Sometimes we get mesmerised by the power of the technology at our fingertips… mixing the old ways with the new is often the best way to communicate

In my last blog I made a lot of noise about the importance of feedback. I often do. It is the oxygen every company needs to stay alive and grow.

The closer we are to our customers and their needs the better. That may sound a little like I am stating the obvious but it is so easy for big, busy, bustling companies to lose touch with the nitty gritty of their business…the small details which make up the big picture of what a customer really needs to be happy. That small talk around the meeting table often throws up the snippets of information which can turn a business lead into a customer or a customer into a supporter spreading the word to others… It’s all about understanding what makes them really tick. But, of course, when you filter table talk through the technology of social media you have a very powerful tool for communicating feedback and reacting to it.

There is an inbuilt irony on our industry. We are in the communication business but can often wrap ourselves in a security blanket of technology. By that I mean we can sometimes assume the technology is taking care of the details and we miss a business opportunity. Here’s a simple example: Marketing department creates a perfect, well written and perfectly targeted e-shot. Out it goes to potential clients only to have it fall at the first hurdle and into the junk mail box of a business lead because it had one too many little embedded logos.

Twitter – with one all seeing eye on the post IPO share price – has just sparked a cultural shift in the way it operates and the way we can used the social media platform to do business. Twitter’s new Direct Messaging (DM) service means ee can now send a direct communication to a business or an organisation without going down the ‘follow first’ route. Of course, the privileged few on Twitter – those members of the ‘great and the good’ who have verified accounts have been able to see respond to or reject direct tweets for some time. Now Twitter has got democratic and this small change is going to make a huge difference.

At Transputec is a culture of openness. We meet and share those details which help us win business and keep our customers satisfied. It’s the mix of serious technology and old fashioned interaction which is vital.

At the recent IP Expo in London we put that cultural thinking into effective practice. Whilst sharing an IBM’s stand, all the Transputec stand staff used their iPhones to take pictures of both the sales prospect and the business card. We also captured the conversation in real-time, and those details were processed and stored using an application that we developed. The marketing team in the office received this information also in real time. They could locate that person on LinkedIn or Twitter, enter them into our CRM system and start an immediate connection and plan with that person, including an introductory email.

The Pictures helped us remember the conversations and the process ensured they remembers Transputec. It worked. we got an amazingly positive feedback – once people had got over the surprise of such an instant response.

Simple and highly effective. A solution which combined social media with just being sociable. It also set us on the road to developing a new App which will enable a broad spectrum of businesses to interact at those busy conferences.