01 Mar 10 Social Media Marketing Is A Two-Way Street

The most important thing businesses need to remember as they start adopting social media marketing is the very same thing that might make them reluctant to engage in this strategy in the first place. This is the fact that this type of business marketing is much more of a two-way street than anything that’s come before. Even if companies have previously tried to listen to their customers, taking surveys, having complaints departments, and so on, the relationship has traditionally been very top-down. But now that has to change. Social media has begun to turn the company-customer relationship into a real conversation.

Everyone has heard the phrase on some company help line: “Your call is important to us.” And most of us recognize this is simply a corporate strategy to prevent us from getting enraged as we hold the line waiting to talk to a person who evidently has little interest in how an item isn’t functioning as advertised, and who provides very little actual help. It might not look like it now, but that approach is on the way out, as the new social media marketing progressively moves in.

This notion actually frightens some corporations, and it makes others outraged. Why adopt social media guidelines, they argue, when they have tried and true marketing strategies which have worked for many years? They’re accustomed to putting ads and specs out there to tell the buyer what they think he or she ought to know, and this consumer has previously been a reasonably submissive recipient of the word from on high. Now the buyer demands to talk back and perhaps make judgments on the corporation’s product line and approach to doing business. But rather than embracing this social media strategy, a number of companies view this modern method of doing business as crazy.

However, when a company develops social media policies that give its customers a genuine voice, and help the company produce things its customers really want, how can that be a bad thing for either of them? The users of the products will certainly feel much more brand loyalty if they know their comments and suggestions were listened to. They’ll even spread the word to others, giving the company a positive profile in the wider public. How can this kind of social media marketing be a bad thing, if it produces such results?

On the other hand, the customers’ same social networks can be used to spread the news if they feel taken advantage of. Social media marketing cannot be done cynically, with companies pretending to engage and then stabbing the customers in the back in some way. The conversation must be a genuinely two-way process if this new type of business marketing is to benefit anyone.

Social media has allowed more people to stay in contact with each other and has provided them with a great way to expand their social network. Social media resources allow for updated information to be passed between each other in an expedited fashion.

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