Getting the best out of social networks for customer connect
The last 5 years have seen an exponention growth of internet as a medium and a boom in social networking services. Since then, companies are leaving no stone unturned to utilize this opportunity to be constantly in-touch with their customers. Product announcements, event invitations,product reviews etc. have all gone 'social'. But, there is a fine line between customer connect and spamming your customers through emails, status updates, tweets and the like.
So, what would be the one factor that differentiates a piece of information between spam and a 'like'able post? In my opinion, the answer would be relevance. While one may be inclined to think that most of the communication may be subscription based. That is, a customer chooses to receive certain updates by subscibing to a blog stream, agreeing to receive email updates or being fans of a facebook page. However, ones a person has consented, he starts receiving ALL updates regardless of his preferences, buying behaviour or availability. Hence, despite the advantages, social media applications risk being overused and resultantly lead to marketing fatigue.
I think, this impasse can be resolved by intelligently using customer analytics and targeting for social media. There are quite a few companies who have started targeted email marketing. I myself have been involved in couple of such implementations. Targeting is an obvious activity in one to one marketing like emails, sms, telecalling and direct mailers. Newspapers, TV commercials, billboards are outside the purview of targeting because these are broadcasting channels. Social media lies somewhere in between. Something I would like to call selective broadcasting. For example a facebook page is public but the updates are available to only those who subscribe. It is the subscribed material where careful targeting should come into play.
To achieve this, social marketing needs to be married with customer analytics. When a customer subscribes to a feed from any of the social platform, the updates that go to her should be driven by the customer's profile. The profile may be bilt using competitive analytics on demographic data, purchase history and even social media interactions. There are certain characteristics of social networks like hashtags or mentions that may be used to define a customer profile. I haven't seen of an application that fulfills this need. While many try to get there by the way of integration, I think this should be built as a stand alone product or a module.
Do you think there is a market out there for something like this? What could be the challenges of building an application
like this?
