Within the past 24 hours I’ve received 18 pieces of direct mail that quickly landed in my recycling, I fast-forwarded through several dozen ads via my DVR and quickly hung-up on 2 automated “marketing” calls on my cell phone…from companies I had never heard of before.

I’m sure you’ve continued to experience similar examples as marketers continue to speak to not with consumers. Today we live in a world where technology has enabled consumers to turn traditional marketing upside-down – a world of “Me Media.”

Never before has the phrase, “the customer comes first” been so incredibly true. Last week, Harish Kotadia had a smart post entitled, “How Customer Engagement will determine winning brands in Social Era.”  Within Harish’s post he talks about a study from ENGAGEMENTdb which ranks The Top 100 Global Brands. As Harish points out (as does Danny Brown in his post today entitled, “The Metrics of Social Media“) there are clear ways that companies are leveraging and measuring these new social technologies against the key business metric – sales.

Here are 3 Steps To Creating a “Customer Engagement” Program in this new world of “Me Media”:

1. Gather Data-Driven Customer Insights – If your company doesn’t have good customer data, engage with a company like Anthem Marketing Solutions or others that do an amazing job of becoming your customer insight engine. Without objective data points on your customer, you might be “assuming” more than you should about your customer or prospect.

2. Develop Customer-Driven Messaging – I’m always amazed at the number of companies that don’t have any messaging architecture in place and I’d estimate that 99% typically don’t have messaging that helps solve customer problems as discovered from their customer insights (see #1)…but instead tries to sell their product or service. If your goal is selling to a prospect, try speaking with them vs. at them.

3. Engage Your Customers In The Business - It’s one thing to be having conversations with your customers and prospects via social media, but it is another to actually engage them in the business. Many call this “crowdsourcing” as you empower your customers to help you make important business decisions. Earlier this week, USA Today talked about how several large brands like Papa John’s, Mountain Dew and American Express were using social media for this purpose.  

At the end of the day we need to ensure that our communications efforts are truly engaging our customers and prospects. If you do nothing else after reading this post, please spend a few minutes evaluating how your business is currently (or could be better) engaging with your customers and prospects.

Happy Thursday!