In a recent Marketing Profs article a team at the University of Missouri demonstrated that “Using a personal, human voice when communicating via social media leads to much higher user satisfaction ratings…”
It seems that when given a choice we would much rather interact with a human voice versus an organizational presence and looking over the comments that followed the article, no one who read the findings was even a little surprised. Usually, it was described as a “well..duh!” kind of revelation, but for all the obviousness of the observation, putting the concept into action will be a challenge for a lot of companies.
To begin with, I think many are stuck at defining “what is a human voice?” and trying to determine if we can create that improved level of loyalty, trust and confidence by using personal versus corporate pages. The irony is that we’re trying to understand how to put the “human” back into “social”, probably because we didn’t pay attention when everyone was taking the human out of social. Heck, we’re already getting confused defining what – within the context of social marketing IS a human voice?
A human voice is actually a very simple concept. It’s what you hear when a human opens their mouth and a sound comes out. It is unique to that person. A human voice can inspire confidence, trust and friendship far more easily than can a Facebook page or a series of Tweets.
So, when we think of putting a human voice into social marketing, we’d be well advised to take the statement at its literal face value and add the sound of a human voice to improve the effectiveness and eventually the results from our social marketing efforts. And- as many companies have already found, the sound of a human voice is also an effective tool to improve our websites and email programs, too.