Consumers: Talk to me or meet your doom?

"If you don't join the conversations customers are having about you, your brands, and the things that matter to your brands, then you're dead." This is a pretty powerful quote from a recent interview with Federated Media's John Battelle.

At this point, statements from experts like this shouldn't shock anyone. Social media has become the great equalizer as described in the youtube clip "Conversational Marketing" by providing a communication platform for consumers. Personally, it's unimaginable for me not comment about recent purchases either on Twitter, forums or even the company site itself. Although I've never truly had a "conversation" with a company, I appreciate the one's that would be willing to hear me out versus the ones who don't. To see a great example of this check out My Starbucks where Starbucks actively engages in conversation with their customers to better their products.

For those companies still catching up with "conversations", I truly fear for their survival. They are missing customer insight, losing relevance and most importantly not building relationships. Although not everyone wants to have conversations with companies - see Jeff the situation blog post - I still feel its important for businesses to engage their customers.

How do you feel about companies that don't engage in conversations? Would this affect your relationship or willingness to buy from them?

Social media unlocks great potential for customer service

After reading "Social networking forces change in customer service" by Barney Beal, I can see why companies are focusing on harnessing social media's power to improve customer service. There's great potential being unlocked, especially regarding improving customer interaction and improving the product experience. Like the article mentions, social media has empowered customers and given them the opportunity to tap into each other to solve problems or allow direct interaction with the company itself for feedback. This concept is similar to another blog post where I write about "crowd sourcing" and how the masses have done a great job interacting with companies.

With that said, I'm always curious what would happen if all of a sudden companies like Twitter (which many companies use for customer service) start charging fee's to companies that use its service. Up to this point, many online tools like Twitter have been free of charge and companies have greatly benefited from them. But the day will come when "free" ends and fees begin. Will companies then bite the bullet and pay or abandon their customer service strategy using social media?

Understanding crowd sourcing is vital for business

Jeff Howe's youtube clip on "crowd sourcing" really gives us a good glimpse of its potential for business use. Like Jeff mentions in his video, online users and communities can now replace employees within a company to fulfill particular needs. For instance, product development is a great example. Consider Fiat and its crowd sourced car as proof. Reaching out to the masses to get idea's on new products like Fiat did will become more prevalent - if hasn't already.

What's important is to continue to encourage online users and communities to engage with companies and let their voice be heard. But therein lies the challenge. Companies should "feed" the crowd and make sure they are taken care of for their ideas. Recently, Google failed to do this with their Chrome browser product where they solicited design ideas but failed to acknowledge the winners of the effort. This could create backlash and deter the crowd from contributing ideas.

What are some other challenges with crowd sourcing that you can think of?

Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect

After reading Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook announcement, I'm a little concerned with the direction they are headed with user information. There's growing sediment on the internet that Facebook doesn't respect privacy and that they want to use information gathered on users for marketing purposes. That last part isn't a shocker, after all they are in it to make money, however the lack of user control mechanisms is a little discomforting.

For example, I can't stop from being tagged in photo's or having an obnoxious friend write something on my Wall without my approval. I can easily show up in the stream of live feeds and can be embarrassed for all of my 370 friends to see -- which is something a few of my friends have had to deal with. So you know what that does? It makes us less of a participant on Facebook. We will start to shy away from pictures, not post our friend's wall and ultimately become passive users. This is strictly my opinion, but if Facebook doesn't make a more concerted effort to give us more control over our online social lives, it may backfire and make their "social network" far less social.

Although, there's a lot to question about Facebook's privacy policy, some would argue they have gone to good lengths to give users control -- I'm not one of them. But here is a link on CNET for the pro's and con's of the new privacy settings.

Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends'

The article "Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends'" is an interesting read. Often when I hear about "Social Networks" I immediately think about the virtual world and not the real world we live in. I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of the article that it's important to improve real world communications through interaction data gathering. It's about time research focuses on real world social networking in the workplace which will hopefully lead to greater efficiency.

I believe as a society we've become so enthralled with online social media and examining it's impact we've forgotten about our real world interactions. We need to be aware that everything we do is social and that a lot depends on how well we communicate with each other outside of the virtual world. I sincerely hope research studies like the one M.I.T. is conducting continues not only in businesses, but in other areas such as health care and improving transportation. The following article in BusinessWeek describes some more "reality mining" benefits.

My First Blog Post

Hello,

My name is Peter, and I'm excited to start blogging. I'm an MBA student at American University and I really believe in the power of social media.


On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own