Would you like to have crisps that taste like strawberry icecream or maybe like french fries?
Nowadays it is all possible. Companies are engaging customers in their business processes. The customers themselves can decide what the end product should be and help the company by generating the exact right product. This way you can kill two birds with one stone: making the customers happy and generating revenue for the company.
The main key of being succesful with customer engagement is social media. Companies need to be involved on social media platforms, before they can be succesful with engaging customers in the business process. At this moment only five percent of the business has a well optimized social media marketing strategy. So a lot of companies have a long way to go before social media will eventually create value.
When a company decides to become involved on social media, the managers also need to realize that there are some factors influencing the corporate reputation. You need to make the right moves to create a successful campaign, that will not harm the company. Policies and strict rules need to be set up in order to keep the social media behavior of your employees safe.
In the guest lecture of KLM we saw the tweet of Holland-Mexico. This is a typical example of how social media can backfire on a company and instead of engaging the customer they ended up losing the mexicans as customer.
Cases that did end up in great success were Lays and Nike. Lays decided to engage the customer by letting them choose their own favourite flavor for crisps. A famous dutch chef rated the flavors and eventually there was a winner. Nike set up a campaign that was called: design your own shoes. The customers were able to customize their shoes the way they wanted.
These are exemples of a right customer engagement. The most important thing for companies is to set up a good working social network platform and interfere with the customers. But they need be aware of the dangers social media can have and set up a specialized team to build the right social media network.
References:
- http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effects-social-media-business-25682.html
- http://www.adformatie.nl/nieuws/klm-verwijdert-social-media-inhaker-na-kritiek-mexicanen
- http://www.marketingonline.nl/bericht/maak-de-smaak-campagne-van-lays-bedenk-nieuwe-chipsmaak
- Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93
- Li, T., Behrens, G., and de Maertelaere, M. 2014. Corporate Twitter channels: The impact of engagement and informedness on corporate reputation. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, forthcoming
- Li, T. and Soonius, G. 2012. Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns. Proceedings of the Workshop on Electronic Business, Orlando, FL, December. PDF
