The powerful value proposition of social media is the opportunity for a business to transform buyers into customers.
Relationships built over time and through familiarity and value offer an alternative to organic attrition rates and the constant cold calls methods in lead generation. If you like to think and talk about benchmarks, this should be on top of your priority list.
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Digital communications and interaction create an opportunity for organizations—to transform one time buyers into repeat customers.
Customer interaction
- When is it a Good Idea to Upsell?
- Why Customer Service in Social is not Fair
- Why Customers Turn to Each Other for Help
- 7 Social Media Behaviors that won't Win You Customers
- Customer Service on Twitter, Should You do it?
- Doing Penance for the 7 Sins of Customer Service
- Why Customer Communities Work
- The Case for Customer Communities
- Creating a Content-Driven Community
- Reinventing the Customer Relationship to Drive Growth
- Six Ways to Connect with Customers
The organization's journey to customer connection starts with adoption and mastering of digital communication. It goes through collaborative filtering of data and information into knowledge. This in turn informs content creation. The journey results in a business that regained a sense of its social relationships.
Activities that help you practice interaction online:
- bookmarking, tagging, adding to groups
- liking, rating, endorsing, voting, commenting
- blogging, fan community participation, creating videos, podcasting, allowing uploads to sites, encouraging co-creation
- adding friends, networking, creating a fan community
We talked about using interaction to connect with customers at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia in May 2010.
Customer insights
Brands and organizations that ask better questions drive deeper insights.
- Customers Continue to Get Smarter. Are you up for it?
- How You Encourage Customer Dis-Loyalty
- Has Your Brand Hit Parity with Customers?
- 5 Reasons Why Listening is so Much More than Monitoring
- The Most Influential Thing a Company can do to Increase Customer Advocacy
- Customer Satisfaction: What are You Looking at?
- Are Dads a New Market Opportunity?
- Customer Experience More Important than Ever
- Emotion, Trust, and Control are at the Heart of Customer Experience
Customer innovation
Companies that innovate are all different. Companies that don't, are all the same. They fail the fundamentals.
- Invest in Your Customers by Making the Product Awesome
- Do Customers Really Want to Co-Create Your Product?
- Building Internal Support for Customers
- Sample Your Product as Often as Possible
- Designing Customer Experience
- Is Your Service Agile?
- 3 Steps to Mapping the Customer Journey
- 5 Areas of Integration that go from Customer Conversation to Conversion
Businesses are value creating systems
My favorite definition of conversations that connect ideas and people is flipping the question around to get to a new place. With social media, many agencies recommend adding an additional layer of amplification around your business.
Activating your social graph starts when you build one. All organizations are in need of strength, endurance, and resilience. Behave like a human to be of service to your customers. This is how you “humanize” the business.
It starts with looking at the business model as the platform to design the experience for the buyer.