Marketing and the image your company projects needs to be unified. You wouldn’t have one company logo on your business cards, another on your company letter heads and a third in your trade magazine advertisements. It wouldn’t make any sense and it’s a somewhat less than professional image. It’s equally important to have staff briefed on communicating with potential customers. My focus here is in the online world but it also applies in the offline world. There should be a marketing strategy in place for this, however simple, and everybody should be aware of it.
Make sure that staff are aware how to approach potential customers on-line. Make sure you’re all singing off the same hymn sheet too, that’s very important. Here are some pointers:
- Be upfront about involvement in a product or service. Don’t go on to web forums or blogs and pretend to be a customer or user of the product or service. If you get caught out this looks dishonest, probably because it is dishonest.
- If you are on sites make sure the owners of those sites are okay with your product being put forward. A lot of web forums make money from advertising and may consider your posting as an attempt to advertise for free.
- If the owners of a site, or somebody acting on their behalf, react to you unfavourably the best thing to do is apologise and enter into a dialog about how they’d like things to be done. This will get them on your side.
- Forums and other places where people gather on-line to discuss and chat will generally have an existing community. Try interacting with that community and gauge how they’ll react to a sales pitch (taken that the site in question will allow you to pitch in the first place).
A very simple strategy may well be “If you’re not the marketing department it is not your job. If you see potential somewhere discuss it with the marketing department.”
I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. You own a web tools company and you’ve developed a content management system. Your target market are web designers and developers. A staff member, in their enthusiasm, joins a forum for web designers and developers and starts singing the praises of your product and how great they found it. They don’t disclose their involvement as they think that posing as a genuine user looks more authentic. They’re right too, it does. They generate some site traffic and possibly some sales.
At this point you’re unaware of what is happening.
Some of the other forum users are hearing these praises a bit too often and raise their suspicions with the moderators (this does happen all the time by the way, that’s how these people get caught). That user gets outed and banned. This makes that individual, and your company, look dishonest. It’s projecting a bad image of being untrustworthy to your potential customers.
If the staff member had discussed the potential with you or a marketing manager then the site owners could have been contacted and a new revenue stream realised. Most sites owners want to make money and will welcome being approached.
I’m giving this example as it is exactly what happened on one of the forums I moderate over the weekend. Some members of our community were furious at having the wool pulled over their eyes. To make matters worse after the initial banning a second staff member came on to the forum, declared who he was, and starting singing praises for the same product. This resulted in a second ban and an even angrier community. Eventually the company owner contacted us and smoothed things out with the moderation team but the damage was done. The company staff are now banned and the community see that particular company as totally untrustworthy.
If the company owner, a very reasonable fellow too, had put a strategy in place this would never have happened. I’m sure the company will do great but forums do get indexed by the search engines; It would be a shame if a search for his products produced this sorry tale.
