Posts Tagged ‘companies using social media’

Focus on Strategies Before Campaigns (Video)

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October 1st, 2009

Video embedded below so if you’re reading in RSS you may have to click to my site to see it.

I promised myself that I’d be doing more videos so it’s time I stick to my promise!

In the video I talk about the importance of focusing on social media strategies before campaigns.  Companies looking for short term wins in the space need to first focus on developing their social media strategies; social media needs to be a part of the company and ingrained within it.  What’s the point of launching a 3 month social media campaign only to take it down after it’s over with nothing but a link that says “sorry the website doesn’t exist.”  That just seems stupid right?

You don’t build relationships with your users only to kill them off once the campaign is done, that’s just not smart.  Social media is not about short term results, it’s about changing the way you do business and communicate with people.

Let me know what you think.

TAGS: companies using social media, social media campaign, social media strategy, strategy before campaign

Do You Really Want More Companies Using Social Media?

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August 4th, 2009

question-mark

At this point we are seeing tens of thousands (if not more) of businesses using tools such as facebook and twitter.  Many of these larger businesses (such as dell) have around a dozen employees tweeting and engaging with people via social media.  Sounds great right?  But are we going to get to a point of business social media saturation?  Will we see more businesses (and employees) than customers?  (and yes I know that customers work at businesses and are customers themselves as well, but the way an individual uses social media and the way someone that’s representing their brand uses social media are very different).  In fact, I’d love to see a current breakdown of a platform such as twitter to see how many of the users are on there as individuals or as brand representatives.

We say that we want to engage with businesses via social media, but have we really thought about what this means in the long term?

Let’s say I’m a customer looking to book a flight somewhere in the United States, naturally all of the airlines that can solve my travel needs and that are on social media channels are going to want to help me out.  So let’s say I’m on twitter and say something like “I want to book a flight to Vegas,” what do you think all of the airlines out there are going to do?  Probably start sending me tweets trying to get me to book with their airline.  Granted this type of behavior hasn’t happened yet, but it certainly will.  Why?  Because the airlines are all competing against each other online.

Imagine that almost every business is using social media tools such as twitter and facebook.  Anytime you send out a tweet about anything that relates to a particular business you’re most likely going to get a barage of tweets.  Talking about computers?  Well then here come tweets from:  best buy, dell, apple, toshiba, lenovo, acer, sony, and probably a dozen other computer manufacturers.  Since social media is still new and since we definitely haven’t seen every business adopt this new medium, we really don’t know what to expect, but here are a few ideas:

  • Eventually social media will have to take a more opt-in approach, meaning instead of companies being able to contact me when I tweet about something, I’m going to have to contact them if I NEED something (which so far looks to be working).
  • We are going to need an in depth business directory of companies using social media tools and what industry they are in, where they are located, etc.  That way when we want something, we can go out and find them.  Furthermore social media platforms are going to have to help create these directories and I’m surprised that they haven’t already.
  • Users may start heavily blocking/ignoring many of the businesses that jump on the social media bandwagon.
  • Business or brand representatives are going to have register themselves as such when they create accounts on social media profiles, then users are going to select whether or not they give permission for businesses to contact them.

What are your thoughts on this?

TAGS: companies using social media, companies vs customers on social media, Do You Really Want More Companies Using Social Media, social media saturation, too many companies on social media

Negative Experiences are Driving New Customer Engagement Models

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July 4th, 2009

I’m going to make a bold statement which is in essence in the title of this post, if it weren’t for negative experiences and feedback then new customer engagement models would NOT exist (or perhaps would take MUCH longer to adopt).  So what does this mean?  It means that the organizations that you see joining [...]

TAGS: companies using social media, negative experiences driving new customer engagement models, negative feedback, social media engagement model