Category: Collaborative Age value production system

Social media is trendy. It is where companies can meet consumers, in particular the young generations. A lot of companies launch themselves for marketing purposes. But those who do so half-heartedly, thinking they can just broadcast their message without engaging with the people, are in fact lowering their brand reputation.

As this paper “Lessons of the Exterminator: Transforming Your Social Media, One Customer at a Time” argues, nothing makes more of a difference than not responding to consumers complaints and remarks. If you’re claiming you’re social and you don’t react to consumers observations, you’re doomed on the long term. Unhappy consumers that get a response on their twitter or facebook complaints, and are then engaged in a meaningful conversation will, on the contrary, give the company the benefit of the doubt, and might even become one of their most fervent supporters.

There is a famous case-study involving DELL in 2005 (see this article on Dell’s hell as a summary). Dell took an inordinate amount of time to react and could only see the damage to the brand. They’ve taken the initiative since then and have become one of the brands most engaged in social networks (see a paper written late 2011 on “why Dell is still a great case study“), with a dedicated team engaging with customers and most of their employees trained in social network. Today they’ve learnt their lessons and they leverage social media  to the benefit of the brand.

That’s why you can’t really engage in public social media half-way. If you are not setup to respond immediately to consumer’s remarks, if you don’t empower your social network team to exceed expectations and give them the power to get the organization to react, you’re doomed.

Still 70% of the companies engaged in social media today don’t get it!

Don’t engage in social media just for the hype and the impression that it is trendy. If you engage, engage completely and be ready for challenge from the outside. A challenge, that taken positively, can  lead to substantial improvement in your business and your brand.

That is – are you ready to be challenged?

Crowdfunding is a very trendy idea. And crowdfunding a local shop using your customer base as an investor base? Look at how a local bakery got funding through a ‘soft’ crowdfunding initiative linked to the products!

That form of crowdfunding is almost quite close to a a cooperative approach (investment upfront in exchange for cheaper products later), but it works and can serve to produce win-win solutions locally! What’s interesting is that people got involved into the project after they had been touched via social networks, as the bakery project did not have any storefront at the beginning.

So, social networks and crowdfunding can work at different scales, from the local to the regional to the global. How can we leverage these different scales?