Social Media

It is easy to underestimate the new power that consumers have in the digital world. Don’t let it happen to you. Will it take a disaster to get our attention. Let us hope it isn’t so. Now is the time to obsess about how our customers may point out our vulnerabilities.

Transparency is no longer debatable. We are no long in control of the message. Consumers are generally more in control than we believe. What we know can be dangerous. What we don’t know can be even more dangerous.

I have to ask myself, do I really feel like rolling the dice and risk being brought down by not paying attention to this? What will my staff think? How will my Board react? Will investors turn and run?

Almost five years ago, I was sitting in the conference room of one of the world’s largest insurance companies, trying to push the idea of social customer relationship management to their corporate marketing team. I showed them the power of Twitter and Facebook, and painted pictures of how they could get closer than ever to their customers with these then-new touchpoints. Roughly 4 hours and 45 slides later, the CMO stood up, shook my hand, and told me how he realized going social and “being there” for his customers was important. And then he added that he just didn’t have the bandwidth for it. He explained why his company was just not ready to go social, and why he believed it would be far too risky to allow his customer service onto public forums or leave his brand open for user generated debate. About six months later, a tweet from an angry customer went viral and brought the insurance giant’s stock prices down by 8%. In a mere two weeks! 

Read more: The Customer Support Hierarchy of Needs – Vikram Bhaskaran – Harvard Business Review