
If you look at those companies that do this stuff really well, they’ve practically made it part of an employees contract to get engaged with customers.
Now I’m not suggesting that Mega Corps need to go that far, but the empowerment word you used Ivan is pretty key. If Mega Corps empowered all their customer facing employees (and in some cases their back-office people) to get stuck in and gave them the time to do it, then I think the value would soon be realised!
A truly customer engaged Mega Corp, with some very happy customers!
I agree with that Martin. In time and in the most customer-focused I think it will become de rigeur for an employee to take it upon themselves to engage customers on the Web whereever they see the need. And they will feel empowered to do that because the company expects it and supports them. But we are a long, long way from that position today in the vast majority of big businesses.
Totally agree with looking at what your customers are talking about. I wrote a damning blog post about a certain low cost airline. Had 25 disgruntled customers leave long comments about their experiences and not one note from the company. Every business should have, as a minimum, one person with google alerts set up to ping them a mail on every mention during the web, keeping in touch with customers is so key and so missed. Great Post.
I agree with the article as well. Companies need to develop good relationship with their customers. They are the most important part of the company. That way, they will know where they can improve and which things they should discontinue. Its all part of marketing.