Consumers are becoming more connected and social about their customer experiences. The number of customer reviews sites and volume of the content published on these sites grow exponentially. More tools are being developed and adopted to make this experiential information easily available to shoppers. More shoppers find this information more trustworthy and valuable to their purchase selection process than marketing collateral and advertising.
So what are brands doing about it?
A few brands, like martial arts masters, learn how to leverage this momentum to come out even stronger. They use this content to learn what is really important to customers about their experience, and how that experience differs from those who purchased competing products. These brands employ the newly found intelligence to improve their customers’ experience, and the customers reciprocate by sharing it with connected consumers, making the brands’ product an easier choice for shoppers.
Some brands are trying to use these new channels of communications to insert themselves into the consumers conversations with selling messages, calling it social media marketing engagement. These brands seem to be less interested in their customers’ unsolicited opinions than in opportunities to ping them with offers to resolve a problem or sell something.
Yesterday I tweeted a link to a magazine article speculating about Comcast’s hidden reasons for acquiring Time-Warner.
That inspired a Comcast competitor’s social media “expert” to tweet to me an “offer” to switch to their service.
How awkward is this? I did not tweet about my experience, negative or positive. I was their customer before. Their offer was not available to me as a “new customer”.
If authenticity is a currency of social media, this brand is running a serious deficit. I think they can benefit from Mark Twain’s wisdom: “Boy, if you can learn how to fake sincerity, you’ve got it made”.
But most brands’ efforts look like a deer caught in the headlights. They just throw money at collecting “likes” on FB and Pinterest and hope for the best. These brands use pre-defined keywords to monitor social media in an effort to protect their reputation, while customers use the words which are meaningful to them to describe their experience. These brands count keywords mentions instead of learning the contextual meaning of customer experience. They still think that social media is just another channel for brands to advertise and maybe provide occasional customer support and find it annoying that they cannot control the conversation.
The future of brands is in learning from consumer conversations as opposed to controlling them. Those who think they know better than their customers are not likely to have a bright future.
