With the emergence of social media, a lot of businesses are hopeful of taking themselves online. However, what they seem to forget is that social media users have a particular culture that they must get to know before they can fully penetrate it. This is the error Skittles committed as they tried to get people to talk about their website last Tuesday.
There is no argument about the influence of social media on the customer-business relationship. A lot of businesses have taken themselves online with high hopes of getting in touch with their customers. Customers, on the other hand, are very inquisitive. As the Church of Customer Blog have claimed, 60% of customers communicate with companies and 56% feel better service because of the open communication.
In fact, customers also want to get in touch with companies. According to the Church of Customer Blog, almost 85% prefer businesses to interact with them.
However, when this interaction turns sour, then we see the worst of the business-customer relationship. This is what happened to Skittles. They have not studied the market before diving. In effect, they received negative feedback. It’s inevitable considering that social media users are very critical having a wide selection of articles and websites to sift through everyday.
The things is, social media users are real people. They have a mind of their own and they are not robots who will follow any company’s command. You have to get their interest for them to talk about you. Forcing them will only result in negative comments as what Skittles experienced.
A notable statement that Brand Keys President Robert Passikoff made on Online Media Daily’s post entitled “Skittles Pulled Twitter Campaign” is that this event is a good example of customer power. No matter what the companies do, people still have the discretion on whether or not they will follow. Well I think this is already embedded in the system. The choice of whether or not to purchase a particular product lies on the person’s decision making process. No one can decide for him than himself.
As Gerry McGovern said in his post entitled “Customer Power Driven by the Web“, customers are more powerful today. Before, companies can arrange certain groups to promote their products. But today, people form groups on their own. The important thing here is that these people have their own united opinion and behavior which is something that companies must be concerned about.
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