Thank you!

I’ve been writing this column for 11 years. Its name has changed over the years but my focus has not. It’s never been primarily about ROI or even about conversion rate optimization; instead it’s always been about customer-centricity. The bottom line has always been what I wrote in one of my first columns in 2001: to achieve your goals, customers must first achieve their goals.

Over the years, my brother and business partner Jeffrey and I have tried to explain fairly complex ideas and tools like personas, web analytics, social commerce, and persuasive design in this column. It’s had an impact and we’re proud to say that so much has become part of the mainstream.

So why all the preamble? Perhaps because I’m about to sound like Andy Rooney and Miss Manners all at once.

Why are so many online marketers unconsciously discourteous to their visitors and customers? I know the answer to that. Very few marketers design measurable scenarios that plan every click and every interaction as part of an experience they want to create. However, I promised to keep it simple.

What follows, in no particular order, are just a few examples of discourtesy that come from industry leading websites. I’m not naming names, to protect the not-so-innocent. If you recognize yourself in these mini-rants don’t talk about it. It’s not therapeutic, just stop it!

• Thank you emails that are generated by the IT department suck. Go read yours. Does it really express gratitude? Does it deepen your relationship with your customer or prospective customer? Ditto for your Thank You page confirmation.
• Requests for 10 to 15 minutes of time to fill out your survey are ludicrous. Very few people have that amount of time to give up for you and I seriously question the motivation of people willing to commit their time that way.
• Forms that are not coded correctly to be auto-filled are annoying. It doesn’t take more than using the HTML tag correctly. That’s a few minutes of work for you but way less time for your customers who want the convenience of auto-fill. 
• Requests to “Like” you might be a lot more compelling if your customer knew what was in it for them. For many marketers, it’s obvious this is just another task to get out of the way – “To Do: Get customer to Like us on Facebook.” Do they get something now or is there any benefit in the future? A “Like” is an opportunity to deepen a relationship, treat it as such.
• Some companies selling goods make shipping costs a mystery. If you need an excuse to go fix it, then say you’re trying to reduce shopping cart abandonment. It will help with that. Your customers should not have to work so hard to figure out what their total cost will be.
• Lots of people in our industry are young, bless their hearts. For those of us who’ve already seen our 40th birthday, small fonts are no fun. If your customers aren’t all under 30, then this needs to be fixed..
• Broadband is not an excuse to hog our bandwidth or our time! Load times are just as critical now as when we used dial-up modems. Optimize your pages to reduce load times. Customers still experience any delay of more than a second as waiting.
• We have smartphones. We have tablets. We have all sorts of devices and we expect to be able to read your website with them. There are often huge costs involved. Think about at least providing contact information and store hours in a format anybody can read.
• Nobody likes to wait for a response. If you can’t respond immediately then set the right expectations and mind that you exceed those expectations. If you think a few minutes don’t matter, then you are fooling yourself. In B2B lead generation the difference between responding in five minutes versus an hour can be as much as 20x more valuable lead. Keep in mind that consumers are way more demanding that B2B clients.
• Let it be your fault. Your error messages and 404 pages should not be written by the IT department. Accept the responsibility, make the customer feel smart and valuable, and then offer them a way back to the right path.

This list was not meant to be exhaustive so please let your fellow online marketers know what else they can do. We should all look forward to the collective feedback.

The other day, I was reading an article on my iPad about a cool new gadget that allows your iPad to hang from your treadmill or exercise bike, a fit rail for the iPad. In the article, they had a link to the Scosche Fit Rail for the iPad on Amazon, so I clicked through. Cool enough, I added it to my wish list.

As soon as I added it, I wanted to share it with Jeffrey but I realized there was no easy way to send this item to him. I could click the back button twice to send him the article but what an opportunity for Amazon (in all that empty space) to offer an ability to share the item you added to your wish list to FaceBook, Twitter or even just to email it to someone to notify them.

Would you have expected some sort of share ability on this wish list confirmation page or have I gotten share happy?

Update: Did you know they have a great share widget on their order confirmation page?

By the time this column is published, Google’s shiny, new social network Google+ should have approximately 20 million users. It’s one of the fastest growing services of all time. Have you joined yet? Still waiting for an invite? You can find my Google+ profile here.

I’m asking myself and you this: Is this growth due to the sentiment that Google+ is basically an improved version of Facebook? Or maybe it’s something else?

