The fast & easy path to social media success

You could take any number of easy decisions with Social Media, all of which you could get up and running fast. You could, for example try any of the following:

1. Ignore it and hope that your customers will too2. Outsource it to a Social Media agency and marvel at the pretty weekly sentiment dashboards that they send to you3. Set up a Twitter account and Tweet out special offers and press releases4. Hire a social media guru and pay them to find you more Twitter followers5. Ask your CEO to write a blog6. Set up a Facebook fan page so that your customers can “like” you7. Siphon off a small team of contact centre agents and have them monitor Twitter and reply to angry complaints8. Create a video of a donkey water-skiing up the River Thames and post that onto YouTube
Sure... you could make any of those easy decisions and implement them pretty quickly. But what happens if:
1. Your customers start to use your Facebook fan page to post customer support issues2. An environmental movement launches an orchestrated attack on your social sites3. People start to question the accuracy and usefulness of the weekly sentiment dashboards from your agency and begin to “file them away”4. Your competitors use insight gained from social listening and analytics to actually improve their core propositions and better tailor those to target your customers5. Your competitors start to provide their customers with tools that actually help them to do the jobs that they are trying to do6. The small team of agents you set up to monitor Twitter starts to grow into a much bigger team7. Your customers start to learn that the only way to get great service from you is to shout loudly at their friends on social networking sites8. No one forwards the video of your water-skiing donkey

An easy decision is not always a sound decision. Just because you can do something fast, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do. The speed, ease and transparency of social media bring both opportunity and threat.