After preparing the steps and organizing Groundswell, the next step is to properly integrate them. The social media revolution will continue to progress whether or not you decide to get involved and utilize it to your advantage. This stresses the point that if you don’t jump on the train early, you’re going to get left in the dark.
This week I have learned a process to aid in determining the social medium to reach your customers called the P.O.S.T process – People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. The process focuses on determining what people are involved, making clear what your objectives are, and knowing the strategy to determine what technology your target market utilizes the most. Many businesses end up doing what their competitors are doing simply because it’s what they are doing; however, if you can be ahead of the trend and actually predict what technologies will be popular, you will be able to reach a much wider audience.
First, knowing the techno-graphic profile of your customer is essential to establishing what technology is best and easiest to reach them through. By knowing what technologies your customer is using, you will have much higher views because you can predict where to place your advertisements.
Moving forward to the objectives, there are five that the Groundswell has listed. These objectives are: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting, and Embracing. All of these are important in their own way, although I will only be covering one in this blog. I believe that Listening is extremely important because it can aid in problem solving and generate ideas that may not have been heard before. Through listening, it is possible to get customer feedback and make product improvements. This can be very valuable to a business because it can be looked at as cheap R&D. Listening is key to staying ahead of the trend.
Next, developing a strategy on how to move forward, establish what changes will be made and how they will improve operations can help a lot. Having the right people in charge is important because only listening isn’t enough. You need people in charge who can energize, support, and embrace the strategy and everyone involved. People are easily distracted so having someone to keep people on track and making objectives clear will benefit the execution of the strategy.
Finally, after establishing the people involved and the techno-graphic profile, making clear the objectives and creating the strategy to follow, you will be better informed on what technologies are the best to reach your target market. Old forms of advertising are becoming less and less useful as people are always looking at phones or tablets. Even when doing something as important as driving, people still choose to look at their phones because they feel it is more important than not crashing their vehicle. By knowing what devices your customers are using, it is much easier to reach them and listen to them as well as getting your message seen.
The P.O.S.T. process is very important for a business such as RBC in the banking industry because you are able to listen to negative and positive feedback and contact those involved to address the situation. By maintaining your customer relationship, the customer feels like the bank cares more than ever before because they are able to voice their opinion. Many people will post messages on Twitter and Facebook about bad experiences they have had with a company. This can be changed into a positive rather than a negative by taking what they have to say seriously and creating a solution for their issue instead of ignoring it, leaving them frustrated. This process should not be overlooked when operating a business no matter how big or small it is and taking serious consideration to it will help greatly.
References
Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell. (p. 230). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.