Word of Mouth + Strategy = engrave it in your delivery strategy

Working on a social media strategy isn’t just a button you can push to add value to your communication and marketing plan after having done everything you can. It has to be core to your customer care strategy to perform fast and accurate word spreading. If not you’d have to face issues that can’t be solved because of the customer care way of working.

To set up a social media strategy, first thing to do is to check when the customers would interact with the company and think of what’s possible to do to add value to the interaction. Adding value means ways of facilitating information sharing and targeting relevant info according to context. For example when requesting people to create an account, think of these points:

1. It is useful for the consumer to go over a 3 or 4 step registration at that point of the relationship with the brand?
2. Can I add interesting information into the confirmation email to help the customer reach faster information he needs?
3. Would the consumer want to ask a question after registration? If so can he do it quickly?

The objective is to help the customer leave as fast as possible places he doesn’t care about, yet places you do really care about, so that they can spend more time on engaging with the brand and then your time to turn them into brand advocates.

The second step is to think of your ability to change the course of your relationship with users as they share information and ideas with you to make them feel they’re listened and their time spent on feeding your business make their life easier. In this case we can take the example of customer support:

• What happens when a customer requests help from the company support? How long does he waits for the answer?
• What’s happening after the answer is delivered? Any follow-up to make people feel they’re important to you?
• Do you anticipate customer support question to invite people to discover your services more deeply?

With these two steps you can already change the opinion people have about your company, they’re still not engaged but they now know they’re important to you since you’ve helped them spend less time on actions that don’t add value to their life.

Engagement comes next. You’ve created the opportunity for people to spend time with your company and they’re in the mood to share with you using the 2 steps above. Now you can request people to engage with you; share ideas, ask for their opinion and views about your ideas, make them speak to each others, and become a friendly place to spend a little time. By connecting people to each others, you won’t be directly creating value for your brand but you would be creating your community and this is the tipping point.

By connecting people you’ve managed to show them you’re not here to grow your business but here to make their activity cool and interesting; they would spend more time on your website and finally share more info about your company that you could possibly do with direct marketing or TV spots because they’d be sharing with their friends about their life, which is supported by your company.

To read more on that topic:

• Brand Building + Social Media = Zappos Example and Employee Advocacy
• Web 2.0 + Best Practices = Connecting and creating value
• MySpace Music + Long tail = Indie labels not worthy enough for MySpace
• Fast.Fwd.Innovation Weekly Takeaway
• Attention Marketing + Online = Google decision making and content creation