Activity vs Trade

According to a July 2011 Forrester Consulting survey commissioned by Dell, US marketers believe the top three business areas of greatest impact for their listening and engagement initiatives are:

1. Influencing customer perception in the marketplace (50 percent)

2. Building long-term relationships with customers and partners (56 percent)

3. Responding to customer feedback in a timely manner (42 percent)

There are many tools at our disposal for listening and monitoring social channels. Dell leads the way on understanding its critical role.

Bottom line, customer conversations on Twitter are good brand management.

When we talk about engagement, however, we're in a more gray-ish area. How do you know when you're truly "engaging" customers. How can you tell if what you're saying and doing is truth or truthiness?

Truthiness happens whenever you don't know what you're really trading. You've seen them in social media -- the endless streams of promotional tweets with exclamation marks at the end. Are they all promises made? How many of those are kept? Do they lead to egangement?

If you want to engage customers, you have to give them a reason to engage. Mindless, idle chatter on Twitter and Facebook isn’t sustainable.

In order to give them a reason to engage, you need to know what you're trading. Are you trading just activity in the hope people will exchange loyalty for it? In which direction is an aggressive discount or couponing program going to influence your customers?

People are prepared to do business. They know they have something to trade.

Thanks to the acceleration in social signals, people are starting to think more carefully about what they're trading -- attention, time, trust, credibility, reputation, money, etc. -- and they're not giving those away unwittingly anymore.

 

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Comments

[VictorCanada]

Thanks for the report and your thoughts Valeria. In the last decade, interaction between consumers/customers and companies has improved. Social Media is accelerating engagement but I think people are really just starting to understand that they can use these tools to communicate with brands. I call it the "Age of the Empowered Consumer". I think we'll see more and greater engagement in 2012. As engagement grows, we'll see the true potential of Social Media.

[Brian Driggs]

"Mindless, idle chatter on Twitter and Facebook isn’t sustainable."

This presents a problem for many people, as they still perceive the bulk of the activity on social networks as being vacuous. Right or wrong (taking a spin through local tweets often shakes my faith in humanity), this perception influences our efforts.

[Gearhead Metaphor Alert]
On the surface, it might seem like social media is largely people standing around in garages BSing around cars. Thing is, some people know know what they want to do with said cars and are choosing the (social) tools to facilitate strategic progress.

You don't need all your tools to change the oil, but you might need most of them to rebuild an engine for a specific purpose.

I like this kind of thinking. :)

[Beth Harte]

Truth vs. Truthiness...

Truth: Sincerity in action, character, and utterance (M-W)

Truthiness: The quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

I had never heard the word "truthiness" before and now I've come across it twice in the past few days. In a book I am reading, they use "truthiness" as subjective vs. objective truth.

Companies that prefer subjective truth (i.e. relativism) aren't living in the same reality as their customers.

Perhaps we should create "truth" test for companies? ;-)

[peter]

Excuse the ill iteration but is is trade or truth.

In the search for truth in business we have become distracted from the bedrock of capitalism - trade.

There is no truth in business. That concept is better left to philosophers and economists who neither make nor must keep promises to survive and grow.

Make great promises, know how you'll keep them, keep them and get something of greater value in return. If social fits helps you trade into strength, resilience and endurance - great. If it doesn't, then great for all your competitor's that persist with the latest truth in business.

Trade well.

Peter

[Valeria Maltoni]

In my view, it is brands that are behind on using the tools to be engaged.

[Valeria Maltoni]

the thing is I've been seeing the same advice about how to use social networks strategically for more than five years. You see the results out there, everyone following the very same tired "best practices"...

The people and brands who know what to do are welcome to do more of it.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Hope is not a model.

[Valeria Maltoni]

afraid we got sidetracked from my reference to another post in this conversation.

Activity (the topic of this post) is not the same as trade. We see a lot of activity in social channels and so very little of it goes back to trading promises.

[twitter.com/wmougayar]

I would submit that the highest form of social engagement is Commenting online. The best reason for engagement is an engaged user (or company) on the other end. That will lead to trade.

[peter]

Sorry. Read it again.

Understand your point.

The interesting thing is that Forester use the expression believe - a concept reserved for aliens, ghosts (and much more noble ideas such as freedom and liberty).

We must believe because there is nothing to connect all this activity to the strength, resilience and endurance other than hope and dubious surveys that make up expressions like "listening and engagement initiatives".

[Valeria Maltoni]

habits have been formed around consultant speak polished to sound refined and necessary. When trade is seen as a black box, then it feels sensible to employ crystal balls and talk about engagement initiatives...

[Valeria Maltoni]

I disagree comments are always an indication of high engagement. People comment on certain sites to "be seen" in that company, etc. Motivation is not a straight line, or a diagram.

Everyone trades their assets differently. Which is why "best practices" become a crutch or a lazy way out...

[twitter.com/wmougayar]

I didn't mean to imply "always". You can tell if there is a genuine intent or something else behind the commenting. But I think it certainly leads to discovering interesting people that you may later form a meaningful relationship with. At least, that has been my experience. I have met some great people online, after some period of time where we exchanged meaningful online conversations on someone else's blog.