I send an e-mail into a company and I don’t get a response. I pick up the phone, ring and leave a message. If I am not getting a response quickly enough in one area I will make another contact with the business and generate another query – but about the same issue, note. Then I can jump to another area, say on to Twitter. Suddenly, you have three separate parts of your business dealing with the same issue, three separate people looking into the same issue. What’s wrong with this picture?

Last time we spoke (The Seductive Power of Social Media (Part I) I raised a red flag over businesses rushing too quickly in to the field of social media. There’s a real worry after all that we’re getting caught up in something that is all the rage – without putting some science and structure into what social media can offer your business, and ending up with the above picture of customer ‘relations.’

A critical issue here is a lack of joined-up thinking. And is social media going to be yet another communication channel between you and your customers that isn’t properly integrated and tied in to specific business processes? Social media has got a place in business – but the appropriate resource needs to be put in to manage it; and the reality is that, for some companies, social media may not be the right thing to do (at least, not now).

Getting the message out
The trick here is to choose the right channel to get the right message out. I think that too many companies are trying to shoehorn social media into their contact strategy, thinking that they are going to be left behind or that their customers will spurn them if they do not use it. Take, for example, a mortgage company that wants to remind people their mortgage is due. Is Facebook or Twitter actually the most appropriate way to remind someone of that?

Better to put some spend and focus into existing channels and make them work better. Look at what you have already, and craft a proper multi-channel approach that you can manage, so that when you do add a channel – like social media – that channel is not going to just add complexity.
Stop, go back and get that first communication responded to in an appropriate time, so that there isn’t that channel escalation. Be honest – 99% of your traffic is on traditional routes, 1% is via social media. So why put 90% of your focus on social media?
To bang the VoiceSage drum at this point: that is something we help our clients do, bring it all together. And we often find that existing channels can be tightened up to do an incredible job. Our company has seen a huge explosion in SMS conversations, for example, something we’ve touched on before (‘The Power Of Short Messaging’).

Stop and take note
Maybe SMS is the answer, for instance; smart use of technology we’ve had for 10 years but we are at last using in a joined up, strategic way.
Rather than rushing off to social media, it is worth considering that you may already have the technology and channels already that can do the same job.

So, make them work better for you, rather than rushing away to do something new and sexy… when actually what’s new and sexy may not always be the best answer.

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