It’s NEVER About YOU!
It’s never about you… in social media at least.
It is never about you, your products, services, goals, etc. It is about your community and what they want. The Internet was designed to be a collaborative social environment; hence social media on the Internet. Therefore, when you establish some type of community around your brand online, whether it is on Twitter or on a Ning community, you must talk about the consumers’ interests, feedback, and build on the relationships.
Consider your community a gift. If people are forming a community online to talk about your product, or joining your already established community, be thankful for that. To show your thanks, ask your community to discuss their thoughts, ideas, feedback, concerns, improvements, etc. This helps to build better relationships and confirms the reason why each consumer is there.
Think of it like this: You walk into a grocery store and are immediately greeted by the store manager who proceeds to tell you who he was, his position, how long he had been there, what he had done to improve the store, and then guided you around and told you about every fabulous feature of the store during your shopping trip. Annoying, right? Instead, wouldn’t you want to be in the store (preferably not even bothered by the store manager unless you want to ask a question, give feedback, or be greeted) and do what YOU needed to do?
The same goes for a community. People come there out of self interest to get something out of it. Whether that is to find out more about your product, ask a question, give a suggestion, or just praise the great job the company is doing. Consumers do not want to enter your community and be bombarded with brand advertisements and features; quite simply they do not care. The only real thing they care about is how their problems can be solved and how you can help them get there.
Your community may look to you for their success, so give them more tools to succeed. For example, a customer of CVS may join the forallthewaysyoucare.com community to share medical stories, gather resources, speak with others for ideas, and join forums on particular topics of interest. They do this because they know that your site serves as a resource to help solve problems and give them tools to succeed. They do not go there to be bombarded with sales pitches or advertisements. This methodology is called “Equip Instead of Sell!”
So whether you are in the biomedical, high tech, toy, or food industries, it is still never about you in social media. Talk about the customers and their thoughts and concerns, and you will realize amazing relationships will start to grow, and in turn ROI (return on influence) and ROI (return on investment) will shortly follow.
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Kristin, this is my favorite post of yours thus far. Social media to poorly informed leadership is like finding dad’s gun or something. And what’s worse is that at first, I’ve seen management reject social media wholly as some kind of voodoo (fear of Dad’s gun), only to embrace it as a new form of push marketing (firing Dad’s gun wildly into the air). So everyone is making these extreme wholesale judgments on its value and then on how to leverage it without knowing a thing about it. Either they discredit social media entirely or worse, they embrace it without knowing the fundamentals. A client of mine, after much tussle, is finally aboard, but immediately posted self-promoting ads/videos on their new Youtube channel. I explained to them just how poor a choice that was, but those videos are still up. Keep talking on this subject specifically, please. First off, you do a great job outlining what the priorities should be and secondly, this topic could easily dovetail into an equally relevant dialogue about how one should respect the gun and its potential before reaching for it, loading it and discharging it aimlessly. Kudos Kristin!
Good idea, Scott. I will try to build off of it in a post next week.