According to the 2009 Marketing Sherpa Report on Social Media Marketing & PR 76% of marketing and PR professionals “agree” or “strongly agree” that social media marketing is changing the way their organizations communicate.
While I cannot disagree with this, I wonder if “changing the way organizations communicate” is simply a consequence of technology. What I mean is, “the way organizations communicate” will always change. I am more concerned about how this changes the way the organizations do business.
The thing is, as an organization technology gives you the opportunity to change the way you operate and thus bettering the experience for your consumers. With the Internet as such a common and widely used tool for research, the expectation of transparency is great. Companies have never before been subject to this kind of scrutiny by the people they rely on most, their customers.
This kind of dramatic shift has happened once before. During the industrial revolution machines gave us the ability to mass produce products, thus drastically cutting the production time and energy that traditionally went into even the most common goods. With this ability to mass produce there was a flood of products constantly interjected into the marketplace giving consumers the opportunity to choose based on cost or quality. Consequently, businesses were then subject to proving their worth or uniqueness because technology had given the consumer the means to decide for themselves.
Like the tools of the Industrial Revolution, the Internet has also revolutionized business, not just communication. Now you must be transparent, and this gives me hope. For a time, I was very pessimistic about where things were headed with this addiction to consumption, but for me, the Internet and especially social media presents a unique opportunity to change that.
I see consumers being more demanding of their brands, and as technology brings us closer together, the expectations of moral become more and more important. As the consumers identifies more and more with the brand, it wants the brand to be more and more representative of who they are at a much deeper level.