Radium

Your competitors are listening

Tuesday, 23rd February , 2010

Being a good listener is fundamental for social media success, but listening alone isn’t enough – you need to engage people. If you work for a big company or operate within a large industry, this can mean thousands of conversations a day. So what happens if you miss just one of them?

To answer that question I’ll tell you a short story.

Recently, I noticed my twitterfeed account wasn’t sending blog posts to twitter. I tried to troubleshoot the issue but ended up creating a support ticket on the company’s forum. An employee was quick to resolve the issue (2 days) and I thought I was all set, but now it seemed I had a different problem.

Twitterfeed was working too good. It was double posting every blog post. I went back to the support forum and tried a couple of the common fixes but nothing seemed to work. I was really frustrated but, at the time, I was too busy to look into the issue. So, I simply posted a tweet exclaiming my frustration. (Please disregard the typo.)

The goal of my tweet wasn’t to get help from twitterfeed. I was still planning on going the support route and resolving the issue at some point in the future. But then, something happened that changed everything.

I received the above tweet from the company dlvr.it – a self-proclaimed twitterfeed alternative. Hmm, should I continue to troubleshoot my problem with twitterfeed or take 5 minutes to tryout another tool? Well, you can probably guess what happened next. I created an account, setup the new feed and, low and behold, everything worked fine. Bye-bye twitterfeed.

What happened?
In the blink of an eye, a competitor stole away your customer for almost no cost to them. How could this happen.

1. The cost to switch was zero
For starters, these are both free services so monetary considerations are removed from the equation. Secondly, the entire process from account creation to feed creation takes about 5 minutes – much shorter than it would have taken me to complete a support ticket and wait for a solution. I was actually saving time by changing services.

2. It’s hard to love a utility
Nobody loves utility companies. You tolerate them because you like modern conveniences and there is little differentiation between operators. These web utilities are really no different. Frankly, I don’t care who takes my blog post and sends it over to twitter as long as it works.

Key learnings

• Listening isn’t the most glamorous aspect of social media but it’s one of the most important. If your aren’t monitoring the stream, you’ll miss opportunities. Opportunities your competitors will seize.
• You have to work hard to keep customers. Give them a reason to love your brand. It doesn’t have to be about your product; it could be anything. Your goal is to create something that makes them unable to live without you.
• Know how to respond before you need to. I recommend developing policies for common customer inquiries. This ensures quick and consistent replies to customers.

Are you listening? Tell us about it in the comments.

Related Posts:
Don’t tick off your customers
Do you have time for social media?
Outsource your social media, if you dare
Research fails to understand social media

Thumbnail image courtesy of Hryck