In the readings for this past week there was one part of a case study that really stood out to me. While describing the journey of salesforce.com within social media, there was one section entitled, “Be Gone Sawbanners Please [Be] Gone”. It talked about a user’s comment which pleaded for salesforce.com to remove the sawbanner ad that popped up on a user’s screen every time s/he logged into the website. The comment quickly gained attention and thousands of votes and additional comments poured in with support for the proposal. Although the solution to this problem was basically unanimous amongst users, internal debate over it created conflicting opinions.The developers of the site’s platform wanted to work towards maximizing the application’s usability. Therefore when users united in the elimination of the sawbanner, developers saw the next step as clear. However, organizational structure within a company causes different departments to have different goals. So when developers decided the obvious solution towards maximizing usability would be to eliminate the sawbanner, the marketers interpreted this as an obvious problem towards their own goal of connecting with the customers (for which they had come to depend on the sawbanner).
The issue of the sawbanner took nine months to address internally. In the meantime, users continued to make suggestions on the site, many of which were acted upon with positive results and stored in their delivered archive. Before reading this, the idea of the trust built from listening and talking was only in one context for me: users trusting a company; the idea that when a customer talks the company will listen and react. The example from
Salesforce shows that this trust is a two way street however. Salesforce had to build trust that the suggestions their customers gave were constructive and of high quality. The details were not explicit in the section, but I would assume that the company didn’t start off reacting to extreme suggestions that would have highly impacted the company. Most likely they began by targeting small changes that would demonstrate to the community that they were indeed listening. This allowed users to trust the company, but it also allowed the company to trust in the quality of suggestions their users produced. The fate of the sawbanner wasn’t decided upon until other suggestions proved positive. When this happened Salesforce was able to have the trust and confidence they needed in order to implement a controversial change and eliminate the sawbanner. Overall this speaks to another concept from the book. The idea that social media marketing isn’t something that one department or group of people exclusively does within a company. Everyone within the organization must be on board. Consumers aren’t just critiquing and influencing a company’s products or services anymore, consumers have taken the next step and are influencing the interactions and experiences they have with a company as a whole. Suggestions don’t just impact one section of an organization and all employees need to appreciate the voice of the groundswell because no matter where an employee falls in the structure of a company, s/he is now never beyond the influential reach of the consumer.
Your last point about social media effecting the a whole company is a good observation. Moving forward, the best companies in the future will be those that educate all of their employees on the best uses of social media, etc. But I believe that as younger employees come up through the ranks, they will naturally be more familiar with using social media than older generations.
ReplyDeleteJoanna,
ReplyDeleteIt's a great point you make about trust being a two way street. While it becomes pretty clear early on that customers need to trust a company for it to be successful, it is absolutely necessary for a company or business to also trust its customers in order to respond effectively to their suggestions and concerns.