The best problem you can have is offering such great service that you wind up spoiling your customers. Mine expect a tremendous amount from me, as well they should. Sometimes they ask for too much, and when they do, I address it. For example, some of my local clients recently informed me that they were annoyed that Wine Library would offer free shipping on our sister site Cinderellawine.com because it means nonlocals can get a better deal on it. But I explained to them, you get the store. The customers in San Francisco (who sometimes buy a lot more than the locals) don’t get to attend the free wine tastings, they can’t stop by anytime to see what’s new or talk to my staff, and they can’t nibble on the free cheese samples and other goodies we make available. I firmly believe that all the perks balance out and that everyone who shops with me gets a great deal. After I explained my position, some of my local customers saw my point, and the issue was resolved. Not everyone was satisfied with my answer, but I am certain everyone appreciated the fact that I made an effort to respond in as much detail as possible. I treated the dissatisfied people the way they should have been treated—like valuable customers!
Had they wanted to, they could have badmouthed me or my store all over Facebook and Twitter. But they didn’t, because I kept the conversation civil and honest. And if they had, I wouldn’t have worried too much about it. What’s brilliant about social media platforms is that no matter what someone else chooses to say about you, you can put the facts out there, on your fan page, on your blog, and in your tweets. People can track events and dialogue as they unfold. Everyone can see the exchange and make his or her own judgment call. As long as you stay on message, and remain honest, polite, and as accommodating as possible, you’ll have nothing to fear from someone with a grudge. Good manners are about treating your customers with respect at all times. You may not be able to control the message anymore, but you can absolutely control the tone in which the message gets played.
Controlling their message and their image explains why so many—too many—companies still refuse to allow their employees to publicly blog and tweet about their work. I understand their fear, but it’s unwarranted. In fact, there might be no better way to know for sure that you’re making smart hiring decisions. Allow your employees to talk freely, let them say what they want, because then you will have a much clearer picture of who your employees are and how they feel about your company. If they post smart, thoughtful posts, that’s worth something. If they post smart, thoughtful, negative posts, that’s worth something, too, if you’re open-minded enough to talk to them about why they feel the way they do. And if you discover that they’re vulgar, or rude, or just plain stupid, and you take a closer look and realize that their work isn’t as good as it should be, you don’t want them to be working for you.
6. I don’t have time to keep track of what every Joe or Jane says, and I can’t afford/don’t want to pay someone else to do it.
Anyone who takes a dismissive attitude toward any customer is heading for disaster. Joe and Jane have the power, and what Joe and Jane say matters. You cannot reserve your care and attention for your best, most profitable, most desirable customers anymore. You have the tools at your disposal to scale that kind of caring across the board, to everyone who even looks your way, and your customers expect you to use them. Your big spenders and casual browsers are all living in the same ecosystem, one where news of how you treat one customer can easily spread to hundreds of other current and even potential ones. That’s a big, big deal.
If you are a one-person company and you want to grow your business, you’re going to have to make time to track conversations yourself because you simply can’t afford not to. Being a part of the conversation is as important as having a website. Doing it yourself is actually ideal. If you establish the tone and voice of your brand to your satisfaction, you’ll create a solid foundation for someone else to build upon when you do eventually delegate the task, or share it with someone else. Because eventually, if you do this right, you will need help. There was a time when companies thought they needed only one person in the IT department, and as the company grew, and as the importance of IT’s expertise grew, so did the department. You’ll start out with one person in the Social Media department, and eventually, when you see the returns on your engagement come in, you’ll hire ten. It will be the greatest department in your company—a group of people spending their time advocating for something they love, caring about the people who love or even hate the brand. I can’t think of a better job. If I didn’t have my entrepreneurial strand of DNA, I’d be pumped to get paid to be an advocate of the New York Jets every day.
If you’re a midsize or large company, or if you can’t handle all the responses yourself and need to delegate, you probably don’t have to hire someone new. Now is the time to take a hard look at how you allocate your resources. It is highly likely that somewhere you are squandering money. Maybe you’ve got a lazy stock boy, or managers who knock off early to head out to the golf course every Friday, or a CMO who is still stuck in 1998. You could hire a better, hungrier CMO for less money and use the leftover budget to start your new Social Media department (which will be totally different and separate from your Customer Service department).* Get lean and efficient. Consider firing any employees who aren’t bringing 100 percent of their efforts to the job, and replace them with people who will care as much about your company as you do. If you see time being wasted, that’s time that can be turned toward interacting with customers and bringing something of real value back to the company. All that time spent trying to coordinate ten people’s schedules so they can be in the same room for a meeting? Figure out a way to eliminate the endless back and forth, or better yet, eliminate the meetings. Too many meetings are simply a way to spread out the responsibility for making decisions and provide safety in numbers should things go wrong. Make all the people in your company, including yourself, take ownership of their decisions, make it easy for them to use their judgment without having to run for approval every time, and you’ll save countless hours that can now be spent tracking Joe and Jane.
