What’s your customer engagement style? It’s a question reminiscent of those light-hearted quizzes that proliferate magazines: Are you strong or sassy? Independent or group-focused? When someone @-replies you on Twitter(
), do you respond immediately or wait a couple days?
These questions are actually important to consider. Why? Because customer engagement encompasses your company’s customer service, support, and marketing. It also deals with your company’s forums, Twitter accounts, blogs and meetups. How various companies use Twitter, YouTube(), Facebook(
), and its ilk, goes a long way to define the long-term relationship consumers have with that brand.
There are some amazing success stories. Old Spice, using both Twitter and YouTube, recently ran a customer engagement masterclass that created a much-needed mania around the brand. Yet, for every success story, there are plenty of flops. When a Domino’s Pizza employee uploaded a disastrous video about the company’s hygiene standards to YouTube, a widespread negative viral campaign ensued.
The lesson: Ensure that your engagement style matches your company’s brand, goals, and general attitude. We took a look at the top five engagement styles that currently dominate the social web. Which are you?
Your message: Winning is sometimes the only thing. We’ve all seen things like this before: “RT – FREE STUFF OVER HERE LINK #welovefreestuff.” This social media personality knows that contests and special offers generate a lot of activity and set up a very clear (if slightly old-fashioned) relationship with the consumer. The consumer follows whatever steps you’ve laid out: Retweeting something, sending in a picture of yourself with company swag, or signing up for a newsletter. Then they are rewarded for taking these steps. Dialogue or community isn’t as important as having consumers hanging around hoping they’ll win something or get a special deal.
How you say it: Giving stuff away or offering deals works well only if you’ve got some trust built up. There are a lot of scams out there and acting like a wacko Twitter user doesn’t instill much confidence that this offer is trustworthy and/or legit.
Who’s it good for? Big companies with big pockets wanting to speak from the perspective of the corporation.
Example: Virgin America. Nearly all of Virgin’s Twitter stream is devoted to special deals and contests.
The bottom line: They keep the voice friendly and light, but also faceless. The brand itself is speaking here.
Your message: Like a good neighbor, you listen to your customers and engage them on an individual level, mostly to solve customer support issues or to capitalize on sales opportunities. You monitor social network channels because “that’s where the customers are,” and if conversations are happening about your brand, you want to be there to participate.
In this engagement style, Twitter is an extension of your customer service reps (albeit in a limited, loose way). Businesses following this style don’t so much start the conversation as they react to the ones that have already started – whether that’s a customer complaining about your brand or a consumer asking a question that your business is well-equipped to answer. You live by co-tweet, the @-reply and direct message.
How you say it: With one friendly “individual” voice. This engagement style calls for a business to officially anoint someone or selected people from within the company to be the official Tweet-voice. Their personality is allowed to come through on some level within company boundaries. Customers need to feel as if they are being handled by an actual human being who is personable, but not too edgy.
Who’s it good for? Larger, consumer-centric businesses, especially service and retail outlets, that have the resources to monitor multiple channels of customer feedback.
Example: Staples. Staples’ Twitter stream is full of @-replies asking for DMs. And they even use little illustrations of the actual people who are sending out those tweets as the background of their Twitter page.
The bottom line: Staples chooses to engage customers on a somewhat personal level; each tweet is “signed” by the person who tweeted.
3.The Beehive
The message: We’re all in this together people. Everyone who works for you can be your social network identity. Instead of having an official company account, you encourage all employees to participate in social media networks. Work identities collapse into personal social identities.
In this engagement style, the focus is not so much the direct relationship between consumer and business. Instead, it’s a distributed relationship whereby the business benefits by all the small relationships between its employees and the wider world. This is a radical way of thinking about customer engagement because it’s about cultivating a culture of engagement throughout your entire company.
How you say it: In a wacky, edgy, at times out-of-control voice. Often a company in this style will have a social media policy setting some ground rules and expectations; but the real thing holding this strategy together is a philosophy of engagement.
Who’s it good for? Idea-based companies, large or small. If your business is based on innovation, networking and generating buzz, this is the style for you.
Example: Any number of small software companies, but IBM is one of the most interesting examples of this style. They have an extensive and thoughtful approach to social networking (and computing). They encourage each of their employees to identify themselves on social networks as IBMers.
4. The Community Builder
Your message: Always an acquaintance but never a friend. You think of your customers as like-minded folks, and so you build spaces on the social web for them to hang out and share in their like-mindedness. You use Twitter to share non-business related links and quotes that you think your customers will like, but you also keep a slight distance from them in an attempt to let them drive the conversation. You probably use the word ‘movement’ in your Twitter bio.
Oftentimes, a business who follows this style will integrate their Twitter use within other social technologies – blogs (but for strictly non-business news), forums, and even entire websites devoted to the things your community cares about.
The community builder’s goal is to create conversation around things the company cares about and then link that conversation to the brand.
How you say it: With a balanced combination of passion and detachment. You want to encourage your customers to join your movement but you don’t want to either dominate the conversation or make the whole thing feel like it was cooked up by your marketing department. You are going for what people actually care about and so a little humility — making the brand ride shotgun or even in the back — works best.
Who’s it Good For? Businesses whose products and services already target a community with a definable set of values. If your customers and you would have a lot to talk about at a dinner party, this is a good bet for you.
Example: Timberland(
). They run a community effort called Earthkeepers, a set of initiatives (including social media) devoted to environmental action. As described on its site:
“When you’re an Earthkeeper, you’re part of a community of like-minded people from all over the world intent on doing the little things and doing bigger things, like replanting eroded areas and retrofitting their engines to run on bio fuel. Earthkeepers learn from and support one another through original and inspiring ideas of making the world a more sustainable and livable place. And the more of us there are, the better.”
Note that while the Timberland logo is on the top of the page, it’s not mentioned here. In their tweets they take a more anonymous tone and almost always include a link to something the community might care about (often linking back to the Earthkeeper blog).
5. The Friend
Your message: Every customer interaction is like one amazing high-five. You are the business owner who knows all your customers by name and hangs out with them on the weekends. Your business Twitter account is way more important to you than your personal account (in fact you may not even have a separate personal account – it’s all the same to you).
Businesses in this style will share relevant info like menu updates, new products and event information but will also mix in personal thoughts, jokes and pictures of themselves at work. They tweet about things that have nothing to do with the business per se. These businesses want to their relationship with their customer base to be fluid and up-to-date.
How you say it: Just as you would say something to a pal. Pretty much anything goes, though the more personal the voice the better. Because your engagement with your customer is based on the friendliness of the relationship, the more natural and true to the voice of the person communicating, the better.
Who’s it good For? Smaller, local businesses. This is best when your social media presence mostly extends your face-to-face relationship.
Example: Choose any local restaurant and look at their Twitter account. There are a lot of food carts here in San Francisco like The Creme Brulee Cart which use Twitter to update their customer base as to where they’ll be that day, but you’ll also see messages to customers, friends, and other business owners.
The bottom line: They engage with their customers as friends.
What’s Your Style?
It is important that you think through how you want to engage your customers on Twitter and elsewhere on the social web. It’s important to stay true to your brand but also to make clear the ways in which your customer engagement style furthers the type of relationship you want with your customers and potential customers.
Hat-Tip to Mashable
Matthew Latkiewicz works at Zendesk.com, customer support software. He writes for and edits Zengage, Zendesk’s blog about customer engagement.
