Do You Have the Right Customer-Engagement Goal?

The market has moved on, and it will move on with or without your company. So it really has gotten down to the question, “Do you want to stay in business or not?”

If the answer is yes, read on. Do you have the right goal in mind? If you are trying to grow your business using the new media tools, you are on your way. Here are three principles that will help guide your effort:

1) Know what you want to get out of your social-media program.

The place to begin is by defining your social-media objectives before you do anything else. Start with an annotated list of objectives that includes your objective and one or two sentences describing your rationale. Then define your audience.

Once you have completed these two steps define the R in your ROI. This means determining the specific return you would like to achieve, but remember to measure the degree and amount of interaction you are achieving, not just the total number of clicks, etc.

2. Make it a two-way conversation.

You can start this process by asking your customers what they would like to talk about with you. After all, the engagement is about having a conversation that goes both ways! What you want to avoid is being a loud speaker and instead nurture a more personalized conversation. You can accomplish this by becoming more sophisticated in your approach than simply “getting the word out” by engaging customers with relevant and personal information and asking for their input and advice.

3. Forget about impressions and hits.

Simply focusing on eyeballs is not an accurate way to assess the value of a social-media or business-development program. Sure, you may know how many people “Like” your Facebook page, but how many are responding to anything you are saying or posting online by repeating what you have to say? A tracking report is fine if you take the data and improve the way you communicate by developing strong two-way conversations.