Just consider Facebook (183 million active users worldwide) or Twitter (which at 4 million members has a smaller user base but which saw an explosive 752% growth in 2008) as indicators of the appeal of social media to consumers. What is most notable about the phenomenon of social media is that it represents not merely a new engagement channel, but a new conversation, one that takes the traditional brand-to-consumer dialogue and subordinates it to an emerging consumer-to-consumer dialogue. That shift makes this a whole new ballgame.
What does it really mean then to “embrace” social media? Does that mean as a tool for your clients? Or for you personally? To take full advantage of this new conversation, the answer needs to be “both.” Certainly we need to determine when and how to bring social media to bear on client solutions with an understanding of both the challenges and opportunities.
In the loyalty space, social media opens up really intriguing possibilities for engaging customers more organically, as well as to leverage, as never before, the power of customer advocacy. It also presents a robust new channel for behavioral data acquisition and insight. At the same time, it brings significant challenges in the area of meaningful ROI—to date, most concepts proposed for calculating the financial benefit of social media marketing are as varied and as transient as many of the social media tools themselves. Many loyalty marketers will also find the lack of control in the social media space daunting. This is a conversation we join—not one we dictate—and therein lies its unique possibilities.
But I’d suggest that the real secret to effectively leveraging social media for our clients, lies in how we as loyalty professionals are personally engaging with social media. How are you using these tools for professional networking? How are we using them to make your voice heard and to share ideas within the loyalty marketing community? Are you on Facebook, posting to Twitter or adding to the dialogue on the Loyalty 360 LinkedIn group? And if the answer is “I’m not” than just take a moment to imagine designing an email campaign for one of your clients, but having to admit that you never use email yourself.
Truly understanding a channel, especially one as richly complex as social media, requires hands-on experimentation. As an avid user of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter I’ve directly experienced the power of these tools to open new professional relationships and business opportunities. And yet just recently in a conversation with another loyalty marketer (whom I met via Twitter) we were lamenting the lack of a strong loyalty marketing dialogue on many of the major social networks. If you are already there, welcome to the conversation. And if you only just contemplating it, its time to make your voice heard—both for the sake of better serving your own clients, as well as for the profession of loyalty marketing.
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