I was reading Brian Solis’ latest post this morning about being at the crossroads of customer transactions and engagement when it occurred to me how fortunate we are to be exploring the ever-changing social landscape. It’s an amazing time full of opportunity (and uncertainty) and the rush of the possibilities and potential behind it are addictive.
In the past, we’d market to people we’d want to join our member organization. We’d send out postcards, attend trade shows, hand out our business cards like there was a free lunch attached to it, but it was just throwing paper into the wind. Someone might come back and tell us that they joined our organization based on one of our “campaigns” but for the most part, we could only guess. Sure we did some creative things with “mentioning” certain words but the science behind it was far from full-proof. We did research the old-fashioned way — by paying a firm to tell us what our demographic was or by trial and error.
Today we can set up analytics and measure click-through counts. We have access to amount of time spent on our specific web pages. We can correct our marketing member recruiting efforts continuously. We also can gain an unbelievable amount of information with a couple of quick key strokes and directed searches. We can learn from industry experts without leaving our office. We can attend webinars and take online courses from schools half-way across the world. And that’s just the beginning of what can be accomplished – those things are the most obvious. You can learn so much about individuals with a couple of quick searches. Twitter may uncover their favorite things and gripes; their most frequented places; any number of preferences. LinkedIn will tell you where they work and where they used to work. You can quickly find out who influences them and who they’re connected with on any number of social platforms and if you are lucky enough to locate a blog that they contribute to you have a deep look into all that and more. These personal preferences can be used to shape your product, services, offerings and or events. And the best of all is that the customer (or consumer) expects that.
For our organizations and membership, this means we can serve them better by an increased knowledge exchange and more personalized offerings. They, in turn, can help us by contributing to our knowledge library and adding the expertise to our community.
Social technology is not making our lives easier nor is it driving our desire to connect. We’re social creatures. The desire has always been there but the technology is allowing us to cross all types of borders, geographic and otherwise. It is giving us a louder microphone with which to reach a greater audience and it is allowing us to be part of conversations that we might never have known about.
How has social technology changed your life or member organization? If you haven’t seen any changes maybe you should ask yourself why? If it’s changing the expectations of those around us and how they do business, it IS changing yours as well. Maybe you just don’t realize it.
