Social media provides new tools for business to interact directly with their customer base.  This may be a good thing or a bad thing - that depends on your business and how good your product is.

The fear from businesses may be that they receive some bad reviews on their product or services.  This is a fear of all businesses. In most cases you are trying to provide the best product or service possible and even though you care what your customers think, you don’t want your potential customers to view any negative feedback.

This poses a dilema, to have the best product you must solicite feedback.  You can do this privately through e-Survey software such as ratepoint.com. Social Media now provides a tool and people will use it whether or not you decide to listen.  With blogs, Facebook, and other mediums to rate your product or just chat about your product, some may already be providing useful nuggets of information; yet you aren’t listening.

I encourage you to take heed of these networks and watch your brand and your customer base, they are out there and they can provide you with valuable feedback.  Feedback that will ultimately increase the quality of your product, if you choose to listen.

Social Media allows you to interact with your customers as well.  If someone posts a negative comment, use that same medium to post any changes or updates that others reading the post may be interested in.

For example:

If someone posts a message stating that your Support department is taking too long to respond back to email, even though in your auto-responder you qualify that they will hear back within 24 hours (for example).  You could first contact that client and make sure their needs are taken care of - win them back.  And then post a message stating that you have changed the email auto-responder to give a more accurate response time (or you removed the time altogether).  In addition, you have implemented a Forum that will allow customers to post their questions, your support team to respond to their questions, and everything is archived for future users who may have the same answer.

Here is an article in regards to replacing that un-godly plastic clam-shell packaging that is almost impossible to open without scissors, and then once you have it open the edges become fatal weapons.

Listen to your customers, they are talking about your product.  Don’t fear feedback, embrace it and use the Internet to communicate with your clients.

I ran across a cool tool that I wanted to share with you guys:

It’s a little button you put on your site that someone can click on and share your site with their friends and colleagues.  Pretty easy to install as well.

Basic Features:

» Easy Bookmarking & Sharing
» Spreads Your Content
» Removes Clutter
» Fast and Reliable
» Easily Customizable
» For Websites and Blogs
» Completely Free
» Customizable (with your logo, service list, colors, etc.)

Get free statistics about how your content is shared and spread by your users:

» Most Popular Content
» Where Your Content is Sent
» Trends Over Time
» Geographic Breakdown

It’s easy enough for a beginnier and flexible enough for a pro.  Try it out.

Arif Gangji
Neon Rain Interactive
www.neonrain.com
Web Design - Application Development - SEO SMO SEM - Email Marketing

del.icio.us - Social Bookmarking has a new name and a new look…Okay, the name’s the same but the url is now www.delicious.com - a bit easier to remember.

With that change they have finally revamped the backend, check out the video here:

http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/07/oh-happy-day.html