Time is the New Money: 7 Crucial Truths for 2012
The silos of thinking that made our processes work were great when we were building assembly lines and factories. The spreadsheets of data that sorted our thinking were fine when we were counting dollars and doughnuts and things that didn’t think too. Fear of change, love of past success, bias that interprets history in our favor leads us to repeat and re-imprint bad or outdated behaviors in our organizational brains.
But when it came to predicting human behavior, teaching and training leaders, or bringing together teams in collaboration,
Big data has crashed through the halls of our silos.
Now through weird combinations of buying habits Target decides that we’re pregnant. For as much as they’re right, they’re wrong too. Just ask my friend who isn’t pregnant who’s getting samples from Similac.
Why don’t they just ask if it’s true? We talk to people who ask us more than we talk to people who tell us.
Find out about Influence and Loyalty
Once in the world of broadcasting, companies could control the conversation. Is it that habit of controling that keeps them secretive about asking?
The older, the larger that business has grown the harder achieving that new culture must be;
that is … they have more past success, more to lose, more to fear, fewer models of trust and collaboration.
Yet the business that will win my trust and gain my influence will be a role model, leader, learner, teacher, guide to the use of its product or service. If you want your company to embrace the social web, champion these ten roles as an action plan …
- Influence is more than moving people to click on an add or retweet an offer. We might do those. We might even write a blog post. Hand us a free phone and we might use it, but that doesn’t mean will carry your banner of influence.
Want me to tell my friends about you, evangelize and spread the word to others who I hardly know? You have to be even better than your product. Understand what it means for me to put my seal on your product. I have to trust that it won’t show up broken, or break when someone first uses it. I have to know that my good experience wasn’t just a fluke. I want to know that you weren’t only extremely to me, but that you’re extremely professional to everybody.
- Loyalty is a relationship based in trust. Lasting loyalty isn’t tied to price, points, or other forms of bribery.
The “tools of social media and social networking” are as important, but not more important than other social tools and venues through history, such as cave paintings, paper and pencil (or crayons), print communication, the telephone, radio, television, the neighborhood bar. Loyalty is a belief that you’ll be there and be the same person even when I’m not around to see you.
It’s important that we recognize that customers already know …
We are influenced by our friends because they are predictable. We know which ones always buy the first of everything and which buy after the sell-by date. We don’t follow the fickle ones blindly. We don’t follow the judgmental ones to places where we disagree.
And we don’t follow people who tell us what to think without finding out who we are.
Just yesterday, I heard someone who spends no time online talk about “companies that don’t ‘get’ it.” What she meant is that her favorite store changed a policy in a way that served themselves not their customer.
What customers know about influence and loyalty is that we don’t like companies who are selfish.
Are you sure you’re serving your customers?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
