I must hear this 5 times a week. Let me tell you – you are wrong. Maybe the guy signing the check for your product or service doesn’t use a social channel, but his team that is doing the research, reference checking and overall selection filtering are. Guaranteed. Millennials – Those folks born in the 1980’s came of age connected with the internet and social media.  They are in their 30’s now and hold positions of real responsibility. They are the most educated generation ever and they feed on organic trust. The kind you can’t build with advertising. They crowd-source information – reviews, feedback, ideas – and if your product or service is up to par, or they can’t find good things written about by peers, you pretty much don’t exist. 

And when they want to contact you – you can’t be invisible.  Large company or small. They don’t want to fill out a contact us form that goes to an anonymous place. They want to talk (figuratively or literally) to the right person. Go to your website – right now. Can someone figure out how to get to the person most responsible for customer satisfaction and interaction?  Can they even figure out who that person is?

Here’s a short personal experience. I’m not an millennial, but I work with so many of them, and have adopted so many of their traits, I might as well be. I had a really difficult experience with a big-box home improvement retailer.  I wanted to let them know about my experience, but on their website is just a fill-in-the-blank form. One that I am pretty sure sails into never-never land. So rather than leave it at that, I searched their corporate hierarchy and found an individual with an appropriate title for my issue. No email for him to be found anywhere. So, I looked him up on LinkedIn and then used the LinkedIn in-mail feature to send him a long note detailing my experiences.

I haven’t gotten a response yet, but I am quite sure that this retailer never anticipated that a customer would reach out in this manner.  Are the executives using social media? Well I hope so, so that I get a response. But the very fact that I took this path to contact him means others will as well.

So should your marketing strategy involve being active on social – absolutely. Your customers will find you (and you want them to) and your prospects will check up on you – it just may not be who you expected.