7. We’re doing fine without it.
That is a losing argument if I ever heard one. If you’re of a certain age, you know you once did fine without copy machines, voice mail, computers, and cell phones, too. You’ll adjust.
How do you know you’re “fine,” anyway, if you’re not in the trenches, listening to your customers and asking them what they think? Remember, too, that the customer who doesn’t say anything can often be a far more dangerous threat than the one who screams and yells. Everything can be fine until all of a sudden it’s not. If you rely on numbers to predict the health of your company, you’re responding to shifts and events that have already happened. If you rely on comment cards or surveys for feedback, you’re still only getting a one-time reply. But if you’re engaging with your customer in real time, having a conversation in which you can ask follow-up questions, you can get clarification and details. You can tackle any issue that arises before it develops into something more problematic. Social media is great for putting out fires, but putting out fires all the time is stressful and hard; keep the sparks from flying in the first place.
Any company that gets so complacent it thinks everything is “fine” deserves to go out of business—it literally means its leaders have stopped caring. A competitive company is always on the offense. Always. Always. Always.
8. We tried it; it doesn’t work.
This one makes me want to tear my hair out, it frustrates me so much. It shows a total lack of patience, which makes no sense in a business setting. A lot of business leaders have been willing to give a social media initiative a shot. They posted comments and tweeted like crazy for six months or, worse, six weeks, and they didn’t see any results. Web traffic didn’t increase enough; sales didn’t spike; content didn’t go viral. Faced with disappointing results, they patted themselves on the back for trying something new and then slammed the door shut. If they’re progressive, they chalked
up the failure to getting in too early on an immature platform, but most are convinced the platform is hype, and not worth the effort. They’re like people who have never seen a bicycle who try to pedal with their hands, then toss the thing aside, declaring it a waste of time and impractical for transportation.
Social media is a long-term play, which is why the majority of the companies that have tried it have failed to reach their potential. The fault doesn’t lie with company managers and leaders, however. It’s not anyone’s fault, really. The problem is that the system on which most corporate decisions are made is broken. As the Wharton study that we discussed in chapter one made clear, until managers and leaders are rewarded for long-term instead of short-term thinking—or, at least, in addition to short-term thinking—there will be no incentive to be patient. You can’t reap the benefits of social media’s word of mouth without a ton of patience, as well as commitment and strategy.
9. The legal issues are too thorny.
My industry, liquor and wine, is highly regulated, and I know how many challenges there can be when a company tries to embark on something new. You hired your legal department to protect you; its job is to be conservative and risk averse…to keep the company as safe as possible. That’s why change has to come from the top. Only the CEO or another leader of the company can sit down with the legal department and say, “This company is embracing social media. Instead of focusing heat-seeking missiles on perceived fatal flaws in this, let’s figure out how to take an acceptable risk and make it possible.” If you work in the medical, pharmaceutical, or financial sector, you’re likely not going to be able to achieve the kind of openness other industries enjoy. But leaders owe it to themselves and to their brand to push the envelope as hard as they can. I have had the privilege to do some consulting in these sectors, and I can tell you that how far that envelope gets pushed always comes down to the DNA of the company. Every legal department has its own DNA, but so does every CEO, and in the end, the company should reflect the DNA of its leader, not its lawyers. Set the ball in motion from the top, and allow the caring philosophy to infiltrate every level of the company. Of course, ethics and legal considerations matter in social media (maybe more than ever, thanks to its inherent transparency). But to allow yourself to be pressured to give up before you even start, without exploring every possibility, is inexcusable, especially when consumers feel so shut out of a lot of these industries. First movers in these sectors will reap some really substantial wins.
10. It takes too long to pay off.
This is a tough one to argue. Although we’ve seen evidence that there can be short-term payoffs, the benefits to engaging with customers often take a while to materialize. I can’t tell brand managers or VPs or CMOs who have numbers to hit that they should sacrifice the numbers for the long-term good of the company. No matter how much managers and leaders may philosophically agree that interacting with their customers is a good thing, without proof that investing in engagement is reliably going to pay off with increased profit and better quarterly returns, most won’t get behind it. How can they, when their compensation is directly tied to quarterly results? The long-term benefits of engaging with customers will almost always lose out to the short-term reality, which is that people want to keep their jobs.
It’s unlikely a lot of people are going to read this book and say, “You’re right. We’re dropping all our other media plays and we’re just going to care like hell.” But the fact is that social media is a marathon—you cannot reach the finish line without patience and determination. That’s why diversification is so important. I know there is a place for traditional media in a well-planned marketing budget, but in today’s marketing mix, it’s overpriced. Let me repeat: In this environment of heavy content consumption, I believe that most traditional media is overpriced. If you should see any billboards advertising this book, know that I got a reeeeeeeally good deal. Carve out 3 or 5 or 10 percent of what you’d normally apply to traditional media and allocate it toward social media. Find more cash by reducing the enormous waste of time and money often spent on producing postmortems that explain why your campaigns aren’t working the way you hoped they would only so you can sink more money into those same old platforms. You’ll see that when done right, social media is one of the most effective and least expensive platforms you can use.
