Consumers know their power over our marketing and brand reputations, and they are not afraid to use it. This power shift and has a created a sort of forced collaboration between marketers and their customers - with industry bloggers, analysts and journalists chiming in, too. Don't be afraid to embrace it. Empower customers and your marketplace - and you win. Try to control it, and you may incite a mutiny.
Don't be afraid, just ask!
Don't wait for the active few - go after the silent majority, too. The primary reason most customers don't share good news about brands that they do business with is because they are never asked. After every appropriate interaction - and without getting creepy or becoming a nag - invite your customers to participate in product reviews, experience surveys, customer forums or just plain telephone calls as part of "executive outreach sessions." Email is a great channel for this, but also reach out across the channel that the customer uses - SMS, social or retail.
Optimize message cadence and timing.
While many of your loyal customers will be happy to receive lots of notices from you, never assume their interest. One of our retail customers recently found that a whopping 10% of their most loyal customers had marked their email messages as "spam" in the past year. When they reached out via other channels to find out why, they learned that the email messages were too frequent and not specific to the interests of those customers. They remained loyal; they just didn't want so many email messages. Don't risk upsetting or annoying your customers to the point of complaints. Listen to the response data you have and back off where necessary.
Pull your head out of the sand
There are dozens of examples every month of brands that tried to ignore negative social commentary, or got "shamed" for suppressing negative comments on Facebook pages. Pfizer, for instance, agitated customers by deleting posts that suggested one of its viral video campaigns may be sexist. Nestle battled back against Greenpeace supporters who voiced their concerns over the company's use of palm oil. Rather than listening and engaging with concerned consumers, Nestle created a wealth of bad PR for itself by deleting posts and snapping back at the page's "fans."
However, Nestle seems to have learned from this experience and has begun addressing customer concerns openly on Facebook. See their recent post below responding to accusations of child labor use and their proactive steps to counter this issue:
If you are going to listen and respond to social data, you must accept and engage with customers who do not agree with your positions or did not have a good brand experience. Like all battles of public opinion, the trick is to empower your advocates to respond to your detractors - and to provide a fact-based, reasoned and reasonable platform for thoughtful discussion.