The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. In today’s youth, social networking tools are used as an assumption and as expected. Indeed, for those of us who are parents, the thought of IM and Facebook discussions between two youngsters sitting on the same sofa rather than talking seems quite an enigma. But it appears that these are the facts of life today.

The Retail Sector is renowned for employing youth, and connecting to these employees at the right level in the right medium is critical to gaining their engagement and loyalty. Yet in Retail, keeping the focus on customer service, having the right information at the right time, and avoiding the distractions of social media is imperative.

So, how can we embrace these tools, put them to effective use, and ensure that they can and will be used at the right time in the right place?

Let’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly, the ugly being what the show stoppers are.

The Good

  • Easy access – multiple platforms from mobile phones, apps and all browsers
  • A toolset that millions of people use to communicate and share
  • Simple to use and understand – NO TRAINING!
  • Provide an easy way to share emotions, thoughts and views
  • Available anytime, anyplace, anywhere

The Bad

  • No control
  • Distracting
  • Disruptive
  • Out of control

The Ugly

There are two common negative themes that we see within the Retail Sector regarding Social Media.

(i) The need for moderation. But how does this fit into the social media psyche? If I am not free to share thoughts and views, likes/dislikes, will I look for another medium?

(ii) Will it be a distraction? I need my employees to focus on customer service, not liking a Facebook entry. But if this is how store colleagues share best practices, knowledge, hints, and tips, would we be mad not to encourage this behaviour?

The Truth

In the unified communications world, we would be mad to ignore these technologies and tools. We must look for ways of embracing them in retail communication and employee engagement. It would equally be imprudent not to have a level of management of how these tools could be used to motivate employees but to have a level of prevention of distraction and inappropriateness. Still, any such management would need to be carefully implemented.

The Best Practice

  • Embrace your corporate social media tools within your communications strategy. Let your employees see the way that you as an organisation use these tools to communicate, share and promote.
  • Provide internal tool-sets to encourage employee tweets, notifications, forums, discussions, but make sure that these can be targeted and shared with predefined user networks, i.e. let the employee decide their ‘friends and family’ to share with, let them decide the audience.
  • Provide formal forum boards for more formal discussions and debates.
  • Provide the facility to share these internal communication tools with the social networking tools at large. I want to promote this latest offer to my Facebook friends.
  • Have an element of moderating, but keep it high level and not invasive. Clearly, abuse needs to be addressed, but over moderation will prevent use.
  • Accept these tools as the latest communications mediums and be prepared to adapt quickly because there are more and more mediums being launch every day.

YES, Social Media does have a place within retail communications and employee engagement.

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