Connecting to consumers through social media

I am beginning to feel Twitter fatigue. I was incredibly active on it when I started, which was just a few months ago, but now don’t do much more than a cursory check once a day or so to see if anything interesting is floating around. Twitter used to be much more about links to interesting articles or even blog posts being bandied about, in addition to the usual status messages. That’s what drew me to it. Now, I feel it is more about conversations between individuals and status messages than the information I found so useful. And Twitter’s continuing technical issues aren’t helping either. I’ve been patient for a while because I understand that any website can have technical issues and things need to be sorted out, but it seems to be taking a much longer time than necessary.

Anyway, I wanted to explore the uses of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, by companies and brands as a method of influencing consumers, which apart from link publicity (which sometimes counts as spam) is easily the best way of employing social media usefully. Jo pointed me to a useful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang that aggregates some examples of companies using Twitter in this way.

What’s important with what these companies are doing is that they are listening to their consumers/users and responding to them. The single most important thing for any consumer is to know that their opinion counts. If you ask me, every business in the world should have a mechanism like Twitter where people can contact the company with queries and be assured of a response from a human-being, and not an automated response like we usually receive by email. Ernst & Young, for example, has one individual responding to all queries that prospective graduate recruits have about working there on their Facebook group.

This video, an interview of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research speaking about the influence of social media marketing, is very informative and relevant to this topic.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...

June 27, 2008 | Filed Under Anjali Ramachandran 

Comments

3 Responses to “Connecting to consumers through social media”

  1. Jo Jordan on June 27th, 2008 2:01 pm

    Thanks Anjali for that tip to Facebook. I am interested in making “positive HR” systems.

    Twitter apparently has a two tier architecture instead of a 3 level architecture. The middle level is needed to allow scalability. That is the design that the Indian Twitter Gupshup uses. It is 3 times the size and doesn’t fall over.

    For what Twitter is, I imagine the smart move would be to put it Google DataStore and let them do the scalability.

    Twitter is typical crowd sourcing. You are completely substitutable by someone else. That stumped me for a while. How can something be meaningful if you aren’t important?

    But then I remembered my good neighborhood pub of another life. You go away and no one notices. They you come back 2 years later and they say where have you been? Have you been on holiday!

    The pub is great because there is critical mass - you always have company, you can always find someone to recommend a plumber, because it works everyone want to join, so you have critical mass, etc. But you also don’t have to excuse yourself if you don’t want be there that night. And you don’t want to be there every night!

    Actually I remember, on pay day no one went to the neighborhood pub. They were taking significant others to nicer places!

    Thanks for the tip.

  2. The Godfather on June 27th, 2008 4:51 pm

    I love the pub analogy, one of my favourites that I often use about social media in general. I generally use SM in the same way as you’d find me conversing in the pub.

  3. Anjali on June 28th, 2008 6:17 am

    Jo: really useful information about the tier architecture levels that Twitter uses.It’s amazing that Gupshup has been able to leverage that and the much bigger Twitter, hasn’t.Being from India, I’m quite proud of that..ha ha!

    Also love the pub analogy with Twitter as well.

    ‘Positive HR systems’ is something I’d certainly like to hear more about. I think there’s potential for a lot of thoughts there.

    Thanks Jo and The Godfather for your comments!

Leave a Reply