Week 2A: SM & Business - Liability or Likability?

SM BUSINESS LIKABILITY?

"Invest in your social capital, invest in your business."

 Social media can be a very efficient tool, when it comes to being noticed as a consumer. This is because customer feedback can posted in a review column, rated, linked in a discussion thread on your own personal media site, or their own. Social Media reviews or comments make individual problems, public problems. This makes it crucial that a business responds to "you" in a professional manner; by investing to their consumers as a whole they are increasing their chances of success online. If they don't it could affect them tremendously because current and potential customers could see the reviews and ratings. If your business neglects to address it's customers issues with outmost importance, your company could be at potential risk.

 Perhaps an example of my own experiences can give you more insight to the paragraph above. In the past, I have had difficulties communicating with a seller on Amazon. The products I ordered were being shipped from China and it seemed almost impossible receive any response from the distributor. It upset me because I felt that I was not only being ignored, but my concerns as a customer had no value to them. Not to mention it gave me anxiety because I had no solutions or answers to the problems that I addressed to them. It was deeply upsetting and in result I had to turn to other sources for help. In contrary, I have also had very positive experiences with communicating with businesses. I have communicated with different businesses about problems with a product, in those cases their customer service team was very responsive, helpful, and kind. Even though I was initially a little upset about the issue, their help and positive responses made all the difference and in the end I was so happy with their services. It made me feel valued as a customer and person; which increased the likelihood of becoming a returning customer.

 If I was a business owner and received any type of comment I would respond appropriately and accordingly. Each customer deserves to be acknowledged as an individual and to me the best way to run a business is to put customers first. I would make sure to respond in a timely manner and make sure that my response was engaging and not just a generic thank you. If a negative comment was received I would respond again in a professional manner, but I would address their problem, apologize and ask what I could do to assess the problem. The ideal solution would always be to take a negative comment and flip that frown around. But, sometimes as a business owner you may receive unrelated and even threatening comments. If that is the case you can delete the comment or ask the services department of whichever platform you are using to remove the comment due to the nature of the situation. I would strongly advice you to never leave any negative feed back to a negative comment. It would not only make your company look bad, but it could escalate into a much more problematic situation.