Be Everywhere Customers Expect You to Be
Charlene Li (Altimeter Group) and Ben Elowitz (Wetpaint) just released an interesting paper linking financial success with social media engagement. Their findings reveal, “… the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.”
Li and Elowitz explain “it pays to be social” and the deeper a company engages with its customers in a variety of social media places, the more financial success they will find.
I’m not convinced their evidence is strong enough to make such a bold statement about the direct correlation between profits and social media engagement because the recession variable wrecks too much havoc on financial success models today.
However, I am a believer when the authors write, “Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer-orientated mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace.”
And the more a company knows about the likes, dislikes, etc. of customers, the better they can develop products and services to meet their needs to drive business success. It’s basic but true.
Which brings us to WOM TRUTH # 17 … Be Everywhere Customers Expect You to Be. If your customers are heavy users of Twitter, your company should be heavy users Twitter. If your customers are heavy users of Facebook, your company should be heavy users of Facebook. If your customers are active users of Yelp, your company should actively use Yelp. If your customers are active users of {insert social media app here}, your company should actively use {re-insert social media app here}.
Word of mouth can only happen if a conversation happens. And the more places where conversations happen, the more opportunities for word of mouth to happen. And thus, it pays to be social.
