Online conversation levels the playing field

I consider myself fortunate to have started my career before the online conversation really got going. While I would have been better equipped to operate in this environment had I been baptized in a digital fount, I think those of us a bit long in the tooth can better appreciate the perspective online social tools have brought.

Prior to Twitter, Facebook and the like, most clients (outside of P&G and a few select others) had no way of knowing what the public thought about their brand outside of sales and quant/qual research that was more often than not contrived to deliver a desired response. Beyond safe broad stroke assumptions, it was often difficult to ascertain what customers really cared about...what bothered them...what made them so loyal to a particular brand...or if they cared at all.

The challenge for many agencies was that their clients didn't have the resources to truly validate assumptions about customer insights and all were left to make educated guesses. More often than not, that led to the wrong answers, which subsequently got a lot of agencies fired.

Social media (more specifically online conversation and feedback) has truly leveled the playing field for so many smaller agencies and brands whose budgets still don't merit large research initiatives. Most importantly, it's brought into focus what customers truly care about...what kind of service, products, product features really matter in the customer's mind. No more guesswork.

With commitment and resourcefulness (not re$ource$), there's not much you can't discover online about any brand in any category. From there, it's a matter of how well agencies and brands filter insights, draw conclusions and create resulting strategies and executions. Equal footing where everyone has access to the same information and is judged by the quality of the resulting recommendations.

Everyone working in our business today should feel much more empowered to do his or her job, provided you know your way around the social media space. Any agency worth their salt has some level of competency in terms of social media's functionality. That's a given. What separates many though, are those (regardless of "official" discipline) with the desire and savvy to navigate and discover information that can lead to account-winning or saving insights.