Engage Customers Online: What It Means, How to Do It

If you’re not engaging with your clients, you’re not going to keep them. And in today’s world businesses increasingly are engaging with their customers online – because that’s where their customers, and the people who influence them, are to be found.

But what does it mean to “engage” with customers online, in practical terms?

Brian Solis

To find out, Travel Market Report spoke with Brian Solis, a new media expert, futurist and the author of Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Business to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web (Wiley, March 2010).

In Engage Solis discusses the evolution of new media and how businesses must integrate the technologies into their everyday activities to stay engaged with customers. Travel Market Report spoke with Solis, who was designated an influential leader by CRM Magazine in 2010, about some of the main themes in the book.

What does it mean for a business to engage with consumers in today’s world?
Solis: There was a recent Burson-Marsteller report that showed that to some businesses the term engagement means that they’re simply recognizing and talking to individuals – for example they’re on Twitter using the @name. But what the greater scope of engagement encompasses is this idea that customers and those who influence their decisions are centralized in the entire business experience.

That means we listen, we learn, we adapt, and through each one of those steps we are participating in these communities, whether that is on Facebook, Twitter or an online forum. It means that instead of broadcasting at audiences using one-to-many channels, we’re now participating in a one-to-one manner that hopefully has a one-to-one-to-many outcome.

What do you mean by one-to-one-to-many?
Solis: On Twitter the average number of connections is 140; on Facebook it’s 130. But those numbers are radically spiking; especially with the more uber-connected individuals, those numbers can easily go into the thousands. So when you engage effectively with the right people, you are reaching great numbers.

How do you find the “right people”?
Solis: The right people are letting you know who they are. There is a social consumer hierocracy, and you have to recognize individuals of a certain stature first because they can reach many more than your traditional one-to-one engagement. I always joke that social media didn’t invent conversations; everybody has always shared their views of your brand, or products or services. The difference here is that it allows us to search and learn all in real time. It’s there for us to find within a search box. So you can easily find people talking about your company or your market.

There are also services available to help you figure this out. Services such as Klout, MPact and PeerIndex all allow you to weigh and rank individuals based on what they’re saying so that you know how to prioritize your engagement strategies and also how to personalize your engagement strategies.

How do you use these tools to personalize engagement strategies?
Solis: I wrote a report to show that these conversations can translate into personalization. The report showed how you can look at Starbucks, their followers on Twitter, and how what they say and who they’re connected to can tell you almost everything that you need to know if you wanted to design personalized engagement strategies. For instance we learned that the top followers of Starbucks used words like family, love, share, work; and they love dogs more than they love cats. All this really interesting information came out of that research.

Talk to me about conversations. Is getting a Facebook page and then only putting up special deals considered a conversation?
Solis: When you look at individuals who express why they follow a certain brand or a company online, the first answer is that they do so to get access to special offers, deals, etc. So in that regard, a travel agent should broadcast these special deals. It’s what people want. But in another study I did we learned that individuals also follow experts and authorities, because they consistently had compelling content and insights to share. So that gives you the balance.

If you want to broadcast deals, then you should also balance it out with expertise on your subject matter. What are you an authority on? You can’t just be an authority on getting deals, because that’s a commodity. But if you’re an expert on Asia or places for families to travel, those become your catalysts for conversations, because there is no shortage of people in the public stream asking for recommendations in those regards.

How does a business owner/manager find out what kind of conversation their clients are most interested in? Trial and error? Ask?
Solis: Probably a combination of both, plus search. Think about it, when a consumer is ready to start investigating a decision, they’re going to go to Google. The same should be true for someone trying to reach a consumer. You can also search social networks to see what people are asking. So rather than going to Google and typing in ‘Bali vacation discount’, people might go to Twitter and ask if anybody knows of good places or deals in Bali that I can take advantage of?

For an agent that information is there for them to find; then they need to learn how they can introduce value into the stream. I could ask a question about Bali and I could get an answer from an agent and I wouldn’t be offended at all – if they didn’t try to sell me, but tried to show me interesting insights that I had not necessarily considered.

Brian Solis is principal at Altimeter Group. (www.briansolis.com)