Customer-Centric Social Media: What is Your Unique Social Proposition?

There is no shortage of acronyms in the marketing jargon. Since the upswing of social media we even got a lot more of them and ‘experts’ started giving new meanings to existing acronyms. This way, e.g. ROI became Return On Involvement and even Return On Ignorance, just to name one acronym. It’s really confusing and silly if you ask me: ROI stands for Return On Investment. Period. It seems that everything has to be reinvented. In this post I will also give a different meaning to an acronym, not to be an ‘expert’ but to make a point: the acronym is USP, Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point.

The term USP is known by both marketers and sales people. It was originally meant to identify and accentuate the unique advantage that had to convince people to buy a product or service.

‘Unique’ means: only we offer it. ‘Advantage’ means: it fulfills a client’s need. I wish to emphasize this because often USP is used incorrectly as being the most important aspects or properties of a product or service around which we build our ‘proposition’, and this happens in sales as well as in marketing. It’s not about products though, it’s about emotional advantages and thus people-centricity.

So, just like ROI in these times of social media, it is an acronym that is being misused very often. This misuse of the acronym USP shows that lots of companies are still thinking in a product-centric way while we should since long be past the solution selling and even value chain selling thinking. However, this is not the case in practice: people-centric thinking remains an empty slogan for many and working in terms of human advantages, let alone individual needs, definitely is not as established as we like to make ourselves believe.

Customer-centric thinking and social media

Fast forward to today, the ‘social era’ in which everybody’s very busy with social media (especially talking about it) but in which we seldom encounter companies who know what it’s really all about.

• Social media is still looked at as something that you could almost hold in your hand while it is in fact a very broad term.
• Social media is still approached from a predominantly marketing and monitoring point of view, while ‘social’ is much more than only that.
• Social media is being seen by most companies as an isolated phenomenon for which lots of new functions even need to be created.
• Pro-active, relational and customer-centric thinking is rarely present, defensive and viral thinking all the more.

What do you use to motivate people to a dialogue or to simple connections?

Do this simple exercise: ask yourself what is your Unique “Social” Proposition. Which unique advantage do you offer people in the social field to make them actually ‘buy your social presence’? Which advantage or psychological gratification do you offer people to make them decide to enter in a dialogue with your company or to simply have a connection in the social field in a silent way, for example by following your blog, by saying something about your brand in some way, by interacting with your content or by sporadically looking at what you are doing?

Or, in other words: how does your company distinguish itself with a better, more original or smarter use of ‘social’ to draw people into the influence sphere of your social presence, and engage, motivate and involve them such that it creates value for them, based on WHAT THEY WANT.

Obviously, it’s important that your Unique ‘Social’ Proposition also offers added value for your company and bottom-line. Hey, that’s where ROI pops up again. Because, for those who still had doubts about it, ROI indeed still means Return On Investment and a USP obviously has a commercial goal in its correct meaning. This is true in your social ecosystem and in the social sphere as well, only the ways in which this business goal is achieved are more diverse and more adapted to a non-linear multi-channel reality. I guess that by now you know that the buying journey is not linear as I recently wrote in a guest post.

How many see their Unique Social Proposition these days and what to do about it

What follows is the Unique Social Proposition of many companies I talk to nowadays or that are active in social media:

‘We do social media because’:

• Our CEO has read about it and has said we also need to do something with it.
• Everybody is talking about it and so you have no choice but to participate.
• It is hip and modern.
• We want to protect our reputation.
• It is good for increasing traffic to our site.
• It is excellent for crisis management.
• It’s good for our SEO.

I can add more to this list but I rarely receive unique answers and I see even less advantages. Obviously, ‘social’ has many aspects and can be used for traffic, crisis management, SEO, customer service and so much more. However, how do you stand out? What business function can you improve in a creative and relevant way using ‘social’? And where is the customer-centric thinking a social business is really all about?

So think about how you can split up social in several more concrete elements and consider which part of your business can improve because of it by offering real advantages to people (clients, prospects, whatever) and by directly or indirectly contributing to your company’s bottom-line.

And especially: don’t limit yourself to just one Unique ‘Social’ Proposition. As long as it is customer-centric. Or better: people-centric.