The discipline of relationship marketing is already facing waves of changes with social media providing a variety of new approaches and opportunities to communicate with customers. If you use Sendy hosting, you can send emails at an affordable price with Amazon SES / Mandrill SMTP servers from your own domain, and can even perform unlimited wordpress hosting in a different scheme. Optimizing communications with email marketing alone has been an ongoing challenge for companies of all sizes. Developing an appropriate communication strategy requires understanding the needs, attitudes and behaviors of customers, fine tuning copy and frequency that will resonate with customers a business is trying to reach.
Clearly social media is already having an impact. Customers opting to follow Twitter streams, join community programs or become “fans” on Facebook are signaling they are opting in to some sort of communication. I met recently with a financial services company who is leveraging these opt-in communication points to offset email marketing – literally, they are sending less email because customers are choosing to interact with their brands through different vehicles.
Facebook just threw yet another a monkey wrench into the mix. With the ability to “like” any page or content out there with a unique URL, a communication strategist has another dimension to manage. When a customer “likes” a page, or perhaps even a specific product, the brand then has the capability to communicate directly with those fans. For example, as a reader if you “like” this blog post (you can choose the verb “recommend” instead, in the settings for the API), I have the ability just like a normal fan page in Facebook to communicate to just the fans of this post. Facebook creates a ‘ghost’ page only available to the admin, which will allow me to track statistics and see an explicit list of people who “like” or “recommend” the post.
Imagine the applications. Companies in all industries could consider implications around targeting through Facebook for specific brands, product lines or individual products. A pharma company, for example, could leverage this function to communicate with Facebook users around specific conditions if they happen to “like” a specific treatment. Retailers could too, except they need to be careful – do they really want to manage communications and fans at a SKU level? Nike could integrate communications via Facebook likes for fans of Air Jordan, but it’s probably not sustainable for each shoe. Bookstores could manage communications with folks who “like” historical fiction different those who “like” Manga.
At the big business level I think there is going to be an emerging emphasis on communication management, copywriters and ongoing relationship marketing strategists to digest these technologies and build case studies to drive business results. Have a favorite example of the application of Facebook’s new “like” API and approach? I’d love to hear it.
Photo credit: Christopher S. Penn via Flickr – who also provides a template for businesses wanting to create a similar sign
