Connecting People to the Human Beings Who Define Corporate Brands and Culture

You’ve heard our humble opinions and the opinions of many Social Media thought leaders that brands don’t engage with people—people engage with people. The idea of empowering your customers or stakeholders so that they become an extension of your marketing isn’t new. Even in Web 1.0, you were using more interactive features on your Web sites and viral marketing to spread the word. Transforming people into an additional sales team is ideal for any service organization. However, the landscape has shifted in such a way that to excel in the marketplace, good customer service is no longer the minimum effort to stay in the game—you must do more to have a winning chance.

We mentioned previously that the Social Web is this great combination of Public Relations, marcom, advertising, and customer service. It’s crucial that all these areas work together to become a holistic inbound and outbound campaign, one of listening to and engaging with customers. We believe that this approach will rewrite the rules of the game, and escalate the corporate brand and loyalty in the process. We believe that these game-changing rules will advance our industry and make PR, once again, a crucial part of an organization. And most important, the lessons learned in the field will be fed into the marketing department to create and run more intelligent, experienced, and real-world initiatives across all forms of marketing, PR, sales, and advertising.