It is the new mantra: Be in social media or perish! Yes, there are indeed tremendous benefits from the proper use of social media. Companies can reach out to consumers
who have a strong interest in their product category and have a dialogue with them. So rather than trying to carpet bomb everybody, you can talk to people who are really interested. Feedback is in real time as well, so you can ask a question and get an almost immediate response. Complaint handling is easier too — helping a customer sort out a negative experience is easier this way and it saves you a lot of flak later. However, there are also a few limitations to this new media — commitment of time and resources, for instance. Financial investment may not be high but the time and efforts of quality people will be necessary. You can get feedback instantly but the problem is if the consumer needs a response from you, you have to be on it so that you can respond quickly. Another limitation is on the actual ROI from this initiative. Many find it difficult to quantify their return on investment with social media. Another limitation is on the true nature and truth about a feedback. How can one verify the identity and the agenda of a social media participant? It could even be a competitor spreading bad news about your product. At best you can take the feedback as a qualitative input rather than base your major decisions on it. Finally, in the social media space, you hardly have any control over messages. You just have to hope your customers will say good things about you. Another issue is the lack of security. When you share information in this space, your competition also gets access to it, so you need to be careful about what you post. What companies should consider is whether social media can be used in lieu of traditional market research for consumer insight. Or is it merely to be used for input than for testing. Here are a few pointers for companies thinking of getting involved with social media. Plan and recruit qualified employees: If you want to succeed with social media you must have adequate staffing in place to monitor the sites and respond to any questions or complaints. Having a dialogue with the consumer means having someone there to listen to the consumer and to represent your company in that dialogue. You will need someone exclusively for managing blogs and other updates. Once started, you just cannot have a blog once in a quarter and then once in a week or month. Have quality content: You have to offer content that will encourage people to return to your Facebook page or to follow your tweets. You have to be engaging and entertaining, without being obvious about selling something. Keep the content fresh; if you go away and you don’t talk about it, then they are not going to come back to your site. You have to keep feeding them with information even if it’s just little things. Advance planning with content: It makes sense to prepare content for the next one quarter in advance so that you are ready for the future needs. Some companies prepare this for a year in advance. Disclose your affiliation: To avoid PR disasters it is essential that you be honest and disclose who you are and your affiliations are. One of the things that companies have learned is that it is important to be honest and disclose who you are and who they are in this process. The reason people are out there is because they don’t feel like they are being sold to. They feel like they are interacting with other like-minded people. You don’t ever want to come across as trying to sell them something. Source: mydigitalfc.com, Source-Image: flickr.com