Quotable quote:
“To err is human. To blame it on a computer is even more so” – Robert Orben
Despite the depths of the GFC, it already seems such a distant memory. The Australian share market has rebounded to regain much of its losses, and the noise on the street is one of “here comes another resources boom”. Yet just 12 months ago I remember too well various businesses under great stress and the voluntary administrators incredibly busy.
Get Ready to Scale Up – Faster is the new fast
To take advantage of the boom, you need to be able to scale your business up. This is a combination of people, process and systems thinking.
Relevance to You and Your Business
Already – and the boom hasn’t really gotten underway yet – there is big noise about huge staff shortages here in the West. Therefore understanding how your organisation is perceived by staff as well as customers become more important, as does understanding what they are saying about you using social media.
Blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are opportunities for employees and customers to be positive – or negative. Engaging online can be a way of resolving issues quickly and enhancing your reputation online. Employees that are passionate about your business can be the perfect people to do this.
It is important to be responsive – and if you want to see the consequences of not being so, try typing Optus Sucks into Google and see how many pages exist. There are many sites, many are very vindictive and it would be naive of any company to consider that such content is ignored by potential customers and staff. From personal experience, I dismissed Optus out of turn given the volume of this content on the web.
What Should You Do
- Set up a series of Google alerts to track your company name, names of key individuals in the business
- Do the same for your competitors
- Put a social media policy in place for your staff. This is communicating what is appropriate about a company. Blanket approaches “do not comment on anything” are rarely successful – guidelines and education are.
- Get the internal collaborative workplace tools in place to foster collaborative thinking and engage your staff
- If you find negative comments online, don’t reach for the lawyers. Respond and be committed to solving the issue. Customers expect problems to occur – it is how you resolve them that makes a difference. Great customer service leads to great feedback – always.
If you don’t know where to start or need some assistance, please contact us to see how we can help you.
