Week 2 Part A: Communication Between Business & Consumer

Communication is now easier than ever for anyone and especially business. Technology has been advancing rapidly throughout the years not just for personal use. How will we know if the strategies that we are currently doing work? Social platforms have a great impact on business to communicate effectively with their consumers and know what they really think of them, 

Who would have guessed that we would have the ability to communicate with each other through a small handheld device. Now we walk around with a cell phone all day, and we are able to communicate with someone on the other side of the world. This is very important especially for business. They are able to get their message across more efficiently and easily. I wonder how long it took before to receive a response for a simple question. How did they advertise before social media? Newspapers I assume would have been the main point of advertisement besides word of mouth. Social platforms make it simple to advertise and receive input from consumers. 

Never really thought of Yelp being a social media platform, but now that I think about it, it actually is. It's a platform where businesses can promote themselves and have others give feedback. Not only does this help promote the businesses, but it gives them a better look to what customers see their business as. Business owners get to listen to their consumers' needs and wants. I searched up some of my favorite local spots in town and I noticed on the negative comments the business owners would step in and reply to their concerns. I feel by doing this the business seems to really care about their consumers and what they think of them. They want to fix the issue and make sure the same customer keeps coming back. 

I’ve always been taught in the school system to listen and this is something very important that one would have to do in order to succeed in business. After reading the first chapter of this book I began to read named Likable Social Media by Dave Kerpen, I began to realize that is something very important. At times business owners might not take this into consideration. However, how could they start listening and start taking action? Well, after reviewing some of the Yelp reviews I realized that it’s very simple. Having a social media platform to connect with your consumers makes it easy to listen. I mean everyone has social media today. We carry our phones 24/7, and with the touch of a button we can easily connect. There is a story in this frist chapter on how a dentist was on Facebook and noticed a patient of hers complained about a procedure they had gotten recently. The dentist reached out to the patient and asked for a picture of the affected area. It turned out the patient had a severe infection in which she needed to be hospitalized. Now that makes me think of how important it is to listen. I began to think what if the doctor had never reached out to the patient? What would have happened? 

Listening and communication is very important for a business to succeed. Today we have several and many platforms in which we can use to our advantage to receive both positive and negative feedback. Listening to both is very important, consumers will tell it like it is and you’ll want to know what is working and what can be improved.