Google can learn a lot from Facebook, including how it captured more than 700 million users. Let’s hope it doesn’t learn the wrong things. In particular, Google+ doesn’t need brand pages. Let the brands tie in to the core functionality of Google+ with apps and website plug-ins. Businesses are hard-pressed enough to keep their website presence optimized let alone manage another outpost page.

Let’s explore some more Google+ success factors:

1. Open vs. closed networks. Facebook is a closed network. Everything that is shared is held within the sacred “walls” of Facebook. The data it collects – your information – is Facebook’s. This is one main reason many industry pundits have been frustrated by Facebook’s attempts to shut down every effort to export their friends to their own computers. Facebook wants to own the social graph. This is also why brands needed to have fan pages so that they could have a presence in this closed system.

Google wants that data too. Google wants to understand how to bring you more relevant search results and ads. The intersection of search, social, and mobile are a powerful force and Google was handicapped by not having full access to the data. Google makes it very easy for you to liberate your data from Google+. History shows that people get comfortable initially as they explore new experiences in closed systems, but eventually they want the freedom they get from open systems. Just remember the AOL of the 1990s, which brought so many people online in the first place and how eventually they wanted to enjoy the openness of the World Wide Web. Facebook could be the new AOL if it’s not paying attention. Google will now be able to leverage its social data and interest graph to offer new levels of ad targeting across its mighty search and display ad networks and not need to if it chooses to offer any ads so it can make revenue within Google+.

2. Social networking is the fastest growing mobile content category. Google’s Android (its mobile OS) has a huge install base and is growing by 500,000 activations daily. The Google+ Android app is well-polished; it already feels like an integral part of the Android experience for me. All of these activations include access to Google+. What happens to search and social when they are fully integrated in the mobile experience? What happens when I look for a restaurant on Google Maps and see my networks’ +1 reviews on the maps? Or what if I want to go to a movie? Will a search display reviews from my network? Facebook hasn’t even released an iPad app, and has no way to target ads to mobile users currently; Facebook is not ready for mobile.

3. Social networking 3.0. As Google starts to integrate Google+ across its products, the social layer becomes integral to everything we do. Google+’s architecture is based on a better understanding of how people’s networks really work and how information is shared and of interest to different circles. Check out this presentation by former Googler and now current Facebooker Paul Adams.

Will Google eventually even be able to suggest what circles certain friends should fall into so that people don’t have to do all the work manually? Probably.

There are many other things that make Google+ a phenomenal product. The experience from an improved photo viewer (and editor) is one of them. Sparks, is another; it helps you find content based on your interest and even mutes conversations.

There will be many factors that will determine the success of Google+. Nevertheless, let’s end off with a quick visual analysis.

I ran a Feng-Gui visual attention analysis on several screen shots from both Facebook and Google+ and the areas of attention in each are quite different. Yes, they both have streams of updates from your social network (so does Twitter), but the similarities end there.

Facebook stream: All the initial attention focuses on seeing the ad on the right-hand side, followed by which of your friends profile picture changed or who was added by your current friends and which of your friends are available to chat on the left-hand side.

Google+ stream: The first thing you want to focus on is starting a hangout. By the way, the consensus is that it is an “awesome” feature. Google wants you to connect and have a video chat with a group from your network while sharing content from text, to photos, to videos, etc. The next focus would be on adding more people to your network through suggestions.

Rafael Mizrahi, CEO of Feng-Gui commented: “Clearly, the left side of Google+ is cleaner than Facebook, but this is likely to change in the future as more features (and probably ads) are added to Google+ and more real estate will be required in the page to deliver the new features.”

There’s a lot more to be said about all the above. I’d love to know: What do you see as the future and impact of Google+?

P.S. Check out this slideshow on Google+.

Additional images: Heatmaps of FaceBook stream and Google Plus stream

On October 15, 2000, A.G. Lafley, president and CEO of Procter & Gamble Co., delivered a prophetic speech entitled “The Consumer is Boss!” to the Association of National Advertisers. In his presentation he emphasized three main points:

• “We’re moving away from the current mass marketing model, away from push and toward pull.
• Consumers will only become more demanding.
• They want to have a conversation, to dialogue, to participate, to be more in control.”

