Engaging in What Matters

We are on our third and final book for my social media class. The book we are reading now is called “Measure What Matters” by Katie Delahaye Paine. I’ve read a handful of chapters so far and chapter five stuck out to me. Chapter five is called, “how to measure marketing, public relations and advertising in a social media world.” I am a marketing major with a public relations miner and find the advertisement side of it all to be a field of interest for me in the future. Social media is ever changing and growing rapidly; use of social media will continue to be a big part of marketing and public relations, so why not learn as much as I can about how to use it in my career? The most interesting part of the chapter, to me, had to do with engagement and why it is critical.

The first reason engagement is critical for any business is because it is the first step in building a relationship between customers and brand. Relationships are what differentiate businesses from their competitors. Relationships are also way to determine whether a business has dialog or is yelling loudly at consumers. This concept ties back to the “voice” of a company; are you having a conversation with your consumers or rather yelling and getting nowhere? Consumer appreciate when they can relate to something or someone and are more willing to engage in a relationship if they feel as though they can have a conversation.

The next reason engagement is critical is it helps promote and protect a brand. Engagement produces brand advocates. These advocates have more influence and credibility than corporations because they are “people like me.” People trust the words of other and peer reviews over business advertisements because they find them more trustworthy. It’s important to build relationships with customers so they will become advocates for a bran and help make more sales. These sales will lead to building more relationship, which will produce more advocates and those advocates will help promote even more sales, so on and so forth.

The final reason engagement is critical is because it can make products better. By listening to customers about what they say about their products, businesses can learn what consumers like and dislike overall. They can then tweak their products to fit the desires of their customers and hopefully bring in new ones as well. It is most important for businesses to listen to their most active customers who are using their products because they provide a virtual customer panel that identifies weaknesses and areas for improvement in products and services. It’s important to not to change a product after every bad review, but rather listen more closely to the customers who advocate for the brand.

I learned a lot about engagement and how if effects marketing. The more I learn the more I love the major that I chose and it excites me to pursue a career with a broad spectrum of job opportunities. I’ve found this book to be the most interesting of the three we’ve read so far because it goes into the most depths about social media, marketing and public relations concepts rather than just the basics.