Do brands on social media need to answer every single query or comment?
First, it is not humanly possible even for brands with an exclusive team that manages social media or has outsourced it. Second, it is utterly pointless to even try responding to most queries.
Take for instance, Idea Cellular. A simple search on Twitter revealed that they do not have a twitter presence yet. So, do they even know that there is assorted chatter about how bad an idea their ‘Walk while you talk’ campaign is?
Sample this,
Walk when you Talk is such a BAD Idea for Indian roads #Fail (link)
walk when you talk in real life is #fail, but then the Idea guys have a disclaimer so nobody can sue them over it (link)
…and my own sidey jab,
Idea Cellular’s Walk While You Talk is the only normal ad that requires a ‘performed by experts’ fine print disclaimer! (link)
Now, do I even care for a response? Of course not – though I do not know about others. I think the campaign is dumb and insensitive, but that’s about it. I’m not annoyed enough to hound them for a response.
Saffola kick-started their digital campaign today, called Heart OK Please. They had a twitter profile too that is, as of now, fresh off the oven. Two of India’s social media veterans welcomed the newbie that was just 3 tweets old – Gautam Ghosh with a,
Saffola’s twitter account @heartokplease is following me… is that good news or bad news (link)
…and Twilight Fairy, with a response to Gautam,
ditto. lagta hai kissi ne kaha it’s fashionable to do campaigns on twitter :p (link)
Gautam’s 2nd tweet nailed them down completely,
and amazingly even 2 hours after that tweet nobody from saffola has responded 🙂 One more marketing campaign down the drain (link)
To give credit where its due, someone from Suffola woke up to these tweets and came back into the game,
@GautamGhosh hopefully good news 🙂 we just want the world to be heart-ok 🙂 (link)
@GautamGhosh sorry about the late response (link)
and,
@twilightfairy its just about inviting people to share your daily struggle to stick to healthy habits. talking about it can help (link)
@twilightfairy yes we did. no bots here. humans only 🙂 (link)
There’s a lot more happening for many other brands online – not just on twitter, but on message boards, review websites like Mouthshut, blog comments, Youtube comments and so on.
How much can a brand/ organization do in trying to answer all these queries? There will be negative comments as long as a brand is serving a large chunk of the population since service/ product delivery does not depend on one person, but a team of people across departments. So, if someone has a great experience with a particular laptop, another will have a defective LCD on Day 1 of its purchase. Now, they have a fantastic cribbing zone called social media and perhaps expect that the laptop brand’s twitter presence (to quote just one social media tool) to intervene and hasten the delivery of the laptop from a service center.
This is just a sample from online spaces that are viewable openly – include walled gardens like Facebook, Orkut or LinkedIn and you have a massive problem in merely reading/ listening to the online buzz, leave alone responding.
Getting a proven listening tool like Radian6 will surely help address the former, but the question is whether responding to every single query makes sense.
Personal opinion – no. Its futile.
Brands first need to start by investing in a professional listening tool or even a outsourced/ in-house team that tracks relevant buzz via more rudimentary ways (RSS feeds, to start with). This is a bare minimum these days even if you do not own even one social media channel. Point is, you need to be aware.
The next is on responding and entering conversations – the point is here across two fronts; have a larger focus and pick your battles.
The larger focus is how you define your social media outreach as. Not, ‘We need to have a presence in Twitter’ or ‘Let us start a Facebook fan page’. For a 6 month old start-up, the latter looks particularly silly. How about defining the outreach using real, feasible objectives – ‘We need to start speaking to people who seem interested in LCD TVs’ or, ‘can we extend our customer support online?’ or even, ‘we need to communicate our city-specific retail offers through appropriate channels online’. The more specific it is, the better.
Then, it is a matter of picking your battles – can’t fight them all, nope! Choose those which you can address and which perhaps seems more pressing. Or choose those who seem to have better influence than others – these criteria could backfire since even someone not with any visible influence can gain notoriety in a week. But, selective response is a better solution than spreading thin. It also gives the brand enough breathing space when the level of activity increases, since the expectation doesn’t veer towards, ‘they’ll respond to every single query’. This is not a perfect solution, but is a perfectly manageable solution.
Scalability and getting an internal buy-in to increase investment in social media engagement is still a problem, at least for Indian brands. Given that, it helps to take smaller steps, achieve minor successes and building on them to scale gradually.
Picture courtesy: craftyanna via Flickr