I really don’t know your brand. We don’t have a relationship. I haven’t yet bought your product. I’m not thinking about your service/product area right now, I’m dealing with a crisis. What could you possibly say/email/mail to me right now that would cause me to give pause? Because I don’t have time to waste, and I’m tired of fluff talk.
If you’re not listening to what your customers are saying and building that insight iteratively back into your culture and product or service development, you won’t have to worry about them being your customers for very long. You’ll be relieved of that little problem.
I read a blog comment someone left on a site recently, and the comment characterized social media as a broad category that, depending on the execution, could be called publishing, customer service, community relations, and many other things. For me, observing and joining social media communities has been incredibly educational and fulfilling, both professionally and personally. One of the important lessons I’ve learned is that when someone graciously wants to engage you in conversation, it’s not a responsibility to be taken lightly.
Consumer interest is becoming more elusive in today’s marketplace as situational, economic, convenience, and other pressures factor into the purchase equation. Which would seem to imply that businesses have to be not only intelligent and intentional with their communication and engagement strategies, but also well informed. And in turn, inform their customers with a degree of transparency that acknowledges purchase –and certainly repeat purchase–is an end achieved through relationship-building.
Sell it and they will come. Um, pass, thanks just the same.
Self-centered companies operating on tired principals where the consumer is excluded from the go-to-market strategy will soon find themselves obsolete.
