The conversations about your brand that used to happen around the water cooler at work or the friends' braai are now happening online in front of a much larger audience of your consumers or potential consumers.
What consumers want
Brands (big and small) owe it to themselves to participate in the conversation if they aim to try and understand what their consumers want, need and expect from them. When brands are deciding if they should establish a social media presence, the one thing that they can be certain of is that the conversations will happen with or without them.
Different brands have taken different approaches to what kind of information they are sharing on social media. This dictates the amount of value that brands can gain, depending on the level of valuable information that they provide to or elicit from consumers.
For some brands, social media is purely a platform to shout down to customers, achieving limited results, while others use it to find brand ambassadors and truly engage with their customers, helping brands to grow from strength to strength.
The complaint trap!
Many brands establish a social media presence with the best of intentions - to get to know their customers and engage with the online community - but end up trapped in continually dealing with complaints and general negative sentiment about their brand which serve to highlight inefficiencies in processes and customer service.
For many consumers, social media becomes simply the most efficient way to complain as there is usually an immediate response and a high focus on ensuring that any complaints and queries are dealt with as a matter of urgency, which is often not the case when using traditional (and less public) channels.
While this arguably does provide some level of value for brands, it does not touch on the true potential that social media has to offer - and a similar result could be achieved by simply fine-tuning offline processes.
Time the most precious commodity
In modern society, time has become the most precious commodity and brands are fighting a harder battle than ever to stay top-of-mind for consumers.
In order to truly provide value to customers, brands must be able to provide customers with relevant information at their fingertips and be able to respond quickly to individual customer needs. Eliciting input about products, services and specials that are relevant is one of the ways in which brands are trying to engage with consumers to ensure that they are constantly interacting with the brand and that they see the brand as adding value to their lives.
Some brands have taken steps to proactively engage in using social media for crowdsourcing of new ideas and to obtain feedback on potential products and services and consumer preference.
Not always in control
Of course, the nature of social media means that such conversations are not always in the control of the brand. In 2010 GAP scrapped its newly redesigned logo due to a massive outpouring of spontaneous negative sentiment via social media channels.
Perhaps the most important way in which some progressive brands use social media to meet the needs of consumers and add value to their brands is by providing a way for people to connect with others and share their experiences of the brand and engage with the brand, creating a community of enthusiasts and helping to build a community around the brand.
Brands such as Coca-Cola have an active Facebook base of over 32 million fans, who interact not only with the brand based on information it supplies but provide their own user-generated content (UGC) in the form of comments, photos, and videos, thus interacting with each other and growing the brand organically.
Constantly evolving
Consumer needs, wants and expectations are constantly evolving based on the increased level of sophistication that access to the vast amounts of information available on the Internet allows.
Brands need to understand what their customers and their potential customers are already doing online, and how they are interacting with other brands (that may not be competitors in the business sense but are still competitors when it comes to customers' attention).
Most importantly, brands need to have a plan but be willing to move and adapt that plan as the environment changes and as they receive feedback from consumers.
The bar is constantly being raised for brands in terms of what consumers consider to be added value, both in terms of information provided and the ways in which it is provided. It is critical for brands to identify and meet these constantly evolving requirements to ensure that they are not left behind.
For more:
