I run into an interesting website the other day. It’s called “My Parents Just Joined Facebook”. The site is edited by Jeanne and Erika who love their parents dearly (their words). I laughed while reading the cuts of conversations between the young kids and their parents over Facebook. If I were a mother of a teenage kid I would for sure visit this site often hoping to find new conversations and opinions every time I visited it. But, I do have other good reasons. As a marketer, I want to understand the new generation of “digital born”. I often ask myself the question: Do I get them?
Jeanne and Erika are good examples of the customer 2.0. Born digital, the customer 2.0 can be very different from what we’re used with. Why? Because, in most of the cases, we are simply just not well prepared to start a dialog with them. Customer 2.0 is asking us to make their experience with our brand fun, social and engaging. They are asking us to participate in a conversation with them. They can and do express their opinions about our brand freely and with as sophisticated tools as we do. This way, contributing in building our brand’s image. So, ready or not, we have jumped on the same boat with our customers and started a dialog.
Holding their attention
Here comes the next question: If we’ve handled the dialog part well and they use our services today, does that mean they will use them tomorrow? Holding the attention of the customer 2.0 means we need to hold the attention of their friends and community too.
We must learn more about communities and try understand how social networks work. Take churn in telecoms as an example. It has been shown that churn is highly viral. The churn behaviour within one’s community affects the individual’s churn decision. Combining information about social networks with the more traditional information about customers such as demographics and behavioural data in churn prediction can maximise the total number of saved customers through loyalty campaigns.
“Can customer 2.0 be a loyal customer” is also the topic of Sari Aapola’s speech at the 9th Customer Retention Forum on June 23rd in Singapore.
Further resources about social network analytics and solutions can also be found at our website: www.xtract.com.




