VP of Technology at Rational Interaction, an interactive marketing agency in Seattle. I blog here about marketing technology, analytics, and the business behind the numbers. 
Forrester Research just wrapped up the 2011 Marketing Forum, and their outlook on interactive marketing at the big brands is not too positive. Most firms’ internal digital teams are too siloed, too understaffed, and too slow to react to the changing interactive landscape.
Consumers increasingly expect responsiveness from mass marketers across channels. If someone voices a complaint or compliment on Twitter or FaceBook, they expect the brand to engage. And they expect brands to follow them when they go to new channels.
How is a big brand supposed to meet (and exceed!) expectations in this area when manpower is short and every area of digital marketing is competing for corporate attention? The only way is to integrate social responsiveness into every area of your business. Here are four ways your brand can be responsive without breaking the budget.
Follow your customers
You can’t be active in every channel, but need to make sure you’re touching your customers where they are spending their time. Take the time to make sure your market research uncovers what channels your key customer segments are in. How else do you know whether to spend time and money monitoring and responding to Twitter?
It’s not enough to do a search and see how much chatter there is about your brand. The tools out there can go a level deeper than that, teasing out demographics and influence networks so you can quantify the impact of investments in Twitter, YouTube, and other channels.
These trends change quickly, so you should track your audiences at least quarterly. Stay agile, so you can respond to changing attention trends and train your staff in time to sync up with the shifts to new channels.
Good tools to start with include QuantCast and the suite from Visible Technologies. Visible is especially interesting because their offerings go beyond the standard Facebook/Twitter analytics to track conversation on forums and other channels.
Your marketers must be empowered to experiement with new tools and channels. Think of your interactive marketing team as a science lab; constantly forming a new hypothesis and testing it until it either sticks or falls. This means there will be more failures than successes. The key is to fail fast and fail forward.
Acknowledge their pain, and give them an aspirin
Your customers’ experiences with your brand aren’t always going to be perfect. Social media gives you the chance to move the needle on these experiences from negative to neutral to positive.
To do this right, you have to break the customer service team’s shell! A complaint on Twitter is more than a support incident. It’s a chance to cast your brand in a responsive, helpful light.
I encountered an example of this recently when my favorite bakery, Grand Central Bakery, was unexpectedly closed on Presidents’ Day. After blowing off steam on Twitter, I got an unexpected but welcome reply to my tweet-plaint!
Further, easing your customer’s pain is about more than one-on-one interaction. Watch the trends that come from these interactions, and feed it back into the metrics that power your business. It’s the tightest, most valuable feedback loop your company can create, so take advantage of it to improve your products and services.
Amplify their conversations
Your customers are already talking about your brand. They’re tweeting it, posting photos and experiences to their Facebook wall. Many of these conversations are tailor-made to be amplified to your brand’s entire network.
When appropriate, go ahead and repost fan’s conversations to your Facebook wall. Re-tweet like it’s going out of style (it’s not!)
Chobani upped the ante on this approach by retweeting its fans on billboards and even prime-time television ads! They are working through several agencies to do this, but there’s no reason your internal department can’t take this as inspiration.
The producers of the movie Bottle Shock came to us at Rational Interaction for a social media contest, and we couldn’t help but be amazed about how passionately people engaged with the campaign. The winner wrote a beautiful poem and shared it with her network, sparking a chain-reaction of conversations that was the biggest bump for Bottle Shock in the entire campaign.
Taking this approach lets you meld your campaign to focus on consumer-first messaging. Your messages will be less polished and more real. In a media marketplace that’s more crowded by the day, you can’t beat that.
Inform, but don’t invade
Whatever your product or service, there is a wealth of information you can provide that will help your customers make better use of your products, leading to repeat buyers and more referrals. If you’re a food company, give your fans recipes. If they’re wondering how to solve a problem, show them how your product helps.
This works on Twitter, on Facebook, but is even more powerful in deeper channels like online forums.
But be careful! There’s a fine line between helping your customers and “astroturfing!” Every interaction with your customers must be authentic and honest, and your marketers must always disclose their affiliation with your products.
More than that, there are some forums in which corporate marketing just isn’t appropriate. Do you really want drug company reps in your breast cancer support group forum? This is an extreme example but there are many more gray areas here. Wherever you post, keep track of the tone of the responses. You’ll often get some people who aren’t happy to see you, and that’s fine. If the feedback is consistently negative, move on or change your approach.
