My Blog » Businesses should ask 'What can I do for my customer, not what can my customer do for me'

Last week I was asked if ‘there is a widget that would get members from existing communities to join our new, commercially published community?’

Apart from obviously ‘missing the point’ of social media - ie the reason why blogs become popular in the first place is because they are relevant to their community members -  so unless you are offering cash incentives or other tenable benefits, you are unlikely to be able to steal someone else community.

What many businesses are still not buying into is the value that social media offers for building brand awareness and customer engagement. Until you can get beyond the ‘can it increase my CPM’ mantra and look at the longer term benefits: ie building up brand loyalty to provided an invaluable source of customer insight that can inform new product and service development, I would hazard a guess that they are not going to succeed in the social media environment. Taking a political view, they need to ask themselves what they can do for their customers, not what their customers can do for them.