These points may seem obvious to marketers and other business people today, but they still confound us. We only now begin to realize the implications. Recently, Rich Green, CTO at Nokia, said companies should stop trying to think of using social media for their own ends: “The big ‘a-ha’ moment is when enterprises finally realize that their digital existences are being defined by the consumer world, not the reverse. It is hubris to think that an enterprise can ‘use’ social media for its advantage.”

There is no question that marketing has been completely redefined, and understanding the impact of social and mobile technologies on customer behavior is still unclear for many. While we know people are engaged with our social and media efforts, the return on investment is still hard to define. In fact, according to the just released Forrester/Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2011 report (SORO 2011), 68 percent of retailers said if Facebook went away it wouldn’t impact sales at all in 2011. Also, 62 percent of retailers agree that returns on social marketing strategies are unclear. There is some good news: 72 percent of retailers will increase their spend in social. However, 36 percent of retailers are pursuing a social media strategy mostly because their competitors are.

In IBM’s State of Marketing 2011 study, we learned that 60 percent of marketers identified “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue. We suffer from data overload. It’s unclear what a lot of this social data is telling us, because we can’t directly correlate that data to sales in most cases. The true ROI of social media is unclear for many.

The study shows our frustration with social media:

“This year, social media is no longer the adorable baby everyone wants to hold, but the angst-filled adolescent – still immature yet no longer cute – who inspires mixed feelings. All things social continue to hold intense interest, with 53% of marketers currently applying it to their marketing efforts. But as tactics rise and fall, a more sophisticated approach is emerging.”

As quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said: “The explosion of social networking with consumers has changed their (consumers) expectations about how they can and should connect with businesses. ‘Real-time’ is a new imperative, which is causing many businesses to rethink their customer relations strategies via digital marketing.”

We have had 10-plus years of warnings about these changes and so few are prepared. Companies have totally missed the point. They don’t really need to worry about keeping up with their competitors. Nevertheless, they must worry about how to keep up with their customers.

We have either entered or passed the year when mobile became a critical issue for business. The SORO 2011 reports that only 29 percent of retailers say they have a mobile strategy, are implementing it, and are already optimizing. Meanwhile, only 12 percent of the Internet Retailer Top 500 websites had mobile websites in a mid-2010 study, and only 7 percent had mobile apps.

I think every digital marketing executive should watch this video produced by Best Buy (be sure to replay the part from 1:20 to 1:30 many, many times):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Companies will continue to be slowed down by their slow corporate metabolisms. Their inability to collect the right data and act, analyze, react, and optimize based on the data continues to provide opportunity for those companies that have a faster metabolism. I no longer wonder how dinosaurs became extinct.

Where are your consumers headed? Where are they today? Will you truly serve them as they want to be served?

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising.  However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising.  Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed.

If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads.

Most 30-40 year old women (one of the most coveted and powerful consumer groups) access their Facebook accounts usinge their mobile device.

While I agree that FaceBook needs a native iPad app, for the sake of their business, I think they first need to find a way to make sure all those current mobile users interact with ads.

As my good friend, Avinash pointed out in his 11 Digital Marketing “Crimes Against Humanity”, there are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones.

You hardly ever have to worry about keeping up with your competition if you keep up with your audience. Facebook is not keeping up with their audience and all companies do this at their own peril.

So do you agree that there might be a problem here?

In December, Amazon (AMZN) invested $175M in LivingSocial. Like Groupon, LivingSocial capitalizes on local advertising by having deals of the day that offer discounts to people who opt in to certain deals. But today, they are offering a $20 Amazon.com gift card for just $10 (get yours today). Brilliant!

It is rare to see 100% redemption for any offer for these companies, but this is a great way for them to add several hundred thousand to a million+ new names to their database as the word of mouth of this great offer gets out. Dozens of my friends have already promoted it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. And even if 100% redeemed it, there could be some breakage in terms of not all the money being spent and of course Amazon has a profit on those purchases as well. So total cost is less than $10 a customer. Can you come up with some creative way to acquire customers that benefit all three parties involved: benefit You, benefit the customer and benefit the company you are offering something from? Please let us know.

When my brother Jeffrey and I wrote “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?” we explained how in the evolution of sales and marketing history, the trend towards the reduction of friction for the customer is impacted by three factors: transportation, communications, and payment technologies. In my last column, while describing the Future Shopper, I illustrated one of the trends; how communication technology will affect the way that people buy.

