The Interdependence of Communication and Feedback

There are two primary and interdependent activities in social media management: communication and intelligence collection. These activities are interdependent because the style and quality of your communication will influence the context and content of your networks and the intelligence you are thus able to collect from those networks.

Very simply, a communication approach that establishes trust and affinity through shared interest and value will generate more useful feedback than will a communication approach that elicits indifference or annoyance (which will probably yield the insight that people are indifferent or annoyed).

This rule is true across all aspects of social business, whether focused externally on consumer communities or internally on enterprise collaboration.

Today, companies set up “listening” platforms and declare that they are collecting intelligence. In parallel, they incorporate social media channels like Facebook and Twitter into their Marketing and PR communications and declare that they are “engaging” and building communities. These are the right steps, but unless the social media “communications” are driven by strategies for building affinity and trust, the quality of the “engagement” with consumers will be weak, and this will be reflected in the intelligence.

If companies can achieve trust and affinity oriented “engagement” of true exchange or interaction, their next step is to ensure that their engagement and listening are connected through an internal feedback loop – without which neither will be worth as much as it should be.