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Social Search Casts a Spotlight on Service Delivery
28 October 2009
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, relationships in business must be win-win to survive the test of time. Therefore, as a business, unless you are a monopoly in a market with a large barrier to entry or a commodity business competing solely on price, you must ensure that your customer and supplier relationships are always mutually beneficial. While this might seem like common sense, with search engines and social media, it is even more critical now that businesses pay close attention to providing excellent customer and supplier service.
Why your might ask? A mentor of mine once told me that happy customers will, on average, tell three acquaintances of a positive business experience, while an unhappy customer will likely tell on average 10. While this hardly seems fair, many believe this is a typical social responses to good and bad business practices. The best way for businesses to protect their reputation and brand is to focus on customer service while over-delivering on customer expectations. I know, you say this seems obvious and you are right. However, with new and emerging search engine and social capabilities, message distribution has recently gotten a lot faster and broader. Therefore, customer experiences and feedback sharing mechanisms need to be factored into your Internet marketing solutions.
Search engines and social media marketing in particular raise the stakes for reputation and brand management. With massive user generated content on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, tens of millions of user messages pass between social network users. If you think news used to travel fast before social networks were in vogue, it travels way faster and further now. Massive and near real-time “news” distribution is now supported by hugely popular, mobile-enabled social networks where opt-in news is pushed to us every day, whenever and wherever we are. Think of this social media revolution in the same context as businesses of the time did when the printing press was first introduced, then radio, TV, the Internet, and now social networks, each with an exponentially shorter interval to reach audiences exceeding 100 million.
Tighter integration between search engines and social media has the potential to further accelerate the distribution of these viral messages. In fact, just last week, Google and Yahoo announced deals to index Twitter content in near real-time, so now tweets about your business from customers and suppliers are not confined to search results on Twitter, but expect prominent, near term placement of these Tweets in Google and Yahoo search results. This takes the originally pioneering concepts of community based feedback on eBay and Amazon introduced a decade ago to a whole new level.
So what does this mean to your businesses? Simply this, treat your customers and suppliers as you would like your business to be treated. Resolve issues in a timely and fair manner fostering long term, mutually beneficial relationships. Be prepared to backup up your claims made during the sales process or in your marketing materials, because if you don’t deliver on customer expectations, be prepared for social media and search engine damage control. Would you prefer your businesses search engine optimization efforts to benefit from positive customers Tweets being indexed on the 1st page of Google or Yahoo search results for your brand, or, well..., you know.