Social Media Impact On Marketing And Sales
October 29th, 2009 by Seth Kenvin
A Tale Of How We Do Business In 2009
It started a few weeks ago when we noticed our customer @switchmarketing recommending our service to @lilipip. @lilipip is the identity of Ksenia Oustiougova on twitter. She is the founder of a company called Lilipip that does gorgeous explanatory animations.
We tried a little bit to @reply and otherwise get some attention from @lilipip, and then last week we saw more twittering about her trying us out like this one, and this one. It was a rather public and pithy review of us including what she’s liked about our accomplishments and what she hopes to see from us going forward. A little more @replying by us, and soon a couple direct messages, and we were invited to converse by skype.
We pretty soon tried to voice-call by skype, but, in perhaps the story’s most dramatic turn, got an immediate text chat reply athat Ksenia was not talking due to suffering from a sore throat. But she very generously engaged in a 15 minute chat session about her experience with and reflections about us. With dozens of ideas laid out in our communications over various media, many about her specific needs and interests as an animator (as opposed to video producer), we now felt compelled to share a compilation of our reactions and intentions, in more lengthy & consolidated form than twitter or skype best support, so it was time for a new medium.
We sent an email of about 10 paragraphs laying out exactly what our service has now related to the preferences expressed and what our roadmap is for those towards which we are still building. Several elements were really just now arising through this particular interaction and its good ideas being raised for which we are grateful. And yesterday we received a reply back from Ksenia with her point-by-point reflection on what was raised in our email including some more new, good ideas. The email exchange also included our appreciation of the video with her entrepreneurial story on the lilipip site and its equivalent in a podcast of our founding and philosophy we did last week.
twitter, skype, email, podcast — a rich array of new (in most cases very new) communication methods, each used distinctively for an overall open and productive communication not only towards forming a new customer relationship but also towards authenticating and accelerating our progress by continuing to evolve our services based on direct, insightful feedback from our marketplace. We hope Ksenia’s throat is recovered.
Thanks for being so proactive in seeking feedback and publicly talking about it! That is how you convert folks like me into customers and then into evangelists:)