Obtaining Tangible Value

Yesterday I attended my first session of the Social Media Success Summit. The session was called Finding and Engaging Your Target Audience With Social Media and Brian Solis was the speaker.
The session was absolutely fantastic. Clear simple information that once spoken seems so ridiculously obvious but it's just not to many brands.

First part of the session was about how brands think about social media and their customers.
23% of people go to social media platforms to interact with brands. 77% for other reasons.

Brand: 

"Customer connect with us on FB and Twitter because they want to learn about new products"

"Customer connect with us because they want information"

"Customer want us to engage with them to create a community"

Customer:

"I actually just want discounts and offers! In fact I just don't want it once like you tricked me to like you at the first place. I'm connecting to you because I want something NOW and over time. Also I want you to acknowledge my problems and solve my issues."

What are we looking at here? A MAJOR gap in between what brands think customer want, and what the customers actually want. There is a huge disconnection here!

This is fascinating information and means a HUGE opportunity for brands. Facebook itself is not saturated at all, Bad marketing is. The unsubscription rate is growing every day. People are breaking up with brands more and more. Why? 

Customer:

1. I was bombarded with marketing messages and it clogged up my wall

2. I didn't get any discounts and offers

What's it about then and how does this change our social strategies? For one thing I think so many brands are on Facebook and Twitter "Just cus they think they have to". Just "To be there". Many of them not understanding neither the reason, the purpose and the opportunity. 

It's about designing our content strategies and engagement programs around what the customer wants.

How? Start by listening. Gather intelligence. Or ASK the customer.

The 5 I's of Social Media marketing:

Intelligence leads to Insight which leads to Ideas and those ideas lead to Interaction which hopefully leads to Influencing customers.

There has to be tangible value in between the customer and client and we find that by listening to what customers want and then we deliver that value.

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