It's an odd dynamic I see in play today–in today's ever connected environment marketers tell me they feel even more removed from direct customer interaction.


As a former sale person, I used to schedule "ride-along" time with my sales team just to get out on sales calls and hear how we position ourselves in front of the customer, how that message lands on the customer and more importantly what the customer is saying in reaction to how we are positioned.
Today I would argue that is still important (and few marketers actually do it) but with the tools we have at our disposal you don't even need to get out of the office to talk with customer. In fact, I talk to customers EVERYDAY, even several times a day. How? With Twitter!
Every week my virtual social media team and I are listening to 1000-2500 mentions of our company plus a bunch of "conversations" we are tracking (see Forget Audience Segmentation .... Segment by Conversation!)
We are engaging with customers and solving their issues in record time providing excellent service to them around issues such as: customer support, product end of life, highly technical questions, finance and billing questions, and partner relations. In fact we even won our first engagement over Twitter–so watch out DellOutlet we are gaining on you fast!
Our goal as a social media marketing team is to engage in more conversations this week than we did last week and have better relations as every week goes by! With today's tools there is no excuse for not engaging with customer in real time–what's stopping you?