For any consumer brand, when it comes to social media strategy or Social Customer Management, there are many paths to take, and many ways to screw it up. Companies have been engaging and selling their wares on the Internet since the pre-Web days, in the early '90s, and this is no longer an immature discipline. The fresh-faced college graduates who launched the first consumer-brand Web sites are now 39 years old. Those days are two-thirds of a generation behind us.
I remember seeing consumer-branded content online the first time I logged on to Prodigy, one April night in 1991. As the Web evolved, some brands jumped on earlier than others. For example, Pizza Hut crafted the world's first online pizza storefront in 1994.
Other brands, like airlines, waited until nearly 1999 or 2000 to bring their offerings to the digital space. One of my clients, Chris Clark of the San Francisco Travel Association, was largely responsible for that push for USAir. Billions of dollars were made in e-commerce in the 1990s, and U.S. e-commerce revenues hit the $20 billion mark around 2006, no small amount.
Since 2007, with the rise of the social Web, and so-called Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies, consumer brands have found themselves in an awkward place: Yogi Berra's proverbial fork in the road: "If you find a fork in the road, take it." Some brands desperately want to engage with their customers and prospects on the new social Web. Some are deeply fearful. Most are somewhere in between. There's no easy extreme to point to.
My client, Christina Harcar, Director of Business Development at Audible, put it best: "A lot of brands are accustomed to thinking proactively and strategically, but they just don't have the tool kit to be proactive and strategic at work anymore." To complicate matters further, most companies confuse strategy with planning, and planning with strategy, to paraphrase Alan Weiss, the author of Million Dollar Consulting.