I threw the blog and social media together in a few hours with alot of anger inside to be honest and not alot of real thought. I felt like all other channels had failed and that i had nothing else to lose. This is still true but now that i have this blog i have a real curiosity to see are we as consumers really empowered by social media? Is the hype all true in the respect that it is just hype?
I have always had an interest in social media and i must say it is usually from the other side of the fence so to speak. I have often thought about how a "company" can leverage social media for their own benefits but this time i am sitting opposite a large organisation. I am just an individual. i have started my social media for this experiment from scratch, i have not leveraged my existing twitter account and followers. In this respect this strategy that i am applying could be carried out by anyone anywhere. You do not need to be a social media expert or have a million followers to apply pressure to an organisation to meet your own personal service expectations. Can i as an individual really become empowered?
Although i have been active myself in social media for some time i have not previously been a contributor, i like to read and learn from others mostly by reading their blogs and applying what i learn from other peoples experiences. For the first time i am learning by doing and this in itself is exhillarating. I am now a contributor to the social media world :-)
As far as my evolving social media strategy is concerned i have given some more thought to this. At this point i do not want to place negative comments on IF's own social media. I want to give the organisation a chance to respond and react to the "risk" of not acting in a positive way. This in itself will give an indication of how seriously IF consider the possible implications in this scenario at this point in time.
Do IF continue as they did in the conventional claim channels or do they change their behaviour because they perceive a risk in not doing so because now their actions are public?
It seems to me that the key indicator in getting IF's previous decision not to pay the claim all comes down two main things.
- Reasoning my case in a public forum. I personally believe that i have a pretty good case regardless of social media. Is this enough by itself? It wasn't in the conventional channels.
- Levels of perceived risk for IF. By using social media this is the main variable that i can affect.
- What i have done in IF's own social media makes the problem apparent. This applies risk as it is visible to their stakeholders who care enough to "like" their facebook pages or "follow" their IF twitter account.
- IF are able to remove this content which limits their risk if they want to but runs the risk of further infuriating me and escalating the situation.
- Risk increases as others contribute to IF's Facebook group in a negative or supportive way.
- What i have done here: My own social media. I am documenting the process in a social media that IF cannot control. Even if they remove content from their own social media it still exists.
- Having thought about this, the level of risk increases to IF with the popularity of this blog, my new facebook group and the new twitter account.
Increase popularity of my own social media content.
I really wanted to start from scratch with this to see if i can nurture organic growth across the social media community. I do not want to spam people with direct messages because i do not want to irritate people. I want support i gain to be totally by voluntary means. As such i am not direct messaging people but i of course want to gain support of people who may have in interest in following or supporting this story. As such i have decided to use Twitter as my main channel to gain support.
My strategy that i impemented just a short while ago is simply to search out people who may have an interest in following this story or may be able to support my cause. Using Twitter i started by looking for people who were interested in CRM, Social Media, Marketing, Organisational communication, the insurance industry and conventional media such as news papers or television. I tried to find people who were in Finland in particular as i felt that this would increase the risk to IF as in this case i am hoping to Influence IF Finland.
I hope that by following these people (some of you readers are hopefully some of these people) then twitter users in particular will start to take an interest in this story. On this blog there is information about IF's own social media and my own. Visitors can choose for themselves how or if they want to support this and on whichever channel they like.
Improvements to my own social media channels.
You will all be pleased to know that i recognise the need to have content that people are interested in hence i am trying to be a better blogger and writer :-)
I have added now new buttons to the blog which stream my Twitter feed in the left column. I think there are some cross scripting issues with IE as i seem to sometimes get a warning but I am not technical enough to solve these. I also added a button so people can follow the blog on my Twitter directly and also RSS.
Finally, I have also added links directly to the Facebook group that i created. I should also probably increase visibility to IF's own facebook group as this is where real pressure could be applied. I will get onto that later. People can now also like the blog in Facebook. (Now done)
I hope that by adding these features the growth of the popularity of this story/experiment will spread through channels that i do not control. This is where the real power of social media lies! I think this will also make or break the experiment.
Epilogue
IF the social media community of people who have a vested interest in social media, engagement, CRM and SCRM don't support this then i guess that no-one will and this in itself will mean something.
Let's see what happens, i seem to be getting more excited about this that i have almost forgotten about the claim itself........ almost.
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