The questionable benefits of being sociable

Leafing through IBM’s chief marketing officer study, published in the last few days, I was struck by one particular chart which compares the reasons companies think their customers follow them via social media sites and their customers’ actual reasons. Interesting in its own right, it’s also – I’d argue – directly relevant to consulting firms.

In general corporations believe that customers follow them because of their products and/or services. 73% think this is because customers want information about new products; 71% because they want general information about the company; 69% because they want to send feedback; and 67% because they want to read reviews and rankings. Companies also think their customers want to “feel connected” (64%) and be part of a community (61%).

How wrong can you be? Asked how important these aspects were, 51% of customers said they were interested in new product information, only 33% wanted to feel connected and a paltry 22% want to be part of a community. What do they want? Discounts. 61% of respondents in the IBM survey followed companies to get money off their purchases.

But, but, but, I hear you say, this is all about B2C companies and isn’t relevant to B2B ones like consulting firms. I wonder.

There certainly are some differences. Consultants want to stay in touch with their former colleagues when they leave, partly because difficult consulting projects forge strong friendships, partly because they suspect they might want to return in the future, so feeling connected and part of a community would score highly among this group. Many firms now use social media-type software to post project information so it can be shared more effectively in joint client-consultant teams, but I’m not convinced that most clients want to stay connected to the firm (as opposed to the individual consultants) once the work is finished. And it’s hard to believe that there are clients out there on the edge of their seats, waiting to be the first to hear about a new release of a consulting firm’s supply chain management methodology.

It all comes down to benefits. Alumni follow their ex-employers because they enjoying hearing about their friends and might want a job; clients use project-specific tools because they need to know what’s going on. But what’s the advantage to clients of following a firm or interacting with them in some way on a social media site? If consulting firms want clients to do this, there has to be something in it for them. It’s difficult to imagine a consulting firm offering exclusive discounts on its services to clients who follow them, but there needs to be some other, equally tangible reason to do so. Otherwise, the only people who follow consulting firms will be consultants.