At Social Fresh last week, Amber Naslund’s keynote was all about the “Now Revolution.” The crux of her presentation (and her and Jay Baer’s upcoming book) is how the consumer has drastically changed from even a few years ago. We now want the companies we buy from to move as quickly as we do. If we ask a question on Twitter, we want a response within the hour, even if it’s 11 pm on the west coast. The real time nature of social media requires us to have someone constantly standing by the digital telephone. This fundamental change in what consumers expect demands a change in how businesses operate.
Here’s the thing I’ve noticed about this change: it scares businesses the crap out of them. I’m okay with them being scared, but this fear needs to lead them to respond. If you see a piano falling from a building (because that happens all the time), you can either react and book it out of there or get caught flat footed like the cartoons always do.
The unfortunate thing is that this fear is paralyzing many businesses. They’re scared they’ll mess up. They think that avoiding it will make them invisible. They don’t have the time or resources. I’ll take “Common Excuses” for $500.
The thing is, it’s our responsibility as marketing and PR professionals to 1) explain it to them in a manner that they understand the importance of adapting to the real time world and 2) help them figure out how to equip their business from the ground up to take on the real time revolution.
Here’s the kicker, folks. Yes real-time is a bit scary because at any moment, a PR nightmare could happen, a fake Twitter account can bet set up that entertains the world at the expense of your business, and an employee can (and probably will) say something they shouldn’t. However, if you equip yourselves to mitigate these risks (with social media guidelines, crisis plans, etc.), then there is a tremendous opportunity for businesses.
The Now Revolution works both ways. These days, consumers are closer than ever to the point of purchase. At any given time, they are seconds away from handing over their money. It only takes a few clicks. It’s all a matter of whether or not you’re there with them to make the sale.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Fantastic point Jackie! So it seems as though we have a split between companies that just “get it” and those that don’t see the fantastic advantage with this strategy. What do you suggest is the best way to keep up with this demand though? Do you have an online response center? Do you hire a team of “community managers” to interact with your audience?
Going off of what you said, customers may be ready to make a purchase at any given time so wouldn’t it be expensive to try and accommodate this demand?
Thanks for stopping by Brooks! We’ll start by saying you can dump as much or as little money into accommodating this as you want/can (and more money definitely doesn’t equate to more success). I think that having a listening system set up is a crucial part for this, whether it be investing in a monitoring tool or simply setting up Google Alerts and Twitter searches to track mentions of your brand and consumers with interests in the area you’re after.
Then, the next step of this would be responding and generating leads using this information. Part of this could include a community manager, but even more importantly, you need to empower employees to respond on behalf of your company. This means establishing social media guidelines that don’t necessarily limit what they can do, but rather give them a framework which will make them feel more comfortable speaking on the company’s behalf online.
Of course, there are many other key aspects involved, but these are two that Amber did mention in her presentation and that I feel are two of the more important ones.
Great points! The quintessential response I get when I start telling people (typically Gen X and Boomers) that work in large corporations about the importance of engaging in conversation with your consumers is, “What’s the ROI and how big of a cost does it incur?”
To address the first point, there’s a couple of guru’s and self-proclaimed experts that have “systems” that measure a company’s results when utilizing social tools. Are they correct? I guess they could be. However, my point to them is, “Who cares?” If you’re engaging in conversations with your target audience and are able to obtain substantial feedback (to help you improve your existing products/services, cultivate new ones, identify weaknesses, etc.) then what else could you possibly need? Of course, the more bureaucratic the organization (and thus more complicated decision-making process) the more difficult this idea becomes to sell.
In the second point, the cost incurred is a paramount, and legitimate, concern. I agree that vesting your employees in your company and actually caring to engage with the consumer on their own is beneficial. But, going off of your point, if someone wants an answer at 3 AM on Sunday morning in order to make an immediate purchase decision; how does a company deal with this demand? In theory it would be great to have a vested group of employees and/or even a full-time community manager but they incur substantial overhead and would never respond to the situation that I just alluded to.
Yeah, the main reason for measuring the results is to be able to convince the skeptics that what you’re doing is working. It can also be valuable to show any sponsors that you work with or other parties, as being able to show the benefits will convince them that it will be a huge value-add to them. But, it’s also good to just measure your performance against yourself, helping you know what’s working, what’s not working, and making sure that you’re continuing to make progress.
In regards to the 3 AM on Sunday morning part, some companies are definitely able to deal with that sort of demand. They have 24-hour call centers anyway, so why not just shift one of those people over to monitoring Twitter and such. For smaller companies, I think managing expectations are important. If you only have someone closely monitoring from 8am-6pm. A customer can’t be mad if they show up to a restaurant at 2 AM and can’t get any service when the sign clearly says it’s only open until 11 PM. So, in a similar manner, if a customer realizes that the customer service isn’t active nights and weekends, they may not be happy about it, but they’ll at least know it’s the case.
A lot of all this really comes down to doing the most with whatever you have, but not trying to do more than you’re capable of. Good discussion going here!
Awesome work Jackie! Proposing proper expectations up-front with the consumer is huge. Keep up the great work