Passive Engagement a potential solution for your brand
What does engaging with your customer really mean? For a marketer that is what you should be thinking when you look at social media. How can I understand what my customer wants? A lot companies (especially in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals) feel uncomfortable with “engagement” due to strict corporate approval processes and there only view social as a broadcast channel.
This creates a dilemma for organisations that wants to be customer centric but who are extremely risk averse. Perhaps there is an alternative way of using social media to obtaining customer interaction but with less risk. If we look at a standard engagement model (see picture) online engagement should be following a continuous 5-step process of:
1. Listen - Listening is vital to understanding your customers
2. Analyse – This is to look for the best opportunities for your brand and for the customer
3. Strategise - To review how opportunities can leverage brand value (not just in digital channels) and add value to the customer
4. Plan – Identify the tactics to achieve your strategy. This phase should include the evaluation risk and issues/event response
5. Engage – The important part, actually engaging with customers
Engagement is a continuous process that works on feedback, allowing you to constantly refine your customer communication. Most companies are perfectly happy until it gets to step 5, so let me propose a solution “Passive Engagement”.
I have coined the term Passive Engagement to reflect a means of interaction with a series of barriers to protect and reduce risk. Passive Engagement moves engagement from being a conversation in in social media to informed personalised interaction.
Traditional engagement = conversation
Passive Engagement = personalised interaction
How does Passive Engagement work in practice? Rather than direct communication, we may need to consider moderation and delayed response. This needs to be set up in such a way to allow reasonably speed interaction with minimal delay. Thus still allowing a personalised response back to the individual, and therefore maintaining engagement. An example of this type of Passive Engagement would be to introduce an “Ask the expert” form to your online campaigns.
Another example of Passive Engagement would be the implementation of crowd sourcing methodology. This could be in the form of a poll to find out opinion, which can act as feedback to focus communications/campaign around the customer. Collecting people’s personal experiences in a form, crowdsources customer experience while still allowing an moderation step to protect from direct interaction. Asking your audience for input and feedback provides a passive form of engagement that shows that you value and respect their opinions without the need for real time interaction.
If you are looking for an example of Passive Engagement in action, the look at this year’s Doritos’ Super Bowl advert (click on the headline for more information on the campaign). The campaign has been developed with customer feedback to decide what the advert should be. Collaboration and participation, creates a brand affinity as well as showing that customer opinion is important.
Passive Engagement is effective and can be the approach that allows you to venture into social media. With Social Business being a buzzword for 2012, Passive Engagement can provide an opportunity to make it happen within your organisation.
If you think social media is one step too far for your organisation, why not try Passive Engagement.
