Communication on different
levels are difficult and time consuming but a necessity for any enterprise
company to send the proper messages to their costumers and partners who are the
foundation of their business. Among the communication tools you as an
enterprise can use is the Social Media platform. The Social Media platform
gives you as an enterprise the opportunity to listen to the Word of Mouth from
your costumers. The costumers will, if you are communicating the proper way –
the collaborative/many-to-many communication – make you as an enterprise,
create a forum which could give you numerous information of how your product
and services affects your costumers and hear how costumers marketer and discuss
your products among each other.
The above
model show how the interaction among costumers/consumers (red arrows) is leap forging
the enterprise. This is why the enterprise should create a social room to be
able to monitor the discussion, be able to respond to the discussion, be able
to amplify the discussion and last lead the discussion by launching products
which uses the discussion from the social media forum. (Source: Mikael
Thorsen 2012)
What are the enterprises Social Challenges?
What an enterprise must
learn is that the costumer has taken the control of the dialog! Costumers are
learning from each other, getting to know the brand and its product and
services and they are discussing it among each other, exchanging experiences –
now the discussion is out of reach for the enterprise company. It is actually
now the enterprise has the ability to show their costumers how passionate they
are about their product and services. The opportunity and the social challenge
for the enterprise are to interact in the word-of- mouth discussion NOT interfere
the discussion. A starter is to have created the good story about your product
and service – Nike has done that with the “running chip in the shoes” – another
company who have created or reinvented their product is - Old Spice, they have created
an universe of what men’s hygiene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE)
purely made for Social Media.
How can the enterprise get into the opportunities?
If the enterprise
management should benefit from the Social Media trend, it is important for them
not just use the entire marketing budget on Social Media ad once. It is important to make a simple approach to
Social Media starting creating a social discussion forum where employees also
can participate and developed this start into having blogs, tweets and links on
Face book and linked-in.
Executives from enterprise
companies understand that Social Media is important. But how do they realize
the potential of Social Media, hand-to-measure, the costumer-controlled media
and how to drive sales and strengthen brands?
Now getting the full
advantage of the costumer discussion the enterprise must start going into
action using the following means of getting knowledge and take part in the
discussion. Enterprises must be able to react 24/7/365 on any kind of
discussion good or bad with all the risks it includes.
- The enterprise must monitor the discussion.
- The enterprise must respond to the discussion.
- The enterprise must amplify the discussion with relevant information.
- The enterprise must lead the discussion by launching products that have taken inspiration from the discussion.
This is not an easy task
but the key word for the enterprise and the entire staff of employees is KISU –
Keep It Simple Understandable for the employees and even more important for the
costumers. Then the enterprise management will be able to experience how they
can benefit from Social Media and understand the importance of the
collaboration model it self.
