By Ashley Bening, SFAMA Blog Editor
Social media guru Charlene Li, the founder of Altimeter Group and the coauthor of the bestselling book, Groundswell, spoke at the last SFAMA event: The Future of Social Networks.
Charlene spoke to how brands can prepare for the future of social media. She spoke to the value of transparency and the fact that consumers will reward a transparent company with loyalty. She played the video of the FedEx delivery guy throwing a computer monitor over a fence.
This video currently has over 8 million views. You can imagine how thrilled FedEx was when this video went viral. But, instead of ignoring the problem, like many companies are doing these days, the Vice President issued his own YouTube video apologizing and promising the delivery employee will no longer be working with customers.
She then posed this question that is important for every company to ask itself in this day in age:
“Is your company truly ready to be transparent and authentic?”
The next step is to ask, what kind of relationship do you want with your customers?? Define your strategy with goals. Do you want your relationships with customers to be transactional, occasional or educational? These are pivotal questions to ask while developing your company’s social media strategy.
Another great topic Charlene discussed is the importance of employee engagement. The more digital capital the employees have, the more socially rich the company’s social media profile will be. Connected employees will create a culture of sharing and that will be contagious. Everyone from the CEO to the Office Administrator should be engaging in their online community. As for the self-proclaimed leaders out there, Charlene would tell you leadership means actually having followers and being influential.
She left us with these inspiring words, “We are going to see a new wave of innovation after the Facebook IPO. But it’s going to build slowly. We are on the edge if a new wave of innovation. And it is up to us to be on the cusp of it.”
What do you think is going to be the next wave of social innovation?
If you would like to see the presentation from the evening, click here.
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