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A few months ago I was at Best Buy, and I watched as a teenager used his Facebook status to request recommendations on a Nintendo Wii game. He got feedback in real time, and used it to decide what to buy. Recommendations and contextual social search are the future. Is it any wonder I’m not bullish on search engine optimization’s (SEO) long-term potential?
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Businesses that aren’t able or willing to join the conversation will likely see their balance sheets suffer, and catch hell from Wall Street. That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case, they aren’t going to be in business much longer.
Power to the People
Finally, when faced with bad service or unfair policies or plain old indifference, there is something people can do. Now if customers have a complaint that they can’t get resolved via traditional channels, they can post a frustrated status update or tweet that could get passed along forever. Suddenly, everyone who’s ever had a problem with a company can compare notes, work him-or herself up into a righteous frenzy, and build enough animosity via word of mouth to create a real PR nightmare. AT&T knows something about how this happens. Giorgio Galante, who took AT&T to task on his blog called So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish*, wrote two emails to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. The first he wrote after the company’s customer service reps were unable to authorize his request for an early iPhone upgrade; the second was to express his dissatisfaction with AT&T’s data rates. In reply, Galante received a voice mail from someone on the AT&T Executive Response Team threatening legal action should he try to contact the CEO again. He finally received (and accepted) an apology from a senior VP, but by then the damage had been done—the story had spread all over the Internet, and even CNN tried to interview him (a request that he declined). How many of the people following Galante decided right then and there that the second Verizon gets on the iPhone, they’re switching, or that maybe their Droid phone wasn’t so bad after all? Too many for AT&T’s taste, I’m sure.
This example perfectly reflects the magnitude by which word of mouth has exploded. Five years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered that this guy was upset. He would have told four people. So what? Maybe, if he were a heavy hitter, he would have told some fellow board members, one of whom could have mentioned it to a journalist friend, who would have written a story about it and forced the company to take the complaint seriously. But this would have been a rarity. The odds were that maybe one out of every million times someone complained about a company, the newspaper would pick it up. If there was a particularly juicy angle to the story, the chances were ten million to one that Nightline would pick it up, as in the case of Mona Shaw, who became a literal heavy hitter when she stormed her local Comcast office and smashed a customer service representative’s computer and workspace with a hammer. But now? You don’t have to have a juicy angle. You just have to care enough to talk about your experience, and everyone you know is going to rally, just as your friends in the PTA, the trade union, or the country club would have rallied if you’d vented your outrage at Butcher Bob’s cheating ways. The story potentially makes its way onto hundreds of influential blogs, and suddenly AT&T has got a massive headache.
Everything is in reverse. Before, it made some financial sense for big business to simply ignore people they considered whiners and complainers. Now, dissatisfied, disappointed consumers have the power to make companies feel the pinch. What a shame that that’s what it’s going to take to make some executives take social media seriously! It means they’re using it only to react to the potential harm it can do to their business. There’s so much unbelievable good it can do, though, especially when companies use it proactively. Social media is a great tool for putting out fires, but it’s an even better tool for building brand equity and relationships with your customers. Once you stop thinking about it as a tool for shutting customers up, and rather as a tool for encouraging customers to speak up, and for you to speak to them, a whole world of branding and marketing opportunities will unfold.
The Thank You Economy
At its core, social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. They’re going to have to take the long view and stop using short-term benchmarks to gauge their progress. They’re going to have to allow the personality, heart, and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show. And they’re going to have to do their damndest to shape the word of mouth that circulates about them by treating each customer as though he or she were the most important customer in the world. In short, they’re going to have to relearn and employ the ethics and skills our great-grandparents’ generation took for granted, and that many of them put into building their own businesses. We’re living in what I like to call the Thank You Economy, because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way—and do it authentically—are going to have a prayer of competing.
Note that I said you have to do it authentically. I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That’s always been my competitive advantage. I approach business the same way I approach every talk I present—I bring this attitude whether I have an audience of ten or ten thousand. Everybody counts, and gets the best I have to give. A lot of the time, we call people who do a consistently great job “a professional,” or “a real pro.” I try to be a pro at all times, and I demand that everyone I hire or work with try to be one, too. All my employees have to have as much of that caring in their DNA as I do. How else do you think I outsell Costco locally and Wine.com nationally? It started with hustle, sure. I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn’t due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships. Yet I could have hustled my ass off and talked to a million people a day about wine, but if I or any of the people who represent Wine Library had come off as phonies or schmoozers, Wine Library would not be what it is today. You cannot underestimate the sharpness of people’s BS radar—they can spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away. BS is a big reason why so many companies that have dipped a toe in social media waters have failed miserably there.
