When it comes to social media for business, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. But to ensure results, you must align it with your overall business objectives and avoid falling for “shiny new objects” simply because they are trendy or hyped.
For example, a new business or “first mover” may want to focus on establishing thought leadership, while a more mature business should aim for customer support. In all cases, creating a product that actually solves problems for customers, present and future, should be every business’s top priority — and you should be using social media to help you figure out what that product is.
Below, we’ll take a closer look at how each department can blend traditional and social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.
Marketing Touchpoints
Marketing and branding are no longer about massive media buys. In fact, your brand is no longer what you say it is, but rather what the patchwork of customer and employee voices says it is. That being said, you still have a tremendous opportunity to help steer these conversations and educate the public in a conversational, open and honest manner so they feel well equipped to talk about your brand when they choose to do so.
Remember that your business needs to have as many touchpoints with your customers as possible, of which social media is just one:
- A clear website that establishes value and helps customers weave your brand into their own story.
- Thought leadership and content creation, in the form of blogging, guest-blogging, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, presentations, and videos help educate the market. Use social media to help create and share content, as well as create discussions around this content.
- Relationships and outreach: As a result of your social media listening, discovery and engagement, you will undoubtedly form relationships with other thought leaders with whom you can collaborate on content, form guest-blogging relationships, create podcasts, etc. I have started many of my professional relationships on Twitter, which have later led to in-person meetings, client relationships, co-creating content, consulting engagements, jobs, etc.
- Events, online as well as offline, are also great awareness vehicles and can take the form of attending and speaking at conferences, sponsorships, and producing your own. Social media can and should be used to drive awareness, collect content input from the public, and provide ways for people in your network to meet in person. Take the time to produce content around the event. Interview people you respect and with whom you have built online and offline relationships, and share that content via social media.
- Then of course, there is social media itself, which is a must for any brand building effort. Your social media strategy should include actively monitoring Twitter (), Facebook (), blogs, discussion forums and other outpost communities, with the purpose of learning, engaging and forming relationships.
- Third-party support, in the form of partners, resellers, and blogger outreach, is also tremendously important. Forming and nurturing these relationships is crucial to your success as a brand, and can have a multiplicative effect on your social media and offline buzz.
Sales
Similar to marketing, sales should be about building relationships via social channels and growing them into offline relationships. Conversely, when meeting someone in person, you can keep the relationship warm via social channels until you see them again.
You should also be using social media listening techniques to gather intelligence around your customers and prospects’ businesses to help drive better and richer conversations. Listen for purchase intent and identify clues about when people may be looking for your product.
Customer Service
Customer service is, of course, nothing new. In a recent interview with Customer Management IQ, Tony Hsieh of Zappos states, and I agree, that a call center should become a powerful branding tool rather than a cost center, as it’s often been regarded in the past. With the emergence of social tools and the empowerment of the social customer, it is necessary for businesses to add social support to their arsenals, in addition to call centers and e-mails. It is not uncommon for the social customer to use several communication platforms at a time in order to get the help she needs, and the company must ensure that if several reps talk to the customer through several channels, they are all working from the same customer record and updating that record dynamically.This streamlines the customer experience. Imagine when a customer tweets an airline that she needs help; if the airline can tie her social data to its internal information associated with the reservation, it can help her that much better. Additionally, anyone in the company can help this customer, because there is a unified customer record available to all relevant parties inside the company.
The Intersection of Traditional and Social Media
So you have decided to provide service via traditional and social channels. It’s crucial to ensure that the two can augment each other.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How will you receive traditional and social media requests for help? Perform a social media audit to understand where your customers are talking about products like yours, and set up a monitoring system attuned to those platforms.
- How will you triage your social media messages?
- How will you route and escalate your social media messages?
- How is that different (or not) from how you treat traditional e-mail and phone support?
- How much automation do you want?
- Do you use a hub-and-spoke system? If so, who is the hub — your social media manager or community manager?
- Are you giving Twitter responsibilities to existing phone and e-mail support reps, or are you hiring specific Twitter response teams? (This will largely depend on the volume of mentions you have and the size of your business.)
- How do they work with the rest of the customer service organization?
Product Intelligence and Design
Support is just one piece of the puzzle, however. The more complex exercise in collaborating with your customers is leveraging social channels to create a product with value. You can use social media in the following ways:
- There’s a lot of information out there, and you can easily figure out what people are saying in aggregate by using the right monitoring and analysis platform. Because there is so much social data, you need smart text analytics to help you make sense of it all. When collecting customer intelligence, you should be blending traditional market research (surveys, focus groups, secondary research) with this type of social media research.
- On a more intimate level, you need to invite your customers behind the scenes and give them a stake in the future of the product. If your customers help you create the product, you can possibly reduce customer support queries and complaints in the future. One easy way that you can implement this today is by adding an idea generation and feedback community like UserVoice to your site.
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