Brand Advocacy and Bringing the Customer to the Drawing Board
Social media allows customers to give instant feedback on products and services. They become a part of the social branding of a company. This is where some companies fail. If a brand isn’t responding to its engaged consumers, they lose valuable advocacy and break spread of the brand’s message. The branding can quickly go from “The company that cares” to “The company that doesn’t listen”. Social marketing is all about building a community and then marketing to that community is a conversational way.
We call this the creation of a social value chain that enriches the brand and business growth. Social media integration ensures that genuine interest is sparked by real people around a brand. Building a community of repeat customers will help a brand gain in social finance and create a credible social name among consumers in general.
Proper social media integration and leveraging of various new media resources can also accelerate the product innovation cycle and reduce the risk of that innovation by utilizing your consumers in the development process. By building deeper relationships with your key consumers you can quickly build a customer-to-customer interaction and learning community who can help in the growth of your business. In addition, social media leveraging allows you to go to market faster with products and service models that have a much higher probability of success—involving customers early on in the product and service definition phase and also listening to the customer on social networking channels would ensure that the products and services you develop are exactly what the customers want.
Because of the increasingly vast and overwhelming amount of content now online, search engines have begun redesigning the way they provide search results. In addition to crawling traditional content of a company’s website and blogs for relevant keywords, search engines are beginning to pull results from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Therefore, as we search online, we will start to see more real-time information in our results from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and user-generated reviews.
Already in 2011 we have seen that Bing has started pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. User generated content is permeating the web and generating a massive global social brain and will become the primary way a person will experience a brand.
This paradigm shift in online searching and brand interfacing makes the development of brand advocates integral to a company’s online presence in the coming year. These evangelists of your brand work to produce relevant streams of content that can be shared and tagged by users. What this means is that once a user interfaces with your brand or product you are moved up in that individual’s organic search results in the future and are more likely to be interacted with a second or third time and ultimately creating an ongoing cycle of increased visibility and engagement.