At Wine Library, we don’t just pull out the charm when a big spender walks in, or when someone is unhappy, and we don’t reply to inquiries with carefully worded legalese. We try not to calculate that one customer is worth more than another, and therefore worth more time and more effort, even as we recognize that a big customer can bring a lot to the table. How can you ever know who is potentially a big customer, anyway? Maybe you’ve got a customer who spends only a few hundred dollars with you a year. What you can’t see is that the customer is spending a few thousand elsewhere, maybe with your competitor. You have no way of knowing that the customer’s best friend is the biggest buyer in the category. Now, what if you were able to build a relationship, make a connection, tilt the person’s emotions toward you, and capture 30, 60, or even 100 percent of what he or she spends? Your small customer would become a lot bigger. That’s why you have to take every customer seriously. This is a basic business principle that has been talked and written about a great deal, and some companies take it seriously. But the playing field is so different now from, say, 1990, that companies can no longer treat it as a nice idea to which they should aspire. Valuing every single customer is mandatory in the Thank You Economy.
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner. We make it clear that we want to help in whatever way we can, and that everyone’s business matters to us. And we mean it.
Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we lose because someone else established the relationship first. For the most part, everyone has more than one place to find what it is you
’re selling. I’ve had people tell me that though they like what I do and live in my town, they buy from the other guy’s liquor store because he’s been good to them. I say, “I’m cheaper and I have a way better selection and I’ll be good to you, too! Heck, I’ll be better!” but I can’t win, because a relationship has already been formed. I can compete on price, I can compete on convenience, and if they’d give me the chance I’d compete on caring, too. But they’re not going to give me that chance unless the other guy slips up. And even then they’d probably give him a second chance, because forgiveness is the hallmark of a good relationship. If I kept pounding I might be able to win a percentage of my competitor’s business, but the little guy in town will keep his consumer’s market share with real caring and service.
Anyone working for a big company might be skeptical that a large business, or even a strictly online business, can form the same kind of friendly, loyal relationship with customers as a local retailer. I’m saying it’s already been done because I lived it. I built my online company the same way I built the brick-and-mortar store. But it works only if everybody at the company gets on board, which is why unless you are building a new company from the ground up and can install caring as your business’s cornerstone, you have to be willing to embark on a complete cultural overhaul so that, like a local mom-and-pop shop, every employee is comfortable engaging in customer service, and does it authentically. Your engagement has to be heartfelt, or it won’t work.
A Gift to Customers and Companies
People want this level of engagement from the companies with which they do business. They always did, but they lost the power to demand it. Now they have it back, and they’re indulging in that power. Even the best of what formerly passed for good customer service is no longer enough. You have to be no less than a customer concierge, doing everything you can to make every one of your customers feel acknowledged, appreciated, and heard. You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were. Social media gives businesses the tools to do that for the first time in a scalable way.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter give back to businesses, too, in the form of real-time feedback. Companies can see for themselves when their lackluster advertising or weak marketing gets panned or ignored, and how their creative, engaging, authentic campaigns get praised and passed along. Even industries that have long resisted paying too close attention to metrics, such as newspaper editorial departments, are turning to online tracking tools to help them allocate resources and shape online content in blogs and podcasts. There doesn’t need to be any guessing about how positively or negatively the public is responding to a brand when it’s in the news or on TV—the public’s reaction is often right there in black-and-white on Facebook, while the cameras are still rolling. In the Thank You Economy, social media allows us to get fresh, visceral, real-time feedback, not stale focus-group opinions. It blows my mind that so many companies resist social media. The fact that customers are open to speaking with them, not just to complain or to praise them but to initiate dialogue, offer opinions, and provide feedback, is fantastic! They should be on their knees with gratitude for the tremendous opportunity they now have to quickly (and cheaply) adapt and improve their strategies.
Exceed Expectations or Lose
Before, people were satisfied if you sent them an e-newsletter and the occasional 10-percent-off coupon in the mail. That was considered great customer engagement. Anything more was unheard of. Now, the standards have been raised by companies like Zappos, which will spend as much time on the phone with you as you need, and Fresh Direct, a New York online grocer that wraps your produce in bubble wrap and tucks an extra bunch of asparagus in with your order just to thank you for being such a great customer. Some retailers are known for charming their customers with thank you notes, like Hem in Austin, Texas—which also offers you wine or beer to drink while you shop—who sends them out a few days after you make your purchase. But how many online companies do it? Not many, which is why Wufoo, an online HTML form developer, gets so much blog coverage when its customers receive handwritten thank you notes, sometimes crafted out of construction paper and decorated with stickers. What’s extra special about the Wufoo notes is that they don’t appear to be triggered by any particular purchase; they’re sent out randomly to longtime customers, just to say “Thanks for doing business with us.”
