Onward and Upward
Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by Jason Chan in Social Media, Strategy
It’s interesting to see how agencies and corporations alike are rushing to pre-fix everything with the word “social.” It’s like the initial dotcom gold rush, where everyone rushed to make online enabled versions of existing businesses. When the dust settles down, we’ll start to see where the real value creators are. Once the industry becomes more sophisticated, I think we’ll start to see different levels of digital social maturity. This will have pretty broad implications across an organization, beyond PR and communication, the first two clear areas for social to establish a beachhead. We’ve seen the impact social has here — but this is just the short part the wedge that social can have on a company.
As organizations gain confidence — and comfort — with a social approach to doing business, they will see the merit of including customers in different parts of their company. As Jeremiah Owyang outlines, beyond PR and communication, there are natural extensions to marketing, support and product development. We’ve seen vivid examples with Starbucks VIA, Best Buy Twelpforce, and Dell IdeaStorm. I’ve personally had recruiters contact me via LinkedIn and Yammer does a great job as an internal tool. Executives from various Fortune 500 corps are even on Twitter.
So now that we’re well on our way, what’s next?
Organizational re-alignment. While we have momentum, let’s use it to make some fundamentally important changes to how companies are aligned. Right now, too many companies are stuck in silos that mean nothing to their customers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a call being transferred from one group to the next, as the buck was being passed around. With an organization that is setup to operate the way a customer would, the experience for them becomes a lot better and they get happier. Pretty simple.
Processes designed around customer thinking. Have you ever tried to return something or get support and are forced to learn that company’s language and way of doing things? Let’s make things as simple as they can be so that each step is intuitive and natural. If I bought something online, let me return it in the store. If I need service or support, assess my technical skill level before throwing a dozen pieces of information at me at once. Put yourself in my shoes.
There are probably more that I’m missing, for sure. Getting companies to where customers are going is hard work. The key, like Wayne Gretzky said, is to “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.“ Customers are moving very quickly and to go where customers are going will force companies to become more like their customers. And that begins by thinking like them.
