When my wife and I go out to dinner with other couples, we talk about all manner of things. Sometimes the topic of Social Media comes up…maybe I bring it up?
When explaining the concept of Foursquare and Yelp to others, my wife often uses a visual metaphor: Social Media is a cloud that sits on top of the city; it’s always there.
Wherever you go in the city you can tap into this cloud of information to make more informed buying decisions, or learn about a landmark, restaurant or business. The majority of this information is provided by people like you and me, because not only can we tap into this cloud, we can contribute to it. It is people like you and me who have helped build the largest, most frequently updated, most frequently used knowledge-base this world has ever known, the Internet. Many of the data points in this giant, fluffy, virtual information cloud that sits on top of our world are comprised of 140 character or less statements such as “The pizza at Nick’s is disgusting #NotKidding” or Foursquare tips like “ask Donna to make your martini, she’s the best bartender in the city.”
All of this information is readily available to some or all of us depending on privacy settings. So what does this mean for businesses?
What do your customers want and need?
How do you, as a business, determine what your customers want or need?
How do you make decisions about products or services?
Do you know who are you best and worst employees?
Do you know who are your best and worst customers?
All of these questions, and more, can be answered simply by tapping into the web. The answers to all of these questions can be influenced by how you use the information you find.
Using Social Media to determine customer preferences
The smart business determines where relevant conversations take place online. If you are a restaurant, you need to know about Yelp and Foursquare, and you should probably take notice of Twitter and Facebook. If you are a software company, you’ll want to find forums or blogs and certainly monitor Twitter. If you are a company that sells a retail product, you’ll want to find the online channels that sell your widget, and consult the reviews. The key is to actively seek out places where people share their ideas and opinions about your product or service. The information there is incredibly valuable and requires far less effort to gather than through other means…
Would you like to take a survey?
I’ll never forget the Animaniacs sketch, Survey Ladies.
Whenever I hear the word “survey,” I can’t help but hear these women in my head saying “would you like to take a survey.” Surveys are a mechanism to find out information. Most companies do this poorly.
What incentive is there for people to be interrupted and give up time in their day simply to help your company improve? Surveys are useful–especially when kept brief, incentivized or used in the appropriate context–but people are more likely to turn to their social outlets and volunteer their ideas and opinions on their own terms.
What are you doing?
Have you sat down to think about a process to collect and analyze information from the web. Are you tapping into that cloud?