How do brands navigate the treacherous, democratized, new customer relations landscape to provide a genuine representation of their experience? The answer is part organizational mindset and part technological enablement.
Part Operational Mindset
First, an organization must be highly aware internally with active internal communication. Making this more difficult, modern business has become truly global with major growth markets in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, as well as in mainstays like the U.S. and Western Europe. Town hall meetings simply will not cut it anymore. Employees need frequency and clarity of communication, but more importantly depth, richness, variety, and access anywhere. Facebook and Twitter have been high impact, easy to use and low burden in the consumer sphere, but nobody (except perhaps Mr. Greg Smith, late of Goldman Sachs) would use them as a vehicle for communicating confidential company matters. Regulations in many industries also mean that those platforms certainly wouldn’t make the cut for corporate use. The good news is that the tools are already here to bring together global knowledge teams and all the supporting systems data to make clear, concise, rich, global communication a reality.
Part Technological Enablement
Large organizations and small are now aware that their clients (and others) are talking about them online, and it may not be all good. This dull white noise of Internet chatter is tough to identify, harder to understand, with sources impossible to pinpoint. The volume and variety of updates, posts, tweets, and blog posts mixed with the unstructured, opaque nature of the content and contributors’ anonymity don’t match the need for hard metrics by corporate environments reliant on SQL statements looking for a match (continued…)
