Two things seem to prevent bigger brands and companies using Social Media Marketing. There may be more but these are what we are sensing in the current situation.
Firstly, one brand felt that it was too risky to even start. They want to get going, they are familiar with the technologies and they clearly understand the benefits. However, with a household name come high expectations and a potential spotlight on any failings.
What, they asked, if we can’t scale, for instance, to meet the volume of responses directed at us: what are the expectations for response times? What if we only want to blog about our community relations efforts but everyone insists on contacting us with customer service issues? What if we don’t respond to those queries?
Sometimes, we need to break through the natural reticence of self-promotion on a blog: an agency like Juice Digital is set-up to manage such response.
Social media can be scary for big brands
Those sorts of issues are a sign of success and some brands would love to have them, to discover exactly what is bugging consumers.
An agency like ours works with in-house teams to plan Social Media Marketing Strategy and anticipate volumes and response and then allocate resources accordingly. That’s what a plan is.
For instance, tweets can be as much a customer service issue as a marketing one. If Social Media Marketing uncovers a particular issue with the brand through buzz monitoring or any consequent Twitter activity, most customer service directors are very keen to identify such issues and respond accordingly. The response might be something as old-fashioned as a call or email and customer service departments would share the response load.
The other starting risk was seen as content-based: the gist of their concerns was “what if we inadvertently say something that is material to the marketplace or that negatively impacts the share price of our parent PLC?”
The adoption of Social Media Marketing implies a change in attitude about corporate transparency and honesty. Many organisations are transferring resources — and changing attitudes — to social media channels. Teams using these channels are empowered to speak out honestly and frankly and will find it impossible to hide behind outmoded ‘jobsworth’ attitudes.
Consumers detest multi-layered menus on telephone customer support lines and Social Media Marketing gives staff an opportunity to respond briefly, and in real-time, to challenges in a general way, addressing an identified problem to an aggregated audience.
Old-fashioned, command-and-control management teams recoil from empowerment and the risk it involves. What they need to take into consideration is that brands that have already started to go down this route get many more positive mentions online and are more profitable.
Now where’s that blog launch button…
