Businesses are about people and conversations. Across the major functions from Marketing to Sales to HR to Purchase, all of them involve conversations with several stakeholders. These conversations are the root of actual business functions. Each of these conversations can be enhanced through social technology.
Simplest of them to understand, the existing standard, is to use social technologies and social media for Marketing. Using Social Media a brand can reach out to its customers and potential customers in several ways. Using the several platforms several customer oriented activities can be carried out.
Advertising: Social Advertising is an interesting area for one can reach audience at their real socializing places to promote related brands. There are many interesting aspects including low costs to targeted advertising to measurement. The latest form of advertising and lead generation in Social Media is also social through referrals and user-promotion.
Branding: There can be more to branding on social media than advertising. A brand can create objective visibility through social presence and valuable content contribution. For example, blogging about valuable content related to the industry, product etc can attract lot of attention. Microblogging on twitter by giving away valuable insights, links will bring in followers, and such the brand’s competence, the product etc can be communicated. Blogging can be a great tool for potraying thought leadership. Individual experts can be given recognition and people attract social attention which can result in sales leads for the business.
Customer Interfacing: Customers are people and they are out there on social media allowing it to slowly sink into their lives. Customers can be your consumers, clients etc. People nevertheless. They are over the social media space on places like LinkedIn, twitter, facebook etc. There are several ways of engaging these customers. Interact by replying to their tweet, question on linkedin, commenting on blog etc. If you have a large customer base keeping them engaged in an community can be an excellent idea for this will keep your customers engaged with the brand even beyond the physical world.
Product specific branding & experimentation: The new extension of e-commerce is social commerce. It is about utilizing social collaborative tools to assist online purchasing. The paradigm that is emerging is of collaborative purchasing, social shopping etc. This presents a great opportunity for New Product experiments where new categoriesprice bands etc can be tested using the power of the crowd. The same applies to branding of the product. The crowd would push a truly promising value proposition to an expanding customer base to embrace and love.,
This is the first of the series. More about the conversations of business soon. Watch out this space for more.
