We can safely say that social media is here to stay. Key platforms have now reached a critical mass of users and their use has become increasingly embedded in people's everyday working and social lives. This rise of social media has fundamentally changed the way brands and customers interact, turning existing brand-customer relationships on their head. We have witnessed a change from organisations talking and the customer listening to dynamic, two-way, customer-led interactions.
This presents exciting opportunities for organisations, who can harness social media to grow their customer base and execute their brand strategy. Social media provides a wealth of data on consumer feedback, which, if harnessed properly, can help businesses to better understand their customers and, in turn, generate exciting, targeted content that strengthens their brand. This is about taking the social experiences we have outside of work, and carefully introducing them into the enterprise.
Starbucks is a great example of a company that has taken the lead in harnessing the power of social media. With 32 million 'Likes' on Facebook and almost 3 million followers on Twitter, the numbers alone are impressive. But it's the depth of engagement Starbucks achieves with its customers that makes it stand out. For example, recognising that more and more users are accessing their accounts from a smart phone or tablet, Starbucks recently launched a Frappuccino Happy Hour photo competition. Each day for two weeks Starbucks gave its Twitter followers a different photographic challenge. Users had to tweet a photo of themselves, including the @StarbucksUK username, for the chance to win a £10 Starbucks card. This campaign achieved maximum exposure for minimal cost, recruiting many hundreds of thousands of unofficial 'brand ambassadors', who were generating online buzz about Starbucks.
On the other hand, social media also presents organisations with a number of challenges, as the changing relationship between business and customer frequently puts brand reputation at risk. The customer is now more proactive than reactive, and they can air their problems to a large audience rather than dealing with complaints in private. As Bing discovered last year, brands can now be broken in a matter of days. Already struggling to compete with other, more established search engines, Bing's brand took a heavy blow when it suffered the wrath of the Twitterati. Its promise to donate $1 to the Japanese tsunami relief fund for everybody who retweeted one of their posts caused widespread outrage. A few days later, the firm made a red-faced apology alongside a large donation to the relief fund. But, by then, the damage was already done and blog posts were already busy documenting a new case study of how not to use social media.
These initial phases of businesses understanding and experimenting with social media are drawing to a close; we are now seeing a new phase of professionalisation. This, in itself, is presenting new challenges. Although brands are increasingly recognising the importance of social media, many are unsure of how to respond to it. A recent study by Deloitte and MIT Sloan, polling over 3400 executives, found that 80% believe social media has a key role to play in building customer relationships. Despite this, few companies have a social media strategy in place and, in the same study, when asked about what metrics their organisations use to measure their performance on social media, the most common answer was 'Do not measure'!
Social media presents exciting new opportunities for brands to deliver genuine differentiation in the market. If they do not approach social in the right way, however, they risk differentiating themselves for entirely the wrong reasons.
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