Four Principles for Co-Creating Value with Your Customers

After a decade of push advertising and heavy-handed CRM programs, many marketers are failing to grasp the potential of social media. The true value of connecting with customers socially is the realization that value itself can be co-created.

Here are four principles to help marketers co-create value with their customers.

Be Collaborative
Customers, partners, and employees — we’re all in this together. As I have said before on this blog, the stakeholders in your brand conversation extend beyond end users. Enabling dialogue between your customers, employees, and partners can create value for everyone. Twitter can help you engage in conversation in real time. But with Vivox voice chat coming to Facebook, customer service calls are about to explode socially. Companies that are good at co-creating value will harness voice-to-voice interactions with customers to create positive word of mouth in social arenas. Given the potential for volume-driven social customer service, it will have to be a collaborative effort.

Be Considerate
Being considerate of people’s time and effort is critical. Failing to remember frequent users’ passwords while constantly bombarding them with CRM campaigns makes your company appear soulless. One of the basic tenets of social engagement is, “Be human.” It might come down to a few simple things: remembering user preferences; not spamming long-time friends; rewarding loyalists; providing extras for über advocates. Ask your company what is preventing you from being human with your customers; then work on those areas immediately.

Be Targeted
We’ve become used to a certain amount of ad randomness in our online experience. But within social media, we are beginning to expect messages to reach us targeted to our specific area of interest. Start by identifying the social ecosystem model that works best for your company. Include customer insights. Ask where they are expecting to see you and build from there. Content that is tailor made for your target social ecosystem is more important than any banner ad you run. Nobody passes along a Flash intro — I guarantee it.

Be Adaptive
Linking into and out of key customer arenas such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., allows the conversation to grow organically and creates word-of-mouth opportunities. If you are determined to collaborate with your customers, you have to be willing to broaden the technology discussion within your organization. Tools like Facebook Connect need to be integrated in collaboration with your IT department. Not sure where to start? Take a look at the Altimeter Group — they can help you understand the best technology strategy for your enterprise. It’s hard to collaborate if you don’t integrate.

Co-creation of value has its rewards