The other two facets of change are concurrent evolutions in transportation systems (i.e., superb logistics and virtual delivery) and payment systems (security, alternate currencies, and micro-payments). This past week at the Shop.org conference in Dallas, I caught up with Scott Silverman, the former director of the association who recently left to co-found IfeelGoods.com. It’s a fascinating move but this company truly has the potential to change the way payments are made using Facebook credits.

The impact on reach and traffic patterns that Facebook and its Like button plug-ins have had are evident. The facts that Target is beginning to sell Facebook credits in-store and how quickly the social gaming world is growing show that we are on the verge of seeing a wider adoption and use of these credits. If enough people begin to accept and use a currency because it represents stored value to them then it can become universally accepted. This is not unrealistic, as TechCrunch recently wrote how Facebook can become bigger than Google:

If PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts, it’s not a stretch to predict that five years from now Facebook too will have 100 million to 150 million active Credits accounts (at least!) bringing in $5 billion in revenue from this business unit alone.

Many in the industry have been waiting to see if anyone would solve the micro-payment issue and Ifeelgoods.com is one solution that would easily integrate into retailers websites to offer Facebook credits for incentivizing positive actions, thus providing a viable micro-payment option.

We might offer our customers some virtual goods, such as a tractor for FarmVille or a machine gun for Mafia Wars as the virtual goods market is exploding to prompt them to take action. According to The New York Times:

The Inside Network, a research firm that tracks social media trends, said Tuesday that the market for virtual goods in the United States was expected to grow to $2.1 billion in 2011, up from $1.6 billion in 2010.

Facebook has been pushing all its game developers to use its credits system as the virtual currency of choice, as it gets 30 percent of all transactions processed with credits.

With over 500 million users globally and with 42 percent of them actively using social gaming, which will make them comfortable trading Facebook credits, will it be long before we see it as another payment option that we are offered as consumers?

In fact, my good friend and CEO of ClickEquations, Lucinda Holt just returned from a trip to China where she describes how we should possibly look to e-commerce trends there because they may become popular here in the U.S. Lucinda shares:

“Because of the enormous difference in China – in culture, payment and delivery infrastructure, Internet penetration and maturity, and many other attributes – the Internet is developing very differently there than it has in the U.S. Things that we assume here just aren’t true there. For example, search isn’t the universal onramp to the Internet. Social commerce is much older and entrenched. Gaming leads in online activity and spending. And payments aren’t dominated by credit cards; services like Alipay and Tenpay are pushing beyond micro-payments in games to become standard payment mechanisms for ecommerce transactions.”

Are you accepting or using Facebook credits yet? Are your customers? What impact will the wide acceptance of Facebook credits have on your business?

There is hardly anyone who would argue over the impact that search, social, and mobile technologies have had on the customer buying process over the last five years. However, while many companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition, they actually have a much bigger issue – keeping pace with their customers. Indulge me while I explore the changes we’ll see over the next five years.

A Marketer’s Job Is Already Hard Enough

Jeffrey, my partner and brother, and I were discussing this column and I took the following notes about marketing that I wanted to share:

• Many times when marketing is called upon to solve a problem, it’s not a marketing problem at all. Marketers’ challenges begin with the brand they choose to represent.
• Marketing and sales have always been driven to reduce friction buyers experience; always – and with every improvement in technology, logistics, or payment options.
• The day has passed since marketers were paid to make promises the business had only a vague intention of delivering.
• Transparency isn’t a choice, it’s what is demanded by your customers; authenticity is a choice and your responsibility as the brand.
• Getting heard through all the noise is hard enough, so anything short of a truly remarkable brand promise is simply more noise.

Technological and social advances over the next few years will force companies to embrace authenticity, improve customer experiences, or suffer the consequences. Will your company be ready to handle this future?

Tomorrow’s Customers

Tomorrow’s customer is already today’s connected customer, with information just a few clicks away on their computer or mobile device. However, when a 7 inch or so iPad-like device is in the pocketbooks of your grocery store shoppers, they’ll be able to point the device’s camera at the shelf in front of them and using an augmented reality program like Layer they’ll be presented with the information they need to make their best choice. Reviews? Check. Cost per serving? Check. Nutritional or taste comparisons? Check. Coupons or better offers available? Instantly downloaded or ordered elsewhere.

