Why companies are actively engaged with social media? The ultimate goal is to earn more profit but that’s not how it works in social media. With social media you transfer the initiative/lead to the client. The client will only do something for you as a company when there is a clear added value for him or her. Clients can reward you with their “word of mouth” or recommendation to their friends and followers. They can punish you by sharing their complaints with others in all media at their disposal. Companies need to reconsider the kind and level of service to be delivered to those clients, especially through social media. There should be no maximum to the service level. If and when you want to start/join the conversation you need to be aware of what make their tick faster. They maybe have a good idea, or want recognition or is proud about yur products and would like to be part of the in crowd at new introductions. It can be anything either positive or negative.
How to address this?
It all starts with listening, analyzing and learning from the social media conversation. The conversation about your brand, your products and your market. You can do that by training your chosen employees as part of a new team called web care team.
This team is responsible for everything around social media. The most important responsibilities are:
Communication. Setup social media guidelines for internal and external social communication.
Monitoring. Follow and analyze the conversation about your brand, your products, your markets and your competitors. You can later include your social ambassadors.
Availability. Able to deliver service outside normal office hours and able to respond and engage with your company resources outside those hours.
Reporting. Report your results, the KPI’s on your social media activities.Share. Share your knowledge and experience with other departments like marketing, communication, sales, hr, management and ICT.
Learn. Learn how to socialize, to discuss and recognize threats and opportunities. Learn what can be improved in the existing communication and processes to prevent recurring issues. Train your colleagues in the do’s and dont’s of social media conversation.
Develop. Develop policies, guidelines, tools, strategy and strong examples to support the rest of the organization.
Join and support. Make sure that the web care team is represented with new communication projects, with workshops on marketing campaigns and with conferences on sharing experiences with clients.
Lead. Take the lead and responsibility when an opportunity demands a response or a threat needs to be managed.
Organize. Create an internal organization that can quickly escalate and involve the right people to respond. Make sure that many answers about your products or services are ready to be communicated.
In following blogs I will describe how to engage and to motivate your client to generate your content. A nice example of a company that has really gone social is Tookam. This is a French financial company who has embraced social media and has empowered their client to generate content.
