Your customers are active online, that’s a given. So where exactly do they live? Meaning, where does the online action for your product, business, and industry take place? If you cannot immediately answer that question, your business is missing out on some very big potential.
Do your customers leave comments and reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon? Do they spend the majority of their time online interacting on Face book fan pages? What LinkedIn groups are active about your industry? Who’s leading the charge on Twitter about you or your industry? What hot topics are being discussed in forums? These are just a few of the basic options your customers have to engage with online. I’m leaving out a wide variety of other options and depending on your business and industry, it is likely your customers are interacting within a vast array of online communities.
So I’ll ask again. Where online does the action take place for your business? If you’ve got this under control, congratulations, you’re definitely in the minority and ahead of the pack. But, if I was a betting man…you have no idea where your audience hangs out online.
By not knowing where your customers are spending their time online, here are some of the things your business is missing.
Proactive Customer Service: Companies can and should take advantage of social networks to become proactive with their customer service. By waiting for problems to come to you, it may be too late and you’ve lost a customer. Or worse, you just never hear from them again and never even know there was a problem.
A good example of proactive customer service is Comcast (NasdaqGS: CMCSA). Comcast currently has an entire team dedicated to serve as the company’s customer care tweeters. Customer service manager, Frank Eliason, started tweeting with Comcast customers in April 2008. His strategy was to use Twitter’s search capabilities to dig up search terms for Comcast and search for #Comcast hash tags inside of Twitter posts. From these simple searches, Eliason was able to easily identify customers having difficulties and quickly send them messages. (note: being a Cable customer, it wouldn’t take long to locate complaints).
Over the past year, Eliason’s team of tweeters has grown from one to ten, and he expects that more employees will start using Twitter in the future. The effectiveness is for you to decide, but that speaks louder to Comcast’s internal issues and not the strategy to proactively engage customers on their own online turf. According to Eliason, 22,000 customers have been helped through social media, which includes a combination of Twitter, Facebook , online forums, and blogs.
Gather A Loyal User Base: Coca-Cola (NASDAQ: COKE) has the second most popular page on Facebook , second only to Barrack Obama. The most stunning fact about this is not that 3.3 million people have decided to follow Coke; it’s that this enormously successful page wasn’t started by the Coca-Cola Company. It was started by two Coke drinkers from L.A. This top ranked page and at least 250 other fan pages devoted to Coke have also sprung up on Facebook.
On one hand, what could be better for Coke than to have 3.3 million fans chatting and interacting on one Facebook page? But since Coca-Cola did not create the page, they had absolutely zero control over it. That means that they were completely at the mercy of the fan page founders, who won’t have corporate brand strategy at the top of their priorities. Last November, Facebook tried to offer more control to companies and brands by creating a policy that says anyone creating a branded Facebook “page” must be authorized by or associated with the brand or company. Rather than delete the page and start over, likely annoying 3.3 million Coke drinkers, Coca-Cola instead proposed a better alternative. They decided to let the creators keep the page, as long as it was also run with a few of Coca-Cola’s senior interactive folks. By becoming engaged, Coca-Cola now has an active community building loyal users and expanding their brand online.
Dig up New Sales: Finding where your customers interact can often lead to new sales that might have never come to you, or worse, gone to a competitor. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has learned to adapt quickly to the opportunities on Twitter and has taken full advantage of tracking customers on this social network. According to an article at Internet News, “Dell says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts”. You’re not guaranteed to have these same results, but if you can increase sales by even a few percentage points, the return on your investment should be well worth the effort.
For the sake of this post’s length, I’ve used only three examples of companies using some of the most popular social networks; Twitter and Facebook . This list could easily be expanded to a wide variety of other possibilities; we’ll dive into those on other posts. The point is, your customers are actively engaging each other online. But that doesn’t mean they’re engaging with you or your business. If you’re most organizations, you’re not where the action is. You’re monitoring page hits on a static non-engaging website while your customers and targets are busy building their own communities. If you want to stay relevant, you need to be engaged and active. What communities are you building?
Stay tuned for action plans with what you can be doing in a follow up post.
Scott S. Bishop is editor for AxeroPulse.com and a social media and marketing strategist. He is @thescottbishop on Twitter
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Well said. The challenge for most companies is to determine where to spend the time and money for social media marketing where they will get the greatest return. You have to determine where your audience is and how to “connect” with them. You gave excellent examples of social sites that offer a way to connect. Setting up business profile pages, or groups for your product or service allow your customers to find you within those social sites. The more presence you have in the online community, in my opinion, the better chance you will have of being found.
I thought this article was very well written and I enjoyed reading it very much. Great job sbishop!
I totally agree with you. You have to be where your customers are and you have to find out where they could be. I recently did a presentation for an Alumni Association and they didn’t even know about MEET UPS they thought about how they could use that for out of state alumni groups to get together on their own.