I’ve been hearing more and more about a growing concern among companies worried about their brand’s identity. Social customer interactions are proliferating exponentially:

  • 1 billion iPhone apps downloaded in 9 months
  • 25% of search results for the top 20 brands link to user-generated content
  • 1.5 million pieces of content shared daily on Facebook
  • 68% more likely to buy a product/visit a retailer based on a positive recommendation of a friend
  • Sales inside well-run customer communities are increasing from 20-60%.

The Phases of Social Implementation

If you look at social in phases, the last five years have been about “do something” social — put up a fan page, get a Twitter account, have someone in your organization write a blog, monitor the social web to see who is talking about your brand, etc. If phase one was just do something, then phase two is perhaps looking at the results of phase one and allowing the lessons learned to be part of your governing practices for the next several phases. (And at some point the word “social” will evaporate from our vocabulary and be replaced with just business. That’s because the way we will do business in the future will be social — there won’t be a distinction between regular business and social initiatives… But that’s the topic of another post for the future…)

Phase two seems to be about making meaning of what we are doing on the social net. Some of the more advanced businesses are talking about the value to the business. They at least want to know if these social activities are producing some tangible business results. And others are actually showing ROI.

What’s noticeable is that it’s not very often that a social initiative is orchestrated across all disciplines or functional departments. In its simplist forms, customer service may have a community, PR may be running the Facebook page, while marketing is sending out email and/or Twitter marketing offers.

But that doesn’t come as a surprise. If we look at the way businesses are run, functional departments are recognized and rewarded– more often than not– by their inpidual accomplishments and not so much by how well those accomplishments coordinate to make a better customer and/or employee experience.

A Customer’s Experience – Attention on all fronts matters

There is no way to interject something really new or profound if you keep doing the same things you’ve always done— and expecting different results. Today, more and more businesses hold the view that customer service is PR and PR is customer service. If you are participating in the social web this probably makes a lot of sense when you see it put this way. And where does marketing and sales come into this? You can’t sell something to someone who is mad or upset.

A customer’s experience needs the attention of all functional disciplines. With the social web proliferating bad experiences, there is no other choice but to do something orthogonal.

Does your brand matter to you?

If you are like most companies, you’ve invested a lot in building and safeguarding your brand’s identity. You know that your brand’s identity is its equity. And with the shift from company-created and controlled- brand images to customer interaction-brand shaping, what we are seeing is that the equation for establishing, maintaining and growing a brand has shifted. The question is, “Have you?”

In particular, seeing that customer experience is single-handedly the most important driver of brand identity, i.e., it is what is “earned” by what inpidual communicate to each other, by what influencers say, and how advocates/or badvocates mobilize the crowd.

And on that note, I’d like to personally invite you to please join myself (@drnatalie) and James Warren (@jamesdotwarren) on June 16th at 2PM EST / 11 AM PST on Twitter. Follow the hashtag #SocialID

We’ll be discussing these and other topics in the coming year as part of our ongoing Twitter Dialogues.

Thank you,
@DrNatalie