Big business is listening—and talking

Yesterday I attended a mini-conference presented by my friend Andy Sernovitz's company and the Blog Council on how big companies can successfully use social media. When I wasn't feeling like a fly on the wall (surrounded as I was by people from such large corporations as FedEx, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart), I was pretty impressed by the vibe of the event. The general consensus was that companies should not shamelessly shill their products using social media but rather listen to their potential customers and engage with them in ways that add value to them. That's pretty heartening to hear as a consumer.

I was also struck by the degree to which reputation monitoring matters to these big businesses. I wasn't aware that companies pay to have online mentions of them monitored, but they do. (Sometimes to funny results: Debbie Curtis-Magley of UPS told the audience how much of a challenge it was to cut through all the mentions of things like pushups and situps, which happen to contain the letters "ups.") Lindsay Lebresco of Graco told of how social media tools helped the company reach out to and reconcile with consumers expressing negative sentiments about the company.

As a person who tends to gravitate toward small companies and shy away from bigger ones, the conference made me wonder if the large players are starting to get it right more than the small ones. Witness my unsatisfying encounter with shoemaker Earth, in which the company told me that it "would rather not open up the conversation" about its contractors in China.

Big doesn't necessarily equal bad. Nothing's black and white.

Comments

[EnglishForDirtyForeigners]

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[Nicole]

Your question about small or big businesses getting it, is a great one. I know from being a part of a small business that it is difficult to make change as our leverage is small and our ideals might not be reflected in available supply chains. Big businesses can make big changes and this is what we need to see with the growing need for action on issues like climate change and human rights. But consummers would rather support the little guy, there is something inherant about not wanting the big guy to win. So listen smaller companies, now more than ever is the need for strong ethics and transparency, you have smaller supply chains and closer connections, you can do this and it might become a point of difference in the future.

[Sustaino]

Another online monitoring company is BuzzMetrics, based out of Ohio. Does that name ring a bell? They are tracking just like Google the trends, the themes and keywords that are often discussed online.

Check out: www.google.com/trends and
www.google.com/trends/hottrends

You will be impressed.

[firefly]

"listen to their potential customers and engage with them in ways that add value to them"

Gee, that's funny -- I always thought the customer service area was the place to register feedback and "engage with the company" in a way that would improve services.

You would be surprised how infrequently companies satisfactorily address communications of this nature, and how very difficult they often make direct contact.

I do not think their emphasis on 'social media' is better than actually attending to a single communication in private.

I think they are looking for things that will simply enhance their image, not necessarily improve the interaction from a customer's standpoint.

You can see this in action at places like Garden Watchdog at Dave's Garden. It is often public complaints that get attention. I have used this myself to try to get resolution for a problem with a plant or a shipment.

The thing that makes this valuable is ratings are always visible and can be changed according to whether the customer thinks there was a satisfactory resolution to a problem. With a blog, however, since posts change precedence over time, this kind of consumer help won't be available.

My absolute last choice of online reading would be a corporate blog, no matter how 'responsive' the company thinks it's being.