- Social CRM is impacting the way brands interact with their customers
- Brands must give up their anonymity for true communal dialogue
- Brands have changed products and strategys based on private feedback
- Creating a perpetual empathetic link with the marketplace and internally
The continued evolution of the social web has had a significant impact on the way that brands can interact with their customers. While the use of public communities like Twitter and Facebook is widely reported, private online communities can also empower customers to give direct input into the strategic planning, marketing and product development strategies of the companies that they care about.
In order to create the communal dialogue inherent to the success of community engagement, brands must give up their anonymity and, to a degree, their privacy. Instead of approaching customers in a top down, one-to-many fashion of traditional media, or in the one-to-one model of traditional customer service, brands are speaking to a crowd of peers. The brand is speaking as a group of individuals who are endeavoring to serve their customers. They are visible as humans and their dialogue is visible to the peer group. The playing field is thus levelled.
