Neoco

A significant number of brands and some PR agencies are still essentially ignoring the relationship aspect of Social CRM. By persisting in only using social media as a PR broadcast medium, they are failing to benefit from the huge opportunity to build direct relationships.

If your brand is only ever talking at its customers, without listening in return, your approach is analogous to having a friend who you only ever see when they choose or when they need a favour – and who only ever talks about themselves. This is not a rewarding relationship – though it is very common behaviour by brands towards their online followers, effectively using social tools as just another mechanism to reach people – like email.

To avoid this trap requires a change of focus in how you build your social strategies. These should instead first focus on generating two-way engagement and listening to what the other side are saying, instead of just building up large numbers of followers for the sake of it. From the very start you should be aiming at a higher level of interaction, and it’s important to understand that not only are your audience out there, but that there’s every chance that they know more about your brand, product or services than you do.

To start with, you should be actively asking your community to respond and give you feedback. As a matter of course you should be regularly asking them to give you their opinions, their points of view and in general what they think of your activities. If you can get them to answer these questions you are then in a stronger position to use this dialogue to actually build and develop your products, services and brand.

This is a tremendous way to gain insight and data about your audience – and one that was unimaginable even only a few years ago. Armed with this feedback you can then use this insight to not only improve what you sell to them but also to other people like them. This can directly help you to generate better sales.

As you begin to better understand your users it also becomes easier to step back and look at things directly from their perspective, making it far simpler to actually pre-empt their needs and questions. You can then quickly determine where they might encounter problems and issues and prepare yourself in advance so that you can deal will these with the minimum of fuss.

This sort of engagement shouldn’t be exceptional, though the number of brands who are really able to exploit it is. However, if you are able to spend more time listening rather than talking to your customers, you should be able to reap the full benefit of your Social CRM strategy.

Tags  brand relationship brands conversation PR relationship relationships social CRM social crm strategy