Social 2011: High Performance Participation Brands
By: Trish Forant
Once upon a time the majority of your brand’s customer interaction was a reactive process. Someone called or wrote in to your company with an issue and your customer service team responded to help with that issue. Often, a response or resolution could take days. Then things changed. Real-time engagement took center stage.
Now, through social media, your brand’s interaction with your customers is a more proactive process. Your brand uses social media platforms to reach out to customers and hold conversations, ask their opinions, look to them for ideas on new products and provide content that they’ll value based on what you’ve learned from them. Of course, you still have to deal with your share of issues but now you’re balancing them with interactions and engagement, too.
This is where your brand was meant to be. But what if your brand isn’t quite there yet?
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our Social 2011 panel High Performance Participation Brands. We’re going to explore how brands are going beyond passive listening and are becoming adaptive businesses, recognizing and responding with real-time engagement.
Our panelists, Barry Dalton: Senior Vice President Technology at Telerx, Claire Spinti: Global Community Engagement Specialist at 3M, Stephanie Marx: Social Media Marketing Manager at Cisco Systems and Wendy Kritt: Senior Director of Global Consumer Relations at Kraft, will share their experiences and answer the questions you’ve been wanting to ask. They’ll share what engagement means to their respective brands, how your brand can achieve a more proactive role and how you might balance the challenges of reacting while moving toward a proactive model.
Sure, there may be missteps along the way toward becoming a fully engaged brand, we’ve all had them, but with proper preparation and insight from our panelists, your brand can overcome these minor bumps in the road. After all, the benefits far outweigh the risks.
So, what do you think? Is this where your brand was meant to be? Is it risky to go beyond passive listening and engage or is it much more perilous not to? We’re interested in what you’ve got to say, you’re the driving force. What would you’d like to learn from this panel? Let us know.
I'm with DebtDefenseLaw. I have a lot of clients who need social media and have just enough understanding of its potential to be nearly ready to commit. But, like they say, "He who fully deliberates before taking a step is destined to spend his life on one leg."
The absence of a clean and clear path to economically, strategically and artfully entering into a social media program is preventing most of our clients from making a commitment. I think we could use a step-by-step model for entry.
Its far more perilous for a brand not to but what brands struggle with is getting the right tone of voice and sentiment. This manifests itself in two ways: brands which have established a voice online but have not got it right; brands which are scared to dip ther feet in social media in case the perceived voice doesn't match their identity . However, whatever the brand or product, industry or vertical, they are still dealing with people, and this is often overlooked.
An audience of thousands comes in time, but is starts with one or two people. This is why marketers have to be careful when studying successful brands in social media. It's not simply a case of replicating a tone or tactic which [say] is working well for a competitor. You have to look at where they came from. This is where the gold is.