Posted on 30-August-2012   by Dee Ward

Why We Have A Social Media Strategy

The evolution of how people communicate online is fast becoming the biggest change in how businesses now speak to their customers and how they market themselves online. What is at the forefront of this evolution? Social media!

Towards the end of 2011 we were convinced that if we didn’t pay attention to this important shift – Daniels would find itself falling behind the pace at which the business world is communicating and engaging with its customers.

Here is a short interview I had with our Managing Director, Eric Lanyon on the subject:

Dee, when it became clear that social media was having a real impact on everyday life and how people, especially customers, interact – I made a firm decision to do some research and speak to social media specialists to really get to the core about what this “new” medium was all about and how it could be used to engage and enhance communication with our many customers.

I thought WOW, we really need to embrace this!

To be honest, the area that really excited me was where customers could share their satisfaction with other potential customers. In the past they may well have given us some positive feedback or perhaps have sent us a letter, but with social media they could share this with their friends and business colleagues online and in a way that would reach a much larger audience in a short space of time. It sounds so much better when someone receives a recommendation about Daniels from someone they know well and trust! On top of that, I feel we can really enhance the level of customer service we offer our customers and they can start to really identify with the Daniels team. They’ve generally known about our service and support, but now they can get to know the people behind that – this was very attractive to me.

I see a great opportunity to further help, support and engage our customers and also maybe support the learning of our prospective audiences, who can be anyone working within a NHS Trust…to a mother of a diabetic child who uses Sharps everyday! As you know the last one is personal to me. Social media also gives us the ability to give our customers an insight into the personalities of our great team, as well as the breadth of what we do for our customers and users of our products.

The way in which we do business hasn’t changed, because our values haven’t changed. We still try to put the customer first. We understand they are busier and have less time, so we feel the way in which we now communicate needs to adapt – we need to embrace new ways of working and communicating, and be present on the social media platforms where more and more of our customers are on a daily basis.

We’ll still answer our phones, we still use emails, we will still meet them for a coffee and a chat…but we can also:

• hold a meeting with them via Skype;
• tweet with them on an issue that they need support with;
• answer their comments / messages / questions on Facebook and
• of course provide a responsive comment to any comments they wish to make below on this blog post…

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We are investing time and effort to also educate our fellow professionals in our industry on social media. If you are new to social media – we would love to answer any questions you have on our personal journey – otherwise we’d love you to join us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Dee Ward

Dee is the Customer Support and Marketing Manager at Daniels. She is the key force behind a motivated and responsive team who support the Daniels customers and sales representatives day in and day out.