Lisa Chang, Social Media Marketing

Certainly, there are some reasons why companies shy away from social media.  On the other hand, social media and relationship-based companies is the way of customer service in the future.

MARKETING WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE
Customers used to seek out businesses with the right services.  Today, businesses seek out customers and social media is one of those ways in which businesses can reach out to potential customers where they spend their time.

RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Conversations, information sharing, entertaining and engaging customers helps build rapport.  It helps them understand how they can buy and why they would purchase while getting a sense of the business philosophies around service, delivery and quality.  It's a lot of talk but it also shows them the walk.

WORD OF MOUTH / VIRAL MARKETING
Social media offers opportunities for word of mouth and viral marketing.  People RETWEET on Twitter, people SHARE on Facebook, and people SHARE on LinkedIn. 

A BRAND PERSONALITY
Social media is a great way to create a brand with personality.  Posting blogs and tweeting are great ways to generate a personal touch to the overall branding message.  The personal touch makes it palatable for people to engage the organization in a conversation.

FEEDBACK FOR INNOVATION AND MORE
Real improvements in customer service, getting and implementing innovative ideas, identifying and improving business processes required and improving risk management comes partly from customer feedback.  In a previous blog, I talked about how best of breed companies use social media to receive feedback and listen to their prospects and customers. These same service and process improvements also happen to the sales process to help reduce the buying decision time or at least the one that chews up the sales persons' time.

LEARN ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS
Typically, those people who participate in your communities are your customers and prospects.  By listening and participating in their conversations, you'll learn a lot about them, how they buy, what innovations would make your product or service more appealing to purchase and much more.

CUSTOMER SERVICE
The new customer service is also reaching out to customers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

EARNED MEDIA
The new paradigm for media relations is earned media.  Creating a social community, developing conversations amongst customers as well as prospects is all part of the social branding of an organization.  Information and being informed is what we all want as consumers.  Using social media makes sense whether your communications has pizzazz and is entertaining or it is informative and thought provoking or just plain educational in nature.  Mix and match or stay with one genre to create a brand that stands above.

Social media gives us access to develop access to earned media.  With so much at our fingertips, there are infinite possibilities for creating a brand with a personality.