A little less conversation? A little more action.
Organisations are in danger of destroying their own brands. Over the last couple of years, and in particular the last 18 months, there has been a very obvious shift in the way audiences interact with businesses. In the good old days decent marketing, in particular good advertising, relied on a strong message, a USP and call to action;
"Buy our stuff now, its the fastest/highest quality on the market. Order before the end of the month and get 20% off your next purchase!"
Not the greatest example in the world, but you get the idea. Of course, if the stuff didn't turn out to be quite as advertised the customer could call in and complain. Perhaps they'd receive an apology or a free sample of stuff. Now of course things are different. People often grumble and vent their frustrations with products over Twitter. The great thing about Twitter, of course, is that it can be easily searched and indexed. If someone (i.e, me) post a tweet such as "BT are slow in connecting my line AGAIN. Useless" the company in question can easily search for this and reply. And they did. Promptly after posting this, I received a reply from @btcare asking what was wrong and how could they help. Now, while this didn't exactly fix my connection problem, it is good to see a company use new media to boost customer service and embrace new technologies that might enable them to improve service.
Another interesting use of Twitter in customer service was the Manchester Cabs service - a collective of various Manchester-based taxi companies that shared a Twitter account. The customer simply tweeted when and where they'd like a cab and the company would do the rest.
With this new ability though comes a whole new etiquette and guideline to usage. The single most important thing organisations must learn while developing a social media strategy is that such technologies are designed for conversation. Where brands fail it is often due to those running the operations simply broadcasting their message - the old "By our stuff!" technique. This is fine on a billboard, but in a medium that is constantly evolving, and where their audience can reply, this doesn't work. The successful brand is the one that engages in active conversation with its audience, and allows a relationship to flourish.
Brands are slowly learning this, but even now, in 2010 where Twitter is already established as the social media platform, it is baffling how many large organisations have failed to realise this. I shan't name names... you know who you are.
