First let me describe the old world:
Hire an ad agency and work with them on a campaign focused on television, radio, billboards, print, etc. You’ll focus the same message in all channels. It’s a mass market approach and you control what is said about your bank and your brand. If users have complaints, there are few channels for them to complain outside of their small circle of friends.
Now look at the new world:
You will most likely have to hire an agency to increase brand awareness using the legacy approaches. However, you now have to deal with a new channel. The problem is that this channel doesn’t act like tv or radio. Users don’t necessarily trust the message that comes from you. You have control over what you say and when you say it but hundreds or even thousands of users can gainsay you. They can even post brand destroying pictures and videos and there’s almost nothing you can do about it.
In many cases, if you aren’t actively listening, you may not even aware of it. Now different people have different terms for it.
KPMG refers to it as “losing control but gaining a voice”
Forrester talks about paid media, owned media, and earned media. This social conversation falls squarely in the earned media category.
Here’s the bottom line, you need to learn about how to listen, measure, and react. I’m going to go into more detail on this in the next post but think about the following:
- Listen: What are people saying about you? Where are they saying? What is the actual sentiment?
- Measure: How many are positive about you? How many negative posts/articles/videos/tweets are out there? How many are just asking questions?
- React: You can and should react. Sometimes you will want to react in a one to many interactions. Others will demand a more personal interaction. Do you have the tools to do that?
So let me leave you with a few thoughts on what is being said about some very well known brands. You should take notice of a couple things. First, both these brands have a presence on twitter. Second, you can get surprisingly good search results on twitter.Third, you get peoples complaints, news, and other information in this one stream alone.
Twitter search on @citibank September 5 2012
Twitter search on Bank of America September 5 2012
