Till a few years back conversations in marketing were B2B & B2C, today social media has enabled C2B (Consumer to Business) and C2C (Consumer to Consumer) conversations.
Consumers now play a major influence in how & what a company communicates across all media.
Some of the key tools are active consumer forums and most known Twitter, FB and the likes.
While companies try to grasp a piece of the social media cake, they do not realize that they are playing with fire.Twitter may seem as an easy media to handle - Just create an account, start following users, who will follow you back and you can start tweeting about your products.
Over time you will start having multiple conversations.
But this is just the beginning. People who follow you or receive RTs will not only listen to you, they will also speak their mind. Recently I heard about a case where one of the top airlines company in India had to go on an offline conversation with a celebrity as she tweeted about her bad experience in a flight that day. Followers of the celebrity were not only supporting her by sympathizing with her but narrating their own experiences through tweets. Can you imagine the number of tweeter accounts that might have got those updates? If the celebrity had 41000 followers then not only did the followers read about the bad experience but when 5% of her followers RT-ed or wrote about their experience their on an avg 50 followers also read about it. So, atleast 102,500 people (read the bad review even when I have estimated very conservatively) assuming that those 50 followers didnt follow suit.
Firms work hard and spend millions to get 100,000 online users onboard and here one celebrity did it with a tweet. This makes you think just how powerful have the consumers become?
7 comments:
Good analysis. This also has got to do with the fact that consumers will tend to write more about bad experiences rather than good ones.
Though social media has upset the equation of communication, I really wonder if companies have found the best way to effectively channelize the unstructured communication of consumers to actionnable insights.
I forgot to include what the company did about the situation. They contacted the celebrity and offered her some perks and assured her of impeccable service the next time. She tweeted within 24 hrs that she was pleasantly surprised about the quick response of the company. She is a celebrity but not like the biggies of bollywood so she didnt expect to be heard at all. I know some Indian companies which have started using online relationship management in airline and banking industry, others are yet to discover the power of social media. Its a difficult media to handle but I find it really powerful & companies can benefit from it once they decide to be consumer facing.
Don't you think then companies will focus on key influencers (aka your celebrity) and forget about the smaller guy (aka us)?
Who knows in the future your twitter/fb friends list could be a way of segmenting the market.
You wrote exactly what I was thinking would probably be the next step. Like ads on traditional media (TV, print) where celebrities are being paid to endorse a product, may be social media will have the same.
Yes, FB, Twitter are definitely accumulating a lot of data about consumer habits and profile like Google.
Companies are now realising the power of social media... there are several companies that offer specialised services to manage issues raised by consumers...
On FB using you to endorse you to promote something... it is already happening via 'xyz is a fan... U become a fan'. Once you are a fan then your entire friend list is contacted with the news that you are fan and they should be a fan too...
interesting article.
are there specific relevant data about India usages ?
take care
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