Clients Are People Too

Thanks to Social Media there are now two kinds of marketing approaches in the world: Those that attach people to things, and those that attach things to people. Let me explain.

Since the ancient Greeks we have been slicing and dicing people into various categories, races, beliefs, genders, and a myriad other ways. People have found bits of themselves in scrolls, ledgers and spreadsheets as our slicing and dicing has gotten more and more sophisticated.

But no matter how clever we get, we never quite seems to cover all the bases. Listen, for example, to someone giving a family order at a fast food restaurant…
“…and can you give us two plates with that, and hold the mayo on one half of the burger, and can I use my daughter’s cup for the soda, she loves her cup; and please don’t put anything in cardboard; we’re all allergic…” There may be a “two plate” button, but I can promise you there are no “half mayo”, “own cup” or “no cardboard” buttons on the server’s computer screen.

This is the classical problem that comes with being forced to attach people to things. The customer may always be right, but you also can’t please all of the people all of the time, no matter how sophisticated your ledger. Marketers have toiled over this issue for centuries. Our approach has been to refine the ledger, add fields, build a better spreadsheet; and no one even guessed that there could be a way to turn the tables… until now.

Social media has changed the rule book. No longer in my marketing am I forced to attach people to things, I can now attach things to people. I can look at people the way they want to be looked at, approach them at their convenience. It is a remarkable evolution for marketing, more of a renaissance than merely a game changer.

Think of it this way: Before social media I was forced to look at bits of people, the bits associated with the slice I am currently looking at, which is understandable. But it does not feel like that for the people I am looking at. For them it feels like I am ripping a piece of them off so that I can force all of them to fit into my box. You only have to remember the last state business license form you filled in to recognize that. Using social media I can let my customer create and tick his own box, she makes her own ledger. It’s so much more human to be treated that way!

So how can you use these new tools strategically in your marketing? It starts with how you build and develop your Website and moves on to how you use Social Media.

1. Application is king. Last decade, 2000 to 2010, Content was king, but no more. Today Application is king. People go to your website because of what it can do, and social applications are the best kind of attraction.

Your website is no longer just a website, cataloging your brochure information to the world; it’s a string of web based applications: Stores, badges, locations, games, forms, communities, video, iFrames, follow and share, calendar, feeds, galleries, blog, comments, reviews and reviews of reviews. The list of possible site application combinations is pretty much endless, and it needs to be strategic, planned out. We must beware, as Alan Perlis said, of the “Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.”

If your website is application poor then users will soon become disinterested and move on to the ‘can-do’ sites.
– Have a web development plan and get familiar with the host of free Google tools.
– Don’t plan to develop and release all possible applications at the same time.
– Use a well established open-source development tool to cut down development cost and time.

2. A website is never finished. Could you imaging Mark Zuckerberg telling the world one day that Facebook is finally finished? Neither could I; because it can never be finished. No website is ever complete. Building a websites is not like building a boat, it’s more like building a tree. It needs continual maintenance and development, especially toward strategic application tools. We should refer to website “planting” instead of website “launching”.

– I suggest an annual plan of at least four new web application additions, and three of them need to have social or game dynamics.
– Get familiar with lead generation and learn to be strategic with Google Analytics.
– Be intentional about your SEO.

3. Social Media Pain. It’s going to take a leap of faith and a painful learning curve to move your marketing people and your efforts into social media. You may have a CRM which will become redundant, you may have just developed a website which you have no way of developing further. In other words there will probably be a whole lot of wasted money and new training required, that’s just the way it is.

It would not have done a book company in the 1400’s any good to complain about the cost and skills required in buy a printing press after they had just hired a bunch of scribes. The printing press would have still changed everything. The best response is to cut your losses and dig in, do whatever it takes. You may find social media confusing, frustrating and discouraging, but your clients love it! Google+ reached 10 million users in 16 days, it took Facebook and Twitter 2 years to do the same.

– Learn to interact meaningfully, and get your staff involved.
– Play some games and build games into your social media and website.
– Run a Facebook ad campaign and build it into your website. Try a few campaigns and measure their success.
– Be as strategic with your Facebook Page stats as you are with your Google Analytics.
– Try a locations based campaign with Foursquare, Google Places and Facebook Locations.

4. Review and be reviewed. The review process is marginally anonymous, brutally honest and loved by everyone not being reviewed.
Fight or ignore it at your own peril. Embrace your reviews the way you have had to embrace your optimization. Pretty soon we will have REO (review engine optimization) tools and a whole new learning curve.

– Review and rate companies in Google and Amazon and monitor reviews.
– Get comfortable with the five star system. Some really great companies only have two or three stars on Google search results. No one get’s five without first having two, three and four.
– When your company is reviewed, complimented or trashed have a meaningful response as soon as you can. This usually takes a bit of planning.
– Interact on other blogs, give your feedback.

Despite the learning required I like to think of Social Media as the first marketing tool that has managed to put people back together again, to treat them as human and slowly turn the world the right way up. Surely that is worth the effort, and while we’re learning how to use it, let’s have some fun.

Access IPD
Alan Jones – vDexter
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