Social Media and the Customer Experience

The use of social media as part of the marketing strategy should not be all about the corporation. We need to view social media as the perfect venue in which to create and focus on excellence in the customer experience. This is going to be the best advertising our companies will ever engage in, and our ability to focus on the customer, and to respond to them within the realm of social media will make or break us. Customers will remember the experience long after they have forgotten about the product, and our ability to create an engaging on-line community focused on our customers, will be the key to CRM.

We must resist the temptation to make our social media avenues one-way streets and all about us. We need to have a strategy for inviting responses from our customers AND for responding to them. Perhaps it is this second part of the social media equation that is most important. Ignoring customers concerns, or even worse, deleting negative comments from our social media venues is a recipe for disaster. Talk about a domino effect! We should view our social media interactions with our customers and potential customers in the same way as our in-person encounters. Creating environments within our social media sites which are inviting to customers and truly convey that the customer is first, will make for a winning marketing strategy.

Look for ways to be innovative and centered on the overall customer experience with both your products as well as your social media sites.

Create two-way streets with the customer at the center of the conversations. Create a collaborative environment.

Sincerely embrace any negative feedback as a great opportunity to acknowledge the customer's importance  to your business. Your customers will thank you for it.

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." Bill Gates

Customer Loyalty: People or Products

What exactly are our customers loyal to? Products or people? As marketers, are we more concerned with building customer loyalty to our products and increasing product loyalty or are we building our marketing plans around the customer (people)? Of course we want people to buy our products or services, but if the focus of our plan is the product and not people, we may be missing a key ingredient in the CRM equation.

Think about your own best customer service experience. What made it stand out in your mind: was it really about the epic product you bought or was it the outstanding personal interaction between you as the customer and the sales person?

I recently purchased a wi-fi mobile hot spot device from a wireless phone service provider. After researching various wireless carriers, and narrowing down my choice to 2 companies that provided just what I was looking for at very comparable rates, I spoke with sales people from both companies. In each case, the sales people were very knowledgeable, and able to answer all my questions, and had plans and products that met all my needs. But one company seemed more people oriented, while the other was more product focused. I went back at a later time to visit the more people-focused company, and they even remembered my name, where I worked, and my basic wi-fi Internet needs. They got my business. What I remember was the experience, and when I talk to others about this company, I am sharing that experience with them; I am not talking to others about the product.

Take a look at your marketing and business plans. Are they all about the people (customers) or all about the products? To convert followers to customers and then to keep customers, our social media and other marketing plans must be all about the customer, not our products.

• Make it easy for customers to contact us. 
• Make our social media sites user-friendly, uncluttered, and visually appealing. 
• Develop a strong customer-focused mission statement and make sure it is displayed prominently on your websites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media venues. 

Make sure you and everyone you work with truly walks the customer-focused talk.

Data Mining in the Social Media World

Have you thought about the huge data mining landscape we have before us within the world of social media? While it may not be the "final frontier", the use of the various social media venues we now have at our disposal can yield very targeted and specific data mining results.

Take Twitter, for example. You can easily see the latest items of interest that are trending, either from a world view or a domestic view. Even more revealing, are those tweets about specific products or companies; one can easily gauge the interests of the Twitter community and map out the trends to get a feel for what works and what doesn't in terms of the ability to create buzz and promote your product awareness. It is a diamond in the rough for a marketer.

And don't forget about all those Facebook postings about who-went-where-and-ate-what-for-lunch. You get the idea. All these seemingly useless and mindless posts about every facet of someone's life can be viewed as a target rich data minefield, when viewed through the eyes of a marketer. Learn to spot trends and analyze those trends; chances are you will start to develop a keen eye for what your target segment looks like, and how to create more awareness for your brand.

Indeed, social media is a real data mining adventure. Start to look at social media as a very hands on and cost effective way to get the data you need to identify your target market, and develop and promote your product. You will start to see some very immediate results.

So put on your miner's hat, fire up your favorite social media account, and start to look for those all important nuggets of information that will get you pointed in the right direction.

"Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing, that we see too late the one that is open." Alexander Graham Bell

Social CRM: Where Social Media and Customers Meet

Social media is here to stay. Love it or hate it, social media can be a powerful tool in the marketing tool basket. But how do we leverage all this social media-ness, and still engage our customers? Is it even possible? The key is still creating and maintaining those relationships, whether through social media or live, in person meetings. It is still all about the customer, and social media can enhance the customer experience and invite the customer to be a collaborator.

So don't just create a Facebook page or a LinkedIn profile and hope they will come. You have to create those moments and utilize the power of the Internet and social media to keep the customer engaged.

If you build it right, they will come.