You Can’t Cross An Unfinished Bridge
Social media is just another bridge. Often times in SM we can feel like we are ahead of the game, on top of the new world order of communication. We are on the cusp of a new way of doing things and now we got it nailed. We’ve created strategic Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan Pages, Feeds, Blogs, and more. We watch them for perception, tone and feedback, interacting with the customers that engage with us through them. You’ve seen feedback from some customers saying, “Wow they’re really paying attention to us, they are innovators!” You are rad. Pat yourself on the back.
Some of us have also been able to attain that other golden jewel of getting our companies to understand the value of what we do as social media managers/owners and what it can do for our companies and clients. We’ve battled through pitch after painful PowerPoint pitch to our investors and execs to get them on board with understanding the value of something that can feel so nebulous for business…..but you did it. If this was a challenge for you and you pulled it off, congratulations. Another rung on the ladder grasped. Another step towards converting your company and it’s culture to the social media occult.
However, if you think you got it dialed by only having man-handled the two big challenges I mentioned above, you may have forgotten the one battle you must fight and conquer to win the war. The missing link.
Process Makes Perfect
Most up and coming young buck marketers that are out there doing the social media thing, love it because it’s free and nimble and expressive and unfettered and nebulous and amorphous, catering to their every random emotional whim and conversation. I will say that there is some business beauty in that. It can help your customers feel like you are real people. It’s a good thing and I dig that part of it too. However, I think one of the caveats that most business leaders new to social media have with it is that no one has explained to them how it fits into their internal business processes and why. How nice it will play with processes that have been established over several years (and that work really well) in various cross-functional organizations and departments?
All is well and good when your company responds to a tweet right there on the fly. Everyone is feeling like a warm fuzzy bunny rabbit when a question is posed on Facebook and you know the answer and can respond right there and be done with it. But what happens when a question is posed to your company that you don’t know the answer to? What happens when you don’t know who has the answer and you gotta do some digging through your org chart and email a few people. What happens when you finally find that person and they answer with more questions for the customer who posed the original question over Twitter? With all the projects that are most likely on your plate, by the time you find the right person, get the final answer you need, just like when you drive a brand new car off the lot and it loses $2k in value within seconds, the value of your conversation risks losing it’s value because in the social media world, interactions can become old news fast and people on the interwebs feel left out in the cold quickly (us web fanatics and consumers are a sensitive emotional bunch).
There needs to be a solid process in place to support the feedback loop required to add value to your social media initiatives. If that loop is dysfunctional, unorganized, or under developed, or worst case – straight up missing, then the real intrinsic value of your customer interactions will suffer.
If You Are Gonna Do It, Do It Right
There’s no value in just being able to address the quick questions and convenient conversations that are going on. If you are going to offer social media as a real part of your company’s culture, as a real solution moving forward, as a mechanism to engage with and listen to your customers, do it right and integrate it into your business top-to-bottom in a way that is efficient and part of the big picture. Make sure there is a stable, well thought out feedback loop so that when a complex question comes in via Twitter, the loop/process guides it to the right people quickly and you can then respond quickly back out to the customer in a way that makes them feel like you personally actually do know everything there is to know about your company. 
Onward.
[Hoover Dam images courtesy of The Goat Blog]
The Feedback Loop: Social Media’s Lost Child
Social media is just another bridge. Often times in SM we can feel like we are ahead of the game, on top of the new world order of communication. We are on the cusp of a new way of doing things and now we got it nailed. We’ve created strategic Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan Pages, Feeds, Blogs, and more. We watch them for perception, tone and feedback, interacting with the customers that engage with us through them. You’ve seen feedback from some customers saying, “Wow they’re really paying attention to us, they are innovators!” You are rad. Pat yourself on the back.
Some of us have also been able to attain that other golden jewel of getting our companies to understand the value of what we do as social media managers/owners and what it can do for our companies and clients. We’ve battled through pitch after painful PowerPoint pitch to our investors and execs to get them on board with understanding the value of something that can feel so nebulous for business…..but you did it. If this was a challenge for you and you pulled it off, congratulations. Another rung on the ladder grasped. Another step towards converting your company and it’s culture to the social media occult.
However, if you think you got it dialed by only having man-handled the two big challenges I mentioned above, you may have forgotten the one battle you must fight and conquer to win the war. The missing link.
Process Makes Perfect
Most up and coming young buck marketers that are out there doing the social media thing, love it because it’s free and nimble and expressive and unfettered and nebulous and amorphous, catering to their every random emotional whim and conversation. I will say that there is some business beauty in that. It can help your customers feel like you are real people. It’s a good thing and I dig that part of it too. However, I think one of the caveats that most business leaders new to social media have with it is that no one has explained to them how it fits into their internal business processes and why. How nice it will play with processes that have been established over several years (and that work really well) in various cross-functional organizations and departments?
All is well and good when your company responds to a tweet right there on the fly. Everyone is feeling like a warm fuzzy bunny rabbit when a question is posed on Facebook and you know the answer and can respond right there and be done with it. But what happens when a question is posed to your company that you don’t know the answer to? What happens when you don’t know who has the answer and you gotta do some digging through your org chart and email a few people. What happens when you finally find that person and they answer with more questions for the customer who posed the original question over Twitter? With all the projects that are most likely on your plate, by the time you find the right person, get the final answer you need, just like when you drive a brand new car off the lot and it loses $2k in value within seconds, the value of your conversation risks losing it’s value because in the social media world, interactions can become old news fast and people on the interwebs feel left out in the cold quickly (us web fanatics and consumers are a sensitive emotional bunch).
There needs to be a solid process in place to support the feedback loop required to add value to your social media initiatives. If that loop is dysfunctional, unorganized, or under developed, or worst case – straight up missing, then the real intrinsic value of your customer interactions will suffer.
If You Are Gonna Do It, Do It Right
There’s no value in just being able to address the quick questions and convenient conversations that are going on. If you are going to offer social media as a real part of your company’s culture, as a real solution moving forward, as a mechanism to engage with and listen to your customers, do it right and integrate it into your business top-to-bottom in a way that is efficient and part of the big picture. Make sure there is a stable, well thought out feedback loop so that when a complex question comes in via Twitter, the loop/process guides it to the right people quickly and you can then respond quickly back out to the customer in a way that makes them feel like you personally actually do know everything there is to know about your company.
Onward.
[Hoover Dam images courtesy of The Goat Blog]