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gig audience

Do you listen to your customer?

We do … that’s what we all say. It’s what we all want to do. Sometimes, particularly in a big corporate, it gets to be a bit difficult to hear what they’re all shouting to you.

Sometimes, it might be “Thanks”; sometimes, “Can you do it tomorrow?”; it might even be “I want to complain”. We want to hear all of those. We want our customers to know we’ve heard them.

How do they talk to you

Ideally, how they want to. They can ring you, email you – hey, even write to you.

What if they use Twitter?

@SouthwestAir and @ComcastCares are examples where corporates engage with an audience – they look for who’s tweeting at them, and talk back to them or help them.

@stephenfry is an extreme example of an individual – some 63k people follow him and he follows back about 32k. He can’t hope to see everything that comes through [replies virtually every 5-10 seconds], but he does engage with his audience. [You can find me at @steveellwood, but I only have 203 followers – but I follow 234 people!]

What if they use Facebook

What groups are being set up around or about your brand? Are they positive? Are they YourFirmSucks? How are you going to deal with it? If you don’t, what’s the message you’re giving? Not saying anything, is making a statement – whether you mean it or not.

Should you engage with your customers via social media

If you start to, and more customers pile in, will it scale?
Chris Brogan (surprisingly enough @chrisbrogan) says in Are you Important to me?

No. No, it will not scale. You cannot … maintain a 1:1 relationship with every single person who interacts … I think the same is true of using these tools within an organization. Only, the beauty is this: inside an organization, you can spread the connections out a bit. Not everyone has to talk with Tony Hsieh at Zappos. They might want to, but they will find that there are plenty of other great folks there.

Ditto Comcast. Ditto Dell. Ditto every brand that’s trying to figure out these tools and this space.

It will not scale, but if you want the bottom line return on investment value, you’d best remember to remind people that they’re important to you. And that’s what these tools do best.

What are you doing to engage with your customers in social media? I’d be interested to hear.

Image Credit:svenwerk

6 thoughts on “Will your social media engagement scale?”

  2. steve, got your email yesterday, will respond soon. As you know I have started to experiment with engaging with customer outside the Firewall … Twitter, GetSatisfaction being the two places so far, but also looking at how we can leverage Zuberance to “amplify advocates”. So far the effects have been positive, about 4 customers who where tweeting negatively have been “satisfied” if not turned into advocates. So far I have avoided obviosuly Tweeting as an employee of our organisation and tried to make it look more “peer to peer” in the public domain, but interested in exploring how we develop this further and stretch out the net wider to find more dissatisfied customer to help.

  3. Steve

    You may or maynot have noticed that the team over on BT Tradespace have been twittering for some time now and also have GetSatisfaction, YouTube, Viddler, Flikr, Myspace, FB and other SN profiles.

    From my experience, it’s been a great way to engage in conversations with BTs customers and the team have been able to respond to comments made about Tradespace as well as just generally getting to know the Tradespace customers. It’s also been an enabler to creating advocacy, just take a look at the number of RTs to Tradespace tweets made by Tradespace customers!

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