| Kippreport.com

Is your company guilty of being socially shy?

August 26, 2012 4:56 by Eva Fernandes

Though pundits and ‘social-media-experts’ may have you believe otherwise, social media isn’t a relatively new phenomenon. Sure the applications have been changing and altering for a while now, but the medium has been around for eight years at the very least.

And still, despite consumers being on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter for years, brands have yet to master the art of striking that social connection with their consumers. Sure, some of the smaller more tech-savvy companies have been quick to jump on the bandwagon, but as a recent study shows larger organisations are still lagging behind when it comes to being social.

Take for instance, the finding s of a study from customer service company Genesys which found more than half of consumer-facing Fortune 500 companies are “socially shy”: more than half of these companies’ contact pages on their official website—there  was absolutely no mention of a Twitter handle or a link to their Facebook page. Perhaps unsurprisingly, roughly 27 percent of these companies do not provide users with a link to either their Twitter or Facebook profiles anywhere on their websites. Not at all!

If you aren’t scandalized just yet, Kipp’s determined to do you in. Take a deep breath, are you ready? Apparently, for fear of spam, 90 percent of the companies studied do not provide an email address in the contact pages. Instead, 83 percent had a contact form, what Genesys rightly calls a ‘black hole’-come on, when was the last time you used one of those?

The conclusion? “On the whole, the research demonstrates that the largest consumer-facing companies are still struggling to adapt to the ways that the Internet is providing them to reach out and engage with their customers.” Kipp couldn’t agree more.

When we conducted a small investigation into how brands responded to inquiries made on Facebook, we found the average response time took anything from 1 to 3 days-with some brands getting back to us after 8 weeks and another after 2 months. Oh, the horror!

The sooner brands realise having a social media presence means more than just having a profile on Facebook and Twitter-they will be able to fully engage with the consumers. Isn’t that what these large corporations are trying to do anyway, with their thousand dollar marketting, advertising and branding departments? W