Digital & Social Media has changed the parameters for client-customer interaction

This time, it’s personal

With an increasing number of consumers interacting with brands and businesses through social media, it’s obvious that the tools of communication have rapidly changed. More than this, however, we’re seeing the ways in which these changes have affected the status quo not simply in terms of how we get our message across, but also what that message is.
Once upon a time in corporate land, there was a definitive set of rules for the tone required when corresponding with clients or consumers. Polite, formal and detached was the name of the game, even to the point where sir/madam were the only modes of addressing a consumer.
Enter social media, smart phones and blogging, and the game changed extensively. Not only do we now have the ability to communicate more immediately, but it is expected of us. And with the immediacy comes a lowered expectation of formality, with consumers willing to trade the stiffly professional service for fast, no-nonsense interaction.

In fact, in social media, there is no place for the kind of formality that we’ve come to expect in an official letter or email from a company. The increased level of personal interaction demands businesses and brands to engage with us, rather than rattling off some template that has been deemed adequately risk-free.
Which brings us, of course, to the heightened potential for business blunders in social media interactions. If you’re communicating more like a human, it stands to reason that there should be a margin for human error in the transaction. Yet a slip-up on social media (within reason) doesn’t have to spell disaster for a business or brand – in fact, it’s unlikely to have too great an impact at all.
As we step forward as a society to embrace these new tools of social media communication, it seems our collective lack of experience in the area makes us all a little more tolerant of slip-ups, and allows for a more genuine engagement to occur.