All social media sites are actively engaged in successfully integrating businesses into their sites. Businesses, while all taking different approaches to use social media sites, are all seeking to find new customer engagement initiatives to improve their performance. They seek to engage their customers (both new and old) through two-way conversation and soliciting opinions and feedback.
Let’s examine some of the more popular customer engagement initiatives many businesses are using:
Soliciting Opinions
What charities to support
Asking favorite flavors or products
What they would like to see on social media pages
Likes and dislikes
Collaborating on product/service design
Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Voting on Most Favorite Things
A moment in Michael Jordan career
Most scary roller coaster
Donuts
New design features
Co-creation of Products / Services
Ad Campaigns
Outfit design combinations
Facebook page
Our job as marketers is to do the hard work of finding and nurturing charismatic ideas we can be proud of. One place to start is to look at the ideas you’re trying to spread.
Consider whether they’re charismatic enough to earn the effort you’re putting into them–and if not, how to replace them with ideas that are.
Pictures of Customers with Products
New Application Introduction / Usage
Creating customized holiday cheer cards
Ordering products (even for local delivery)
Local store locator
Use of Videos
Live events, such as fashion shows
Product demo’s, do it yourself tips
Game clips
Local, regional activities
The truth is that there is no one “true” path to new ideas because innovation, at its core, is about solving problems and every enterprise chooses different problems to solve.
While IBM might be happy to have its scientists work for decades on some arcane technology and Google gladly allows its employees to pursue pet projects, those things probably wouldn’t fly at Amazon. However, the one thing that all great innovators have in common is that culture and practice are deeply intertwined.
That’s what makes them so hard to copy. Anybody can write a six-page memo or start meetings with a reading period. It’s not those specific practices, but the commitment to the values they reflect, that has driven Amazon’s incredible success.
Promotions
Weekly giveaways
Coupons
Free products to entice Facebook fan signup
Special rates for Facebook fans
Content
Menus
New product introduction
Share product/articles from magazines
Targeted messages to customer groups/segments
Special business events
There is considerable creativity in the use of social media by many businesses, with very good engagement results.
The bottom line
What we found most interesting in this concept is its simplicity. Making the simple complicated is commonplace … but making the complicated simple, awesomely simple is real creativity!
Lots of ideas are being generated and the process is definitely great at customer engagement. We believe its success will generate more business experimentation in crowdsourcing.
Companies deserve lots of credit and kudos for pushing the envelope.
If you are not taking advantage of social media customer engagement, you are missing a great opportunity to create/build customer relationships for you and your brand. Why not put some of these ideas to use and gain valuable feedback and customer insights?
If your business is using social media, are there results that you would like to share?
