Corporate Social Media

I talked to a Social Media director today at a large chain of retail convenience stores, and she told me a simple story of how the company had used Social Media to discover that a move from French Vanilla creamer to Dark Chocolate had been something that a lot of patrons weren’t completely happy about.  She saw a few tweets and Facebook comments coming through, and alerted the marketing department immediately.  It took a little convincing, but she eventually had the French Vanilla creamer back in the stores.  Here are the lessons that I think we can all take from this little story.

Agility – Social Media can make your organization a much more nimble company.  Whether you are big or small, you can learn about even small tweaks that will make your customers happier and therefore more likely to buy your products or services.  We are not talking about New Coke vs. Coca-Cola Classic here where you have millions upon millions of people asking for a change.  That’s a PR nightmare.  We’re talking about listening to your customers on a micro-level and addressing their concerns in a real way that be the difference between a good experience and a great one.

Organization – In this case, the Social Media Director was able to get some data in front of the people who could make a change.  Agility has an inverse relationship with the size of an organization, and as companies get larger they need to start thinking about how they will funnel this information to the right people.  And then the processes need to be in place so that the right people can take action quickly against what is being suggested in the Social Media channels.  Ultimately, this means restructuring an organization to be open to this new channel of information and to react in timely manner.  But for the initial period, I would start by setting up guidelines and plan of attack when faced with Social Media data that can affect your organization.

Suggestion boxes, comment cards and feedback hot-lines have been around for a while now, and the ideas through those channels generally took a while to get through the pipes.  It was hard to tell if anyone even bothered to listen, and customers rarely got direct feedback that they were being heard.  Now we are talking about faster and more immediate questions in the public forum that can build momentum if not addressed in real-time.  To make the most of these new suggestion boxes, companies need to adapt their organizations and embrace the ideas that their customers have delivered.

Sure, we all want to be “Outside the Box”, but how far from the box do we normally venture when we try to put this into practice?  The “box” is a pretty safe place, and that’s really why we like to stay within its confines.  Even when we venture outside of the box, we typically like to stay close to the box because of the risk of being too far out there, etc.

With social media, we can test the grounds outside of the box and really push innovation.  Conversations are happening all over different social media channels, and more often than not, around your specific brand as well.  Current and future customers are asking for product enhancements, changes and improvements.  They have ideas that maybe you have not thought of, and yet they are telling you and your competitors what they are.  It’s amazing that so much great information is being discussed, while most of it is not being used or even heard.

I would suggest that brands begin listening to social media especially for new product and campaign launches.  Hear what your customers are saying and make changes if you can.  If not, feed that information back to marketing, research and product development for future launches.  The better you can know your customer, the more you can deliver innovative and exciting products back to them.  And in the end, that is simply good business sense.

Within the social media monitoring space, there is a lot of talk of using social media to innovate products and determine how trending data is pointing to new places that your customer wants products to go.  But how realistic is it that a company can use this information appropriately?

Generally, I would say that most companies who do not generate massive amounts of social media on a day to day to basis are going to find social media as a source of product innovation pretty difficult.  The real winners are companies like Subway or Taco Bell where there is enough flowing through Twitter streams, etc. to be able to quickly understand what consumers think about specific promotions and product releases.  Entertainment companies who produce content may also have a high level of engagement, but production take a long time, and many of the companies who we have talked to don’t really see how they can react quick enough to make a change.

That being said, there is definitely an opportunity here for all companies with regards to product innovation.  Just as it is great to bring in executive talent from outside the company to get renewed perspective, there is a huge benefit to bringing in the intuition of consumers who do not work at the company.  As opposed to a market research study, the unstructured and often out-of-the-box thinking that comes out of a trend cloud can help researchers and product innovators within the organization think differently about how to to tweak ideas.

Are we still in the infancy of using this data for product innovation?  Of course.  But is there a lot of information out there that can be already be used to think differently? Absolutely.

I think the one thing that always amazes CMOs and marketers in general is the huge amount of market data that resides on social media channels. Traditionally, market research has been a relatively slow process taking weeks or months and costing a good chunk of change. Today, we can use monitoring tools to analyze that data very quickly and efficiently to identify areas where product innovation and marketing opportunities can lie.

This is such a huge shift in the way that market research is happening that I think most people don’t even know where to begin.  People are talking about what they like and dislike about all sorts of products, companies and services.  We are NOT talking about engagement here.  We are simply saying that there is information out there that can be used for your organization’s next marketing campaign, product launch or price promotion.

For me, that’s really powerful.  It means that organizations need to embrace social media not only because they want to talk to their customers, but because they want to LISTEN.