A small company might be able to win the war relying on social media alone, but a larger company should think of social media as the Navy SEAL unit of its armed forces. Small, targeted, and hugely effective when deployed, it doesn’t go out to win the war on its own, but without it, the troops are at a huge disadvantage.
Say you spend $750,000 on a media buy, focusing on a well-defined, geographically limited target group, and see your sales rise 4 percent. You renew the buy for another $750,000, this time seeing a 2 percent boost. Then you retreat and spend six months on a new campaign before launching it again, to the same target group, to the same tune of $750,000. Every time you want your audience to hear your message, it costs you another serious amount of cash.
Compare that to spending $750,000 to launch a well-thoughtout, on-target, strategic social media campaign—blogging, commenting, tweeting great content and inviting interaction everywhere you can. You thank the heck out of every person who says something positive about you. You address every complaint. You answer every question and correct every misunderstanding. You see sales rise by 2 percent. You keep the ball rolling. You never retreat; you just keep fine-tuning your message and adapting to the needs of your customers. You give them what they want. You don’t spend any additional money other than the salary of the people in charge of the campaign. Six months later, profits continue to rise as consumer loyalty solidifies. You grow by 13 percent. And still, the only additional cash you spend are the raises you offer your staff and the salaries of the new hires you bring in to strengthen your social media presence.
An ad or a Today Show appearance or an NPR interview is a one-shot deal. You ride the wave of attention it brings you for a while, but then you generally have to throw money around to keep interest alive. When done right, social media, though it takes more up-front time to build a database of emails, fans, and Twitter followers, ultimately provides you with a never-ending opportunity to talk to consumers as often as you want, or better yet, as often as they invite you to.
11. Social media works only for startup, life style, or tech brands.
A concrete company does not have the same cachet to work with as an apparel company, I’ll grant you that. But you can sell only to your customer base, anyway. The concrete company’s mission isn’t to get as many people as possible to buy concrete, it’s to get as many people who need concrete to buy concrete. And the biggest challenge, the one that offers the most potential for growth, is to reach people who don’t yet know they need concrete. So don’t limit your conversation to concrete. Building, expansion, remodeling, real estate, parking, wherever concrete gets used—that’s where you should be listening and talking.
People are mistaken to think that it’s only startups, entrepreneurs, or tech companies that can make social media work for them (many do a piss-poor job—a study showed that 43 percent of the fastest-growing tech brands in the UK who are on Twitter have never replied to a tweet).* Being small is an advantage, because an individual can really shape a brand with his or her own style and personality. But a large company can scale one-on-one to the masses, because it has the resources to train enough people to engage in every conversation.
It’s true that some products are sexier than others, but it’s also true that if there weren’t a need for your product, you wouldn’t be in business. I don’t give a whole lot of thought to dental floss, but I might if you can make me start caring more about my teeth. And even if I don’t give you an opportunity to talk about dental hygiene, chances are good that my dentist is out there talking about it online. Engage with her, and your dental floss may well wind up in my take-home bag the next time I go in for my s
ix-month checkup. (Incidentally, in chapter twelve you can see a real-life example of how Dr. Irena Vaksman, a dentist in San Francisco, uses social media to make a visit to her office something patients might actually look forward to.)
If you’re not passionate enough about what your company does to find fuel for conversation every day, for hours on end, with as many people as possible, maybe you’re in the wrong business. Go general if you have to. Not everyone can be the Lakers, but anyone can talk basketball. When I started out, I didn’t have the name recognition of Robert Parker, or the clout of Wine Spectator, so I didn’t talk about Gary Vaynerchuk or Wine Library—I talked about Chardonnay. Social media gives you the opportunity to take your business to its fullest potential. Grab it.
The Answer Is Always the Same
I think we’re entering a business golden age. It took a long time for people to recognize the value of intellectual capital, whose intangible assets don’t show up on a spreadsheet, couldn’t be tracked, and couldn’t be expressed in dollars. Now it’s widely understood that intellectual capital is part of the backbone of every organization, and worth protecting. While the ability to form relationships has always been considered a subset of intellectual capital, social media has catapulted that skill into a wealth-building category. In the future, the companies with tremendous “relationship capital” will be the ones to succeed. Society is creating an ecosystem that rewards good manners, high touch, honesty, and integrity. Ten years from now, every company will have a Chief Culture Officer on staff and, if big enough, a team dedicated to scaling one-on-one relationships. All of the issues discussed above will have been resolved one way or another. The metrics and the standards that might seem experimental or suspicious now will be well established and accepted, just like the ones we’ve used for so many years to measure traditional marketing platforms.