If you’re still thinking about social media as nothing but another channel, to quote George Bailey when he was trying to calm his bank’s nervous customers, “look, you’ve got this thing all wrong.”
We’ve got a big Zeitgeist & Coffee initiative going on for a major financial institution, Bank X. (The name has been changed to protect the innocent.) Although they recognized the growing importance of social media marketing, Bank X was not actively listening to and marketing against the many conversations being had about it, its products and its competitors. So we started by plugging in to all of the chatter.
We analyzed conversation streams from microblogs including Twitter, blogs, message boards, user forums, wikis, social networking sites such as Ning, and MySpace and Facebook (to the extent they are open) and video and photo sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Conversations are
Earned through trusted engagement
Not purchased wholesale.
Fred Ulrich, Account Executive
06.18.09
Social media can sometimes feel more like outbound telemarketing. Sure, clients get to approve a script and listen in on calls, but they cannot predict the words that will come out of every customer’s mouth when an agent gets on that call. And worse, the whole world can see this conversation AND there is a written record of it.
The number one activity of small businesses using social media is “responding to customer questions.” This shows me that many small businesses are picking up on something that the larger companies often miss – it’s about establishing and nurturing a conversation.
