This week, I was interviewed by Younomy, an India-based publishing and training company. They asked me some interesting questions on important issues such as transparency, interactivity, brand-management, crowd-sourcing, and community building.
Read the highlights below. Or, visit Younomy’s blog to read the whole interview.
Younomy: Your book places huge emphasize on interactivity. Do you think investment in facilitating digital or social media interactions – in terms of creating digital infrastructure, deploying people to manage community, developing widgets, offering incentives to encourage participation, etc, to make “immediate” business sense as much as investments in products or services make?
Andy: I think there can be few things more worth investing in than in tools – digital or otherwise that create meaningful interactions between a company and its customers. The evolution of the social web has provided an opportunity for brands to engage with their customers in a way that involves very little effort on the part of the customer. All other things being equal this should translate into the opportunity to develop a wealth of extremely broad customer insights that in turn lead to better products and services. So the trade-off between investing in product and in interacting with customers is only encountered by companies who see the opportunity to engage merely as a means to promote their offerings.
The social web is not just a new place for companies to put ads. Those that view it that way are not only wasting their money, they are possibly missing an unprecedented chance to learn a huge amount about their customer and how to fulfill their current and future needs. One last point, here, when it comes to the number of customers to listen to, beyond a certain point size doesn’t matter. It’s a great deal more important to direct effort toward really listening to the relatively few highly engaged customers who say they can’t live without your product than to the many more weak-tie participants that encounter your company solely for a contest entry and a chance to win a trip to Disneyland. Continue reading “The Business Sense of Social Media”