Brands & Social Media

Are brands afraid of social media ? A question that popped to me this morning while reading my feeds.

I think brands are afraid of social media because at one point these new medias can hurt the image they were trying to build for years even decades. There are lots of unhappy customers out there who now have the power to express their feelings on the “wild” wide web without any control. Blogs can easily be set up in few minutes and indexed by search engines robots and the word is spread.
A live example for that is “I Hate Crocs“.

Today retailing is no more about customer service, it is about pure and rich experience.

How many brands are out there listening to their consumers? Few of them and have not seen many adapting new social media to get closer because their experience can be bad. And so what? Why not listen and perform better. When a consumer have the brand forged in his brand, he expects while going through his experience to have exactly what he deserves, what if this does not happen?

Does your business afford losing a client? I don’t think so.

Starbucks and Zappos understood this earlier than others and got engaged. Starbucks did just that with “My Starbucks Idea.” Zappos ingrained the idea of micro-blogging and the sense of exceptional customer service in the corporate culture by dedicating a special page on their site at http://twitter.zappos.com/.
Many other brands are following but at a slower pace while keeping an eye on the ones who got faster there to learn from their mistakes, in case they did or have any.

Then come the CEOs, the main players who should believe in social media. CEO’s rely on data and input to make good decisions. The problem is that most of their data and input is filtered through other people whom at times want to please the CEO so as to be in good standing. Thus filtered information can lead any CEO to make wrong conclusions which in turn impact business performance over time.

How many have we seen on social media? While most of them are having many stories with “the media”, they prefer having it the classical way and not the 2.0 way. Here i am talking about CEOs mainly in the US, while European CEOs prefer having less exposure and in the MENA region (Middle East & North Africa) are almost not seen active and prefer playing in the shadow for millions of reasons.

Most active CEO on social media in the US must be Tony Hsieh of Zappos and can be found at http://twitter.com/Zappos, not sure who is leading this in Europe and in the MENA region is Aramex CEO, Fadi Ghandour found at http://twitter.com/fadig

Today companies and brands should be open to interact with people giving life to their products and/or services, social media should be part of their company culture and have a dedicated team for it.
They should listen, discuss, dialogue and find ways to make everybody happy including themselves.

Sites often considered as social media include:

Can also read the below: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media

ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media –