If the secret to creating and capturing value with social media is not about how social your company is, but about how many social ripples your products/services create, then how do you create social ripples?
The short answer for how to create social ripples is to sell something worth talking about (something remarkable), and do so in a way that’s worth talking about (in a remarkable way).
And one simple and proven way to do this to offer customers remarkable value, value worth talking about. In other words, offering a remarkable deal is the simple way to create social ripples. For example, this week, the market leader in social commerce software for small businesses – Payvment (and, full disclosure, sponsor of SCT) – is launching it own ‘social ripple maker’ just in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday; Weekly Deals. By offering remarkable value through Weekly Deals, Payvment vendors can create social ripples by publishing deals to Payvment’s social shopping portal Lish.com, which get syndicated to an aggregated into Deal Feed and posted into vendors Facebook newsfeeds.
Of course, the smart way to create social ripples with remarkable deals is to do so in a way that doesn’t damage your ‘brand’ (or in plain English – your ability to extract margin (when was the last time you paid full price in The Gap?)), or that doesn’t end up costing your business rather than profiting your business. This means you need to use remarkable deals strategically and infrequently – as a way of attracting profitable new customers (but not promotional junkies), activating word of mouth, and as as ‘bait’ for cross-selling and up-selling. What you don’t want is for either you or you customers to become addicted to deals – addiction to deals is the crack-cocaine of commerce.
So ask yourself, does my deal have the “surprise factor”? If the answer is no, then reconsider – because it won’t create social ripples, and it’s a symptom of deal addiction. But if you have the opportunity to surprise and delight your customers this holiday season with a remarkable deal that profits both you and your customers – then go for it – it’s a sure-fire way of creating social ripples.
