Kent Kirschner - "Contact Us" on Steroids

 

Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, we are finding discussion groups, trade show panels, online communities, political organizations...all talking about SOCIAL MEDIA. Don't get me wrong, it's fun.  It's all blue sky with lots of case studies to look at, new technologies to play around with, experiments to make. But everybody wants to know, at the end of the day, what does it really mean. Where is all this going?

It's all going to the 'Contact Us' button. 

How often do we go to a corporate website to try and gather information or make a suggestion or get help, only to be stymied by the utter lack of humanity to be found there. Putting design considerations aside for a moment, let's focus solely on the ability that we are given to get answers to our questions or provide feedback that we feel is actually being looked at by another living human being. The fact of the matter is that in 99.9% of the situations, the corporate 'Contact Us' button is an experience that no one treasures. Enter social media.

Within five years time, if not sooner, the 'Contact Us' experience will be transformed by social media technologies and the users that adapt with them. Customer service will now be a vibrant exchange of information populated primarily by other consumers/constituents that are more than happy to help their fellow answer seekers.

Product development and enhancement will be an entirely new process where the outside world is encouraged to share their ideas and feedback for building a better tomorrow. These user contributed suggestions will be consumed and modeled by other users and their interactions will be moderated, modeled and molded by the internal team at the corporation.

Conversations with the president will become a reality and the outside world will finally feel like their requests for attention get the human touch that they merit. All communication back and forth between the executive leadership within an organization and the audience of consumers and constituents will be open and visible. 

What is the overall impact of these considerations? How do these social media innovations impact the running of an organization? The benefits are clearly numerous: cost savings through a decreased need for full time customer support staff, greater brand loyalty through an awareness that the user/audience is now part of the brand, more efficient communication vehicles as messages can be delivered immediately and personally to vast audiences of 'opted in' members. 

At this point most brands continue to express concerns about random negative experiences impacting a much wider audience. In time though, these negative experiences will be out in the open for audiences to see. And sitting right next to them will be the response to the problem.

We see this already on sites like TripAdvisor where savvy hoteliers readily and immediately respond to negative comments about a person's stay at their hotel.The net effect of this is to show that they are real people interested in hearing what people say and then acting to ensure that the problem will be resolved. I daresay that this builds even greater affinity for that brand/hotel.

Social Networking is obviously here to stay- it's absolutely the most effective way to stay in touch with people in a time where change is so rapid and our need to stay connected so acute. But this is only an aspect of the transformational technology described by the term 'social media'. The long term proposition, the opportunity to be seized, is to be able to capture the wisdom, enthusiasm and contributions (ie unpaid labor) of our existing networks