If we stop for a moment and think about how the Internet has evolved in recent years, we can see that both the players and the scenario have changed considerably. Even the way in which we use the Internet in our daily lives has changed.
The first web pages were intended to become the new showcase of the brand, open 24 hours a day. The company could offer its services through a new channel and these would reach any corner of the world, undoubtedly a breakthrough for the entrepreneur. At the same time, anyone could access this information from home, without having to go out on the street, all advantages. This is what has become known as Web 1.0. This approach has not changed much since then, what has changed is the way information flows between the actors. Before, the sender of information was the company, and only the company, which used the Internet channel to advertise its products and services. While the citizen was a mere receiver.
Thanks to Web 2.0 and the arrival of social networks, the situation changes and citizens go from being mere receivers of information to being also senders of it, now their comments, opinions and criticisms about a product or service will reach more citizens and they will be able to put more pressure on brands. In this way, the citizen takes more prominence as a consumer and “forces” companies to strive to be better, since their reputation is more exposed than ever. Suddenly customer service takes on another dimension.
But far from being a drawback for companies, this new scenario offers new tools for brands to better reach their customers and get to know them in a way that was unthinkable before. Through social networks, companies can create a community, in this way they can enhance their brand, and at the same time they will be generating critical mass, which will bring their concerns, likes, discomfort, etc. directly to the company. The brand will be able to use this information to improve its services and products.
Social networks belong to everyone and for everyone, and if a citizen can give his opinion on a company's service, the company will in turn be able to benefit from that comment for future customers, if the comment is good. In the opposite case, if the comment is damaging, then the brand will be able to use the same medium, the social networks, to correct the problem and thus clean up its reputation. We are thus witnessing the birth of a new digital dialogue between the brand and its customers.
But, how is all this done? From the brand's side, the most important thing is to identify the social networks that will allow you to get closer to your customers or future customers, you do not have to be in all social networks, this is a big mistake. The first thing to do is to ask yourself what the objective is and draw a strategy with realistic milestones, as we would do in the offline world. In which social network is my audience? What is my target? What is the objective of my brand within the social network? These questions can be complicated, but if we analyze our customers, based on their age or purchasing power for example, the answers are not very difficult to answer. That is, a clothing and accessories business for teenagers should have a presence in Tuenti (www.tuenti.com), while if the company is dedicated to selling yachts or we are talking about a luxury hotel, then the social network to take into account should be ASW (www.asmallworld.net). A brand should definitely be on Facebook (www.facebook.com), as it is the social network par excellence, with more than 750 million users in July 2011. Another fact is that in Spain alone it has more than 14 million registered users.
Once the company has decided in which networks to participate, the next step is to strengthen the brand, generate community and take care of the reputation. To do this we must be honest and transparent with the consumer of our brand, and what is more important is to know how to rectify or apologize if necessary, in this way we will avoid a digital “lynching”. The brand has to take more care than ever in the treatment of customers in this new scenario, since the better your digital reputation, the more your community will grow and generate more customers for your business through the networks.
In order to take care of the reputation of a brand, the Internet offers free tools such as Google alerts, this is a monitoring application and serves, among other things, to know the comments of users about a service or product of a business, either in forums, blogs, or digital newspaper. This is very useful to know the opinion of your customers, and to be able to put solutions to a possible misunderstanding with a consumer or a bad service given that can harm us. That other users see how a brand gets in touch with a dissatisfied customer and try to offer a solution to that annoyed consumer, can have a positive impact on the digital reputation of the brand.
And what does the consumer gain from all this? The fact that companies have a presence in social networks allows customers to have a direct communication channel, as I mentioned earlier, and therefore a close relationship with the brand. In this way the consumer will be able to manage an incident or make a complaint more quickly. Networks such as Twitter (www.twitter.com) are becoming more and more important in this regard, large companies are beginning to use this social network as a Call Center or to manage customer service in a more agile and effective way during a crisis, as we saw during the air traffic controllers strike in December 2010, when Aena used this microblogging to inform their customers about the cancellation of their flights and address their complaints and doubts.
From the customer's side, the new digital scenario offers the possibility of sharing the opinion of consumers with the rest of the world, thus creating a new figure to be taken into account by brands. This figure already existed before, but without the same scope that it can have today, and thanks to social networks this figure has the power to benefit or harm the brand in a more forceful and faster way. There is no longer “anything goes” in order to sell, now there may be reputational consequences that were not considered a few years ago by companies. And these consequences will have to be taken into account before launching any action through social networks.
The same approach between Brand and Customers is again taking place in large communication companies. Nowadays, the citizen has more prominence in this field as well. Nowadays we are no longer surprised by the presence of citizens' opinions in television programs such as news or current affairs programs. The citizen gives his opinion on current affairs on social networks and the television channels echo this. Even thanks to social networks, news is included in the news that would have probably gone unnoticed by most people a few years ago or would only have arrived locally. Do you want to know what is happening now in the world? Don't turn on the TV, go to Twitter's search engine (search.twitter.com) and find out what people on the street are concerned about.