No amount of great packaging or promotions will be able to sell the customer if people say your product sucks or costs way more per serving simply because you say it uses premium ingredients and added nutrients when this information layer shows the “real” deal. With the wide adoption of shopping scan-and-compare apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser (already downloaded over 2 million times), is this new reality that far behind? Probably not, and it won’t be limited to the supermarket aisle either.

As All Media Digitizes, Product Discovery Evolves

As Apple and Google prepare to tackle the largest screens in the house with their TV offerings, what will those products look like in the next five years? Will those set-top devices they design constantly search out and deliver you the best content based on your personal preferences (sort of a Pandora for TV)? It could just be if Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s IFA keynote is any indication:

“Not only are you never lonely, you’re never bored! We’ll suggest what you should be watching, because we know what you care about.”

You can be assured the ads will become more personalized and targeted. Will those set-top devices sync up with your mobile devices to deliver content and ads on the go? Again, Schmidt may be leaving us clues from his speech:

“We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like.”

One day, you’ll be watching an episode of “Sex and the City,” fall in love with a blouse one of the stars is wearing, touch the screen and activate your shopping avatar to try on your clothes virtually and see how it will fit based on your personal dimensions, and be able to order it with just a couple of clicks. Perhaps it will be super chef Bobby Flay making an incredible barbecue rib recipe that you want to make at home; a couple of clicks on the TV and the recipe is synced up to your kitchen and the missing ingredients are added to your weekly shopping list. Of course, all this will be highly measurable and television show producers will work closer with advertisers to make sure the right products make it into the right content for their audience.

The Future Buyer’s Life Made Easier Day by Day

It is easy to see how the evolution and convergence of technology will continue to reduce the friction of the customer buying process, and I can show you countless numbers of other ways technology and advertising will change our lives in the near future. Advertising will start to fulfill its promises of true one-to-one messaging as we all carry powerful computers in our pockets and the systems are available to personalize our experiences to make our “future shopper” lives easier. It may only be a couple more years until our advertising makes us feel like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report.”

In the meantime, Schmidt says, “I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” and I’ll spend my time thinking what companies need to do in order to optimize those selling experiences. Will you?

Watch this marketing keynote presentation- includes a few attendee testimonials (this is a 45 minute+ presentation, please give the video some time to load):

I read the news and it makes me sad for businesses today. It’s no news that we are in the midst of one of the worst economic crises ever, while working our way through one of the greatest periods of change ever. These two things are not unrelated. We are undergoing a revolution in commerce, logistics, and communications as disruptive as the Industrial Revolution.

Some gurus will self-assuredly tell you it is the “social media revolution.” That’s just one strong signal of the revolution that is occurring. In our book, “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark,” my brother Jeffrey and I explained his concept of the evolution of commerce. We wrote that in the history of sales and marketing, the need that drives this evolution is reducing friction in the customers’ buying process. As changes in technology, communications, and logistics become possible, market forces push businesses to evolve strategies that entice customers to buy.

So what is this revolution that we can all readily observe? Ubiquitous connectivity has brought us to the tipping point where the customer is now largely in control of their experience. Where that isn’t true yet, it’s only a matter of time till it is – no business will be exempt. From now on, customers will increasingly seek experiences that meet or exceed their expectations and let them buy the way they want to. Companies that don’t choose to be authentically customer-centric and learn to quickly communicate, iterate, and adapt to change will struggle.

Think about how much has changed in the last five years on the consumer side since the book was written.

Hey Retailers! Offline Is the New Online

For the past decade, people have been announcing and still waiting for the year of mobile. It never came because of the limitations of mobile technology. Enter smartphones (e.g., iPhones, Android) and now we are an “always connected” customer. Applications like RedLaser and ShopSavvy give consumers the ability to walk into stores, scan bar codes, read reviews for products, and find the best value either locally or online (logistics make the differences minor). If the ability to gather information before buying products online made customers harder to sell, what do you think having that information at their fingertips while in your store will do?

Still buying on a little phone isn’t easy, and most retailers’ mobile apps are no better than websites from 1995 to 1996, but just imagine when women who control the spending have their 7 inch iPad or similar device in their purse and the experience is far smoother. It’s coming!

The problem: Is your organization ready to handle this change?

Is Your Corporate Metabolism Sluggish Like the Economy?