Now, it is true that the more you give, the more people want. It breaks my heart that I want to fly first class now. It’s so much nicer, and now that I know what it’s like, I want it all the time. I could travel that way regularly, but I don’t, because I don’t want to be that guy. The real question is, though, why can’t everyone on the plane get first-class treatment, even the passengers who are not paying for bigger seats? I think they eventually will, because they’re going to start demanding it. Not the perks—the warm nuts and Champagne, or even the bigger seats and leg room—but the respect? The kindness? Absolutely. All businesses, not just the airlines, need to start treating their consumers as though they’re big spenders. My own father was worried about creating that kind of expectation at the liquor store, because where would it end? And what would happen if we stopped offering more? I had to work hard to convince him that if we didn’t do it, someone else would. We built the first-class customer philosophy into the business, and people raved about us. They came back, they raved some more, their friends came to check us out, they raved about us, and through great customer service and word of mouth we built a large, loyal fan base. (Oh man, Wine Library would be so much bigger today, though, if the Thank You Economy had been in full force when we got started!) We’ll talk later about what to do when people make unreasonable demands, but for the most part, the kind of service people are learning to expect isn’t that shocking; companies just aren’t used to having to give it.
Now, people expect you to give a damn about them. Not only that, they expect you to prove it. And the only way to prove it is to listen, engage, give them what they want when you can, and, when you can’t, give them an honest answer why. They just want to be heard and taken seriously. That’s all.
Engagement Is Not a Four-Letter Word
Tall order? Yep. A lot of work? Heck, yes. But companies no longer have a choice. I know that for many business leaders, investing in “engagement” is the same as eating a mouthful of cotton candy—it tastes sweet, but leaves you with a whole lot of nothing. However, I’m going to show that there is no more risk in allocating resources to perfecting your social media strategy than there is in screaming “Buy My Stuff!” on television, radio, in print, or on outdoor media. Then we’ll focus on what needs to be in place for any company, whether big or small, B2B or B2C, cool or conventional, to use social media correctly to build one-to-one relationships. If you’ve already experimented with social media and it didn’t work, there are only two possible reasons: your product or service isn’t any good, or you’re doing it wrong. We’re going to assume your problem is the latter.
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If there are any shortcomings in your brand or product, they might be starkly revealed once you start implementing social media correctly. Don’t let this possibility stop you. Listen to your customers’ suggestions and complaints (as well as their praise), and take the opportunity to fix the problem; then use social media to show the world how you’ve changed and improved.
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I’ll introduce some shining examples of what social media done right looks like, and what it can help companies achieve in an economy where an earnest, well-timed “thank you”—whether it’s in the form of a handshake, a comment, or a sample—is worth as much to a business as a Platinum Amex. I’m going to show you how incredibly far the effects of a sincerely expressed “How may I help you?” or “What can I do for you?” or “You are too kind.” or “I’m so sorry. What can I do to make this right?” or, perhaps mo
st important, “I am so happy to hear from you!” can take your business in a world where word of mouth travels more quickly and holds more power than it ever has before. Succeeding in the Thank You Economy is not about simply being nice and selling in an inoffensive way. Anyone can do that. It’s about taking every opportunity to show that you care about your customers and how they experience your brand in a way that is memorably and uniquely you.
What Caring Looks Like
Imagine you are the CEO of Super Duper Fans, Inc., sitting in your local coffee shop, and you overhear one patron say to another, “You know, you really get what you pay for. I’m trying to go green by not using my A/C so much, so I went out and bought a bunch of fans. I didn’t want to spend a fortune, either, so I bought those Super Duper fans, the ones with that great ad on TV.”
“Ooh, with the monkey? Yeah, I’ve seen them; they’re hilarious!”
“I set them up and two are already broken. Figures, right? Piece of junk.”
Any executive or manager or sales rep who cares about the company and believes in what it does wouldn’t hesitate to approach the table, introduce him-or herself, defend the product, apologize for any inconvenience, and ask for another chance to prove how great the Super Duper fan really is. You might offer to replace the defective models (throwing in free shipping and delivery, of course) and include a 30 percent coupon for any other Super Duper product. You’d do it in a heartbeat, and not out of the goodness of your heart, not because you’re a nice person, but because you care about your company and want everyone who does business with you to have a great experience.
The Thank You Economy Page 3
