True Customer Engagement (when social is not so social)

About a year ago NAG embarked on a new journey into the realms of social media as a new way of engaging with our customers and potential customers. For many years we’d relied on communicating via the website, email, telephone and letter (all of which we still do of course), but we felt social media outlets could provide a great new way of improving communication.

First we created the NAG Blog. The vision for the blog is to provide an outlet for NAG staff to share their thoughts with the outside world in an informal way. We also created a space for NAG on Twitter and a group on Linkedin. So far, we’ve been pleased with how the groups have grown with followers and readers, but feel what might be lacking with all three places is true interaction with our audience.

The statistics show that people are reading and following, yet there's little two way dialogue. I’ve been trying to understand why this is, I've concluded that it's probably down to a host of reasons. Here are my thoughts:

1. Maybe our audience don’t have time or inclination to communicate with us through social media?

2. Or, maybe we’re not asking the right questions of our audience, or in fact any questions?

3. Maybe our audience still prefer more traditional methods of communication?

During 2011 we’ll be thinking of ways to further enhance dialogue with our customers. We really do want to hear how you’re using our software and learn about your successes and failures. This helps us grow and improve as an organisation, not only by making product offerings more customer centric, but improving our customer service.

Please do get in touch if you have ideas or thoughts of your own on this. I’d love to hear from you.