Customer Relationship Management

Advertising and marketing products through Twitter accounts and Facebook pages have become commonplace enough these days; the really tech savvy companies have created customer service agents to maintain service accounts in Twitter, Facebook, mySpace and many other such networking sites. There have been numerous success stories of companies innovating to enhance the customer experience by, in a way, embracing these social media platforms and reaching out to customers (There can be no better example than zappos.com – a site that sells shoes online).

Companies now see social media as integral to their future plans and have already started chalking out strategies to harness the phenomenon that is social media. Corporations have started employing personnel to maintain their Facebook pages and Twitter support accounts. The reason? Well, cost cutting of course. Employing people to maintain online accounts works out to be much cheaper than hiring more call center executives. By one estimate, on an average, each call to a call center costs the company around $8 but getting a problem resolved through an online account costs a fraction of that amount.

Apart from just cutting costs, companies have also recognized that with the advent of these social networking sites, public opinion is getting more and more influenced by the goings on in the internet in general and these social media forums in particular. Companies are increasingly jumping on the bandwagon of these social media sites and are developing marketing strategies revolving around these sites. Collaborative consumerism has well and truly arrived, and by the looks of it, is here to stay.

So in light of all the above, the future does indeed look rosy and the world will soon be one big social network. But hold on; nothing can be that good, can it? I mean, sure it’s the next big thing and all but then isn’t there a catch? Of course there is. There always is.

So here are a few things that social media cannot do:

a) It can give you an opinion on what product to buy but cannot actually promise that the product that you buy will live up to your expectation.
b) It can promise you visibility and great PR but can’t guarantee that your product will be sold.
c) In spite of all the good reviews and publicity, the consumers still lack that ‘touch-n-feel’ that actually drives people towards buying.
d) If someone decides to bad-mouth your product, and if he/she is quite big in the social sphere, there is not much that can be done to stop the defamation of your product, and once you can get them to stop, it’s more likely that irreparable damage has already been done.
e) With the power in so many hands, there are bound to be hoaxes and threats, and in such a vast expanse, tracking these hoaxes could get tiresome (the recent hoaxes that perpetrated on Twitter about the Haiti earthquake are great examples of this).

Social media, in its entirety, is a fantastic concept that has taken the world by storm and to take Yahoo!’s tagline, has really made the saying “Power to you” come true. Yet, social media, for all its good, still does not substitute for the real thing. Social media in itself is not an end; it is merely a means to an end. A means that is so powerful, that the opportunities are vast and the possibilities endless.

In the upcoming posts I would like to talk about the reaches of social media, what you can make social media do for you, the current social media strategies followed by the companies and also how social media will be the game changer in the near future.

About the Author

Amrith Rajasekaran is part of the Product Incubation and Engineering unit. His areas of interest are  social media, its impact and potential.