Corporate metabolism is the term I use to describe the speed at which organizations can make decisions, adapt, and evolve. Things are progressing at a faster pace today than ever before, yet corporations struggle to empower themselves to change with them. An example of why Amazon was able to capture about 25 percent of the e-commerce transactions in the U.S. is how two hours after the death of Michael Jackson, it had reconfigured its MP3 store. That’s right; in two hours most companies couldn’t even coordinate a conference call, yet Amazon reconfigured the home page of one of its most important businesses. At any given time, Amazon has almost 200 tests running on its website and it was among the first to leverage social commerce effectively by harnessing the power of ratings and reviews. Jeff Bezos proclaimed early on that advertising as we know it was dead and that he was better off investing his millions in advertising budget into building a better experience. He understands the dynamic forces that are driving commerce. Does your organization? Can your organization keep up?

This is not exclusively a retail issue. It’s hard to imagine the number of companies that were innovators in a technology that were able to capture a significant portion of the marketplace because of their first mover advantage, who then lost that “startup” edge. What happened is that their corporate metabolism slows and then they struggle to grow. If you need a cautionary tale, think about why Yahoo failed versus the speedy and agile Google. Will Skype be the next poster child for a slow corporate metabolism killing a company?

The Management Bureaucracy Must Evolve

Think about the typical command and control corporate bureaucracy that exists in most companies. All those layers of management were best suited for the Industrial Revolution’s factory model of doing business. For over a century that worked fine, but that model is ill-suited to today’s environment.

Change is the one business concept you can count on. Whenever you’re feeling comfortable, fat, and happy there is somebody who will eat your lunch and they’ll do it quickly and inexpensively. How quickly you handle change depends on how much your employees are empowered to make decisions and how fast you can shift your entire organization. You can leverage technology that helps speed up your organization and that gives you the flexibility to test, target and personalize across channels the experience the way customers want it. If you haven’t made significant changes yet, you better find ways to change and speed your corporate self up rapidly.

Technology, logistics, and communications are coming at us faster than a meteor. Remember that it was a meteor that killed the dinosaurs but allowed mammals (smaller, speedier, and adaptable) to survive. I hope dear reader that you’re not a dinosaur.

Advertising guru, Roy Williams likes to say “Advertising only accelerates the inevitable” today I would add that “Social media only accelerates the inevitable.”

The point is simple, if you have a good business, with strong values, a great product/service, that takes good care of employees and customers, advertising will help amplify your great story and your results.

If you have a lousy product, treat customers and employees without respect, with advertising you’ll soon be out of business (although some airlines and banks have consistently managed to defy this rule).

Used to be if you had a lousy business you could fool some people in to buying from you and word of mouth would eventually catch up with you as the expression went one person who would then tell twelve… But that was another day. Today one person Tweets, updates their status, creates a YouTube video, post a review or blogs and thousands if not millions might see it.

It’s All About Me, The Customer

Peter Drucker said the “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

Notice the focus on the customer, not the product or service. The point of your business should be to fill needs and create value for your customers. Too many companies still practice accidental marketing. They hope that social media marketing is their magic blue pill to great results.

An Apple a Day Keeps the Social Away

You don’t have to be social, but you do need to provide value for your customers. Apple is not a social company, it is not open to having a dialogue with everyone, nor does it need to. As long as they continue to fill needs and bring value to customers. Some die-hard social media “experts” will argue with me, but you can’t argue with Apple’s results. Being social is not part of their corporate metabolism and it doesn’t look like they need to change that anytime soon. But you are also not Apple.

The Social Values

The social media revolution though does signify certain cultural and societal values shifting. We expect a business to have respect for the customer, create good products/services (or we’ll review them negatively), have good customer service, and we expect some level of transparency and authenticity from the organization.

Being social is about values, beliefs and attitudes. Values and attitudes you have or don’t or would like to have. Keep in mind if you don’t have them changing attitudes and beliefs can be difficult, un-natural and you will resist it. As much as change is a constant, as humans we seek to keep the status quo.

You can’t fake social. Just because you post some YouTube videos, put up a fan page, start a blog or twitter account, does not mean you are “social.” If you are not prepared to walk the talk and align your values don’t believe the tactics will bring results.

Do not believe the tactics can replace the strategy. However, if you are prepared for real change starting down this path to social commerce can be transformative.

You can always put lipstick on a pig, but at the end of the day you still have a pig, although possibly a pretty pig.