Social media - should you participate?

With Twitter getting another round of funding and continually in the media, many companies are asking if and how they should participate in social media to market their products and services.

Some brands such as Dell, Jet Blue and Comcast have twitter accounts and have a large following and focus on listening to their concerns and answering their questions.

One early adopter of online discussions was GM through their GM Fastlane Blog which gave owners and potential buyers access to the main decision makers with GM – from the charismatic Product Czar Bob Lutz to downstream engineers who were actually working on the products. The customer engagement is fantastic and really shows that the company is serious about turning their company around by making products the customers want.

Many brands are trying to use social media to generate marketing hype on their products but I believe that the momentum for generating media buzz usually comes from consumers as in the case of Cadbury’s Wispa Facebook campaign.

Trying to manufacture a grass roots up-swell is marketing utopia and often fails. Consumers quickly see through it and then the tide of opinion turns against the brand.

I feel that brands need to focus on using social media platforms such as Twitter as a research tool – listening for customer feedback and engaging with their customers. It is all about a genuine interest in consumer insight.

A good example I have experience of is BT. I got up one morning at the crack of dawn to finish off some work and then a few hours later at 06:30 the internet connection died.

I was really annoyed and after having re-set the router 3 times and called BT, I tweeted in sheer frustration about the lack of connectivity - partly in the hope that if it was a major network issue other BT broadband subscribers would tweet back and let me know.

To be fair to BT, the issue was resolved within 20 mins but really impressively BT picked up my tweet and tweeted back asking if the issue had been fixed and to tweet back if not fixed. Skype employ a specialist social media company – We Are Social – who monitor social sites for Skype and pick-up any customer comments, engage with the customer, investigate the issue and get a resolution for the customer.

So to answer the question of my post - Should you particpate in social media? The answer is YES as to continue to be successful in a fast changing world you need to listen to your customers and being able to listen and engage with thousands of online discussions is the most powerful marketing insight solution today.


So what should brands do?

• Understand that social media is not a panacea for your online marketing – it takes hard work and commitment.
• Listen to what your customers are saying about your brand online – visit 10 sites and search for terms about your company, industry and solutions you offer.
• Plan how you could engage in the online conversations – what value can you add to the discussion? Insight into a product upgrade/new innovations that are about to come to market? Apologise for a mistake and let your customers know that lessons have been learnt and new processes implemented
• Define what success looks like
  
• Allocate the resources and define the processes for engaging with your customers – then make it happen
• Measure against your success vision