Disruptive Social Media Trends – WhichBox Media

I’m a self-professed sales and marketing technology buff. I find it fascinating how ideas are becoming real technology today to drive tomorrow’s business. I came into this quite by accident back in the late 90’s when I was building custom marketing system capabilities at GTE because there were no package software solutions that were viable. When I get a chance to learn more about something that I think will be transformational or disruptive technology, I jump at the chance.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Bettina Bennett, CEO and Chief Maverick, at WhichBox Media to learn more about some social media challenges she is working to help overcome. It was quite by accident that our paths crossed, but when I looked at what whichbox® was doing, I wanted to know more.

Some Current Social Media Challenges
While it is quite evident with the proliferation of roles around social media that the corporate world has bought into the idea of the value of social media as a channel, there are some very evident struggles playing out. These real problems are impacting the ability to achieve full value realization from social media as a channel.

Challenge 1
I would draw one parallel to TV advertising. Like TV advertising, the social media platforms own the channel as well as users and the corporations are feeding it social content and listening. Like TV advertising, it appears to be more of an awareness and attempt at brand loyalty channel than a true social media experience in many cases. While it may be successful in awareness and some brand loyalty, the consumers are once removed from the company though the channel. More like going on a date with a chaperone, which is not ideal when you want to build a direct, authentic, and meaningful relationship with your customers. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are solutions emerging to manage social media content; however, what I have seen so far keeps the social media channels as primary outlets rather than secondary.

Challenge 2
The social channels are once removed from your website, platform, or community where you can control the complete experience for the customer. You have no control over what ads could appear to the consumer that could conflict with the experience you want to create. There’s nothing like having your message appear along with a competitor’s in a customer’s news feed because the customer happened to visit that competitor’s website hours or days ago. I think we can all agree that would be less than optimal for your content purpose.

Challenge 3
Mobile devices continue to grow as a dominant platform for consumers. When going through third party social channels, you have to understand how are they handling your content on mobile devices and hope that they don’t execute a change on their side that impacts the social media effort you are about to execute. If that does happen, then all the time, effort, and funds will likely be far from achieving their full potential.

Social Media Emerging Trends

Community (Occasionally Lifestyle for Luxury Brands) Sites
I think we are going to start hearing more about community and lifestyle sites being created that pull consumers away from today’s nuts and bolts websites chalked full of information and less on the experience. These community or lifestyle sites will be about what you do or experience with the product or service rather than what it is. While I am a huge fan of marketing, sometimes your best marketers are your customers; however, they have limited or scattered opportunities to tell their story.

Channel Re-alignment
As we covered in the second challenge, having the customers once removed from your website, platform, or community does present a challenge. While I don’t think that companies are going to abandon Facebook, Twitter, etc. by any means, I think there will be a growing trend for companies to look for better ways to be 1:1 with their customers without Uncle Facebook as the chaperone but rather becoming Mom or Dad back at home so that you can tell them later how the date went. For this to happen, we need a technology solution to facilitate that relationship and grow it so that there is something to share later through today’s social media channels.

Technology Solutions to Build Authentic or Real Consumer Relationships
This is where whichbox® comes in. whichbox® is a audience engagement platform, SaaS solution to foster a 1:1 relationship directly with customers so that they can share their stories directly with the company and also share that story to other social media sites from that platform, or the company could highlight stories in social media channels to create awareness of their community presence. whichbox® can service B2C or B2B for companies, non-profits, or associations as examples. The goal is to develop real and authentic customer relationships that generate crowdsourced user generated content that the company can leverage in addition to potential SEO benefits. It will also afford the ability to create some form of a loyalty component where storytellers get rewards for sharing their experiences.

The historical segmentation mentality has been focused on a customer’s propensity to purchase, lifetime value, etc. As the audience engagement platforms develop, we may see new customer segments appear like: aspiring writer, folk stories, basic facts, and non-writer in an attempt to engage the right customers to engage on these community sites and build the crowdsourced content as there is real value in getting your customers to tell their stories. I could see future digital campaigns focused on getting customers to engage on the community site with offers living within the community site. Imagine the ROI uplift of an offer living with real and authentic customer stories over cleverly crafted copy.

If you would like to learn more about whichbox® you can find them at www.whichboxmedia.com .