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Quote of the Day

Ron Shevlin takes on social media douchebags:

You don’t need a social media strategy. I absolutely hate hearing from the social media dou… er, experts…that firms need to have a social media strategy. Firms need a customer engagement strategy — how should they, and how can they — interact (or engage) with customers in a more meaningful way that creates and deepens the relationship. I will keep saying this over and over until the social media proponents begin to understand: Blogs and wikis and Facebook are not the only ways to engage customers. Face to face works. The phone can work. Direct mail can work. Any touchpoint can work. If you’re a bank or credit union, it doesn’t matter one single iota that 100 million people are on Facebook — unless they want to interact with banks and credit unions there. And that’s far from a proven fact.

Customer engagement strategy – absolutely!

From what I remember about Credit Unions when I was in the States, they get a lot more personal than banks. Hence the role of face-to-face, phone, etc.

I suppose that social media experts, as well as yours truly, are arguing for the use of “2.0″ toolkit because firms either

  • don’t employ them at all, or worse yet
  • employ then in a mistaken belief that the Web is just another channel

A company that is conversational, ie. treats its customers as partners rather than a prey to be hunted, such a company will eventually reach out also using “2.0″ means, if and when its customers are ready for it. It can lead the way and pull its customers there, or wait until it gets pulled there by them; both is all good and well.

What doesn’t work is marching into Facebook with the same old rusty weapons, looking for another “segment” to bombard with “messages”, with a “social media strategy” paper at hand.

I hope that once the credit crisis blows over, many more companies will be doing the former, if not for any other reason that because they won’t have marketing budgets for the latter. Hyped up or not, the social web is here to stay, and sooner or later the companies will learn to live with it.

October 4, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Links and Quotes 

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One Response to “Quote of the Day”

  1. Reflections on the 2008 Forum Symposium « Ron Shevlin’s Marketing Whims on October 4th, 2008

    [...] For more discussion on this, go here.  Tomas rightfully argues that “what doesn’t work is marching into Facebook with the same old [...]

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