Follow the leader: How will you(r company) respond to customers?

July 10th, 2008 Angela LoSasso

Make a statement. Get opinions. Ask a question. Get answers. Ask a different question. Get silence.

Look or sound familiar?

It’s fascinating to watch conversations unfold between companies and customers. Large, small, formal, informal – examples of what works well and what doesn’t in social marketing has less to do with your Fortune 500 ranking than it does your commitment and willingness to allow your customers to lead the conversation.

“Follow the leader? Give my customers control? But it’s my company. That’s crazy?” I hear this a lot (including the “crazy” part).

In no way am I suggesting that you relinquish control of moderating, monitoring and hosting your conversation. Instead, I am suggesting that you take a hard look at who, what, where, when and how your customers engage with your company and brand and adjust your social program and planning accordingly.

This can be easy, or it can be difficult. But flexibility, iteration, and ongoing commitment to satisfying customers’ needs and wants are the most common essential ingredients of the most successful conversational marketing programs (See this. Look here. And here, here, and here for examples).

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how and where HP’s printing customers have engaged and shared content. With a Wiki-based service, we’ve been able to quickly adapt, ask questions, generate new targeted content, repurpose other content, and inspire user-generated content that’s useful to both customers and HP.

But I don’t always have clear visibility as to how a new feature, or topic, or discussion will be received. In such cases, we launched anyway, introduced it to customers in a friendly way and invited their feedback. Believe me, customers will let you know whether it’s good, useful, or should be pulled.

But the larger goal is provide value to your customers and give your customers a say in what you sell, how you do business, and what your future relationship will be. So encourage them to shape your community — so much so that they become invested in your community and organically grow into brand ambassadors on your behalf (and recommend your community, your company, and your company’s service and products to their friends, family and colleagues).

How can you encourage customer participation in your social programs?

Make it easy for customers to participate (or at least keep the barriers to engagement to a minimum)

Ask questions that anyone in your target audience can answer
Use free opinion polls (like Vizu) and plug-ins
Make it easy for people to find the “comment” feature
Enable sharing features – tags, posts, email
Add community features

Reward customer engagement (promoting user-generated content begets more user-generated content)

Take their suggestions and implement them (if appropriate) and thank them!
Award gift cards to the customers who help other customers or help your business
Pick a customer comment and write about it and showcase it (if appropriate)

Monitor and analyze what’s most popular with your customers

You should know where your customers are coming from (referrals, email invitations, search, etc.)
What’s most popular ? Analyze which categories, pages, downloads, etc. are getting the most clicks, link-tos, etc. You may want to consider adding more content in these areas.
Ask your customers to rate your content, features, widgets, etc.
Ask for suggestions – old-fashioned, yes, but highly effective (ask Dell).

And just a tip: Remember that the majority of your visitors will be browsing and reading only. But information-gathering is still an extremely valuable conversational tool for your brand.

Please share your thoughts, tips and ideas. I’m interested to hear what you have to say.