The gazing pupils locked to the 5-inch screen, the continuously sparking dendrites and the neural cells, the advent of technology, touchscreens, stylus, augmented reality da-bling-da- blang-da-blung , mixed with the perfect stimulated ecosystem providing the advertisers with the perfect opportunity to exploit & at times passivity.
The bottom line – users are becoming a bigger chatter box. With the liberty of social media, people are now just a click away from their favourite brand, as a result the graph of expectation is at the crest to experience, talk as close to face-to-face and judge by just reading the first 4 lines of communication.
The NEXT – Discussions and opinion sharing take place in public, trading the perceived knowledge in the hippocampus – part of the brain specialized to codify and structure information and episodic occurrences (info about people, places, things and events), for example – user comments on publically available profile on social media platforms can be viewed by anyone. This puts any business in an inevitable position where they have to respond. Else it seems like they’re trying to avoid the KING.
Traditional social media strategies use outbound marketing messages to enhance brand’s advocacy or awareness depending upon the objective. Furthermore, when consumers try to engage with their brands via Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, they rarely get a response, if at all they do, it’s a canned one with no degree of connect providing only a one-way route. They tell the King to visit their official page or contact them over the phone or probably file a form with the CC team. Bleh !!
Typically, majority of the brands don’t take advantage of the opportunity to connect & socialize, with their prospective advocator in real time, missing on the chance to gather invaluable data in the process, because they direct them to a different owned property which could be a website as lame as their response to their KING. “Did you as an advertiser get the requisite info about the usage / consumption / buying patterns of your King? Is he even your King or are you just executing your call to action way too well?”
Traditional vs New age
All this while I learned that Customer Relationship Management focuses on statistical factoring and implantation of customer data, which is marked by recorded info such as past purchases, contact history, demographic, geographic etc. This information is easy to source via past interactions, possibly limited to direct interactions between the company and the customer.
Where do you stand ?
So we have all been in a phase of life at least once where mom requests to buy a washing machine, the son provides crucial tech specifications of various washing machines via his online /offline sources of information, the elder sibling decides the colour pallet and the look, ultimately to be paid by Dad. Now the real deal is to identify whether your KING is the mom, the son, the sibling or the Dad in the purchase decision.
Social CRM adds a deeper layer of information into traditional CRM by adding data derived from social networks where your King publicly shares information, empowering companies to track his social influence, revenue, and source data from conversations occurring as a result of direct communication to various ethnicities of the hippocampus of the King.
The power of metrics
Have you deployed the algorithm to derive the capability for consumer interaction in a never resting omnipresent environment? Does your King has the capacity to interact with their brand of choice at the time of their preference, through the channel they want, something that brands can later monitor, benchmark, and improve.
It is at the mercy of these metrics, you will be able to amalgamate your understanding of every King (existing or prospective) – with new data around their sentiments, intentions and the way they use the media.
Put your swords to test
From a marketing engine and a research/insight/lead generation platform to a customer service tool, bubbles of social community are based on an incredible amount of interactions that they have either among themselves or with the brand with just one objective- to gain as much info as possible about a product/service which would support the purchase decision of the King. This exercise of Kings provide businesses with bulks of data that they can churn to capture feedback and improvise their services and products, basis real-time sentiments.
