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CHAPTER THREE

Why Smart People Dismiss Social Media, and Why They Shouldn’t

I’ve talked to a lot of corporations about the benefits of social media over the last six years, and most of the reasons I’ve heard as to why leaders don’t want to invest in it hinge on fear. As I’ve discussed, Wall Street doesn’t make it easy for companies to take many risks. Maybe there was some risk in the early days, but at this point the risk anyone is avoiding exists only in his or her own head. I know that can be hard to believe when you’re staring at headlines that read “Most Brands Still Irrelevant on Twitter,” and “Social Networking May Not Be as Profitable as Many Think.” It’s possible that for now those headlines and others like them are technically true, but if they are, in almost every case, the reason is the same—most of the companies already attempting to use social media platforms aren’t using them correctly. I mean, just because you can’t dribble well or get the rock in the hoop doesn’t mean that there’s a design flaw in your basketball. And the reason they’re not using them correctly is generally because they aren’t fully committed to it; they still don’t get that intent matters. It is true that you need to use social media because otherwise your competitors will get ahead of you. Yet how we speak and behave when we’re going through the motions of caring is vastly different from how we speak and behave when we care from the bottom of our hearts. Our intent affects the force of our actions, so if a leader has simply got a case of monkey see, monkey do (where people throw themselves and their companies into social media solely because their competitor is doing it) and her intent isn’t to infuse every aspect of her business with Thank You Economy principles, of course she’ll never reap the full benefits. She’s like a competitive swimmer who hangs around the edge of the pool for a month, carefully dipping her toes and analyzing the water, and who then complains that her swim times aren’t improving.

Overall, there are eleven excuses I’ve heard companies use again and again to justify their refusal to fully commit to and invest in social media, and I want to dissect them all. If you’re a skeptic, I hope you’ll find some new information here that will persuade you that the time to act has come. If you are eager to get your company to connect on a deeper level with its customers but are meeting with resistance, I hope these pages will provide fresh talking points and facts you can use when presenting this issue to the heads of your company or department. One thing is absolutely certain—until leaders erase this particular line in the sand, they will be severely hampered in their attempts to guide their companies smoothly and successfully into the Thank You Economy.

1. There’s no ROI.

Brand managers and company leaders are obsessed with numbers because the numbers matter a great deal, if not to them personally, then to their superiors, their stockholders, and the financial and business media. I get that. But let me ask this: what is the return on investment for any kind of customer caring? Is there a formula that calculates how many positive interactions it takes to pay off in a sale or in a recommendation? No, but until now good managers and salespeople have killed their customers with kindness anyway, because even without hard numbers to quantify the ROI, they instinctively know that earning a customer’s trust is key.

Now, Nielsen has numbers that prove the link between generating trust and making a sale isn’t just theoretical. When Nielsen conducted a study on what drives consumer trust, the results were clear: almost 70 percent of people turn to family and friends for advice when making purchasing decisions. Where have people been talking to their family and friends lately? Facebook reports that 60 percent of the people online are going to social networks, with half returning every day. If there is ROI in friendship and family, there has to be ROI in social media. “We often forget the symbiotic relationship between trust and ROI,” says Pete Blackshaw of NM Incite, a joint venture of McKinsey and Nielsen, and also author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000. “If consumers trust other consumers more than they trust traditional advertising, and the platforms to convey their trusted recommendations are now reaching billions, the ROI should start to enter the ‘no brainer’ zone. There’s clearly nuance in the executional elements, and some social media techniques or tactics will clearly drive more ROI than others, but the big picture should be obvious.”

When faced with two equal choices, people often buy for no other reason than they associate one choice with someone they know. My friends shop at Wine Library, and they go out of their way to do so. Most of my acquaintances from high school shop at Wine Library, too. There is a Dell consumer out there who buys Dell because he has an uncle who works there. There are plenty of people who never stopped buying their gas at Exxon after the Valdez spill, or more recently, from BP, even though they were upset by the environmental catastrophes those companies caused, because they have friends or relatives connected to them. Social media, which allows people to see their family and friends’ preferences and interactions with brands, allows for many more chances for people to make the personal associations that can lead to buying decisions.

The ROI of a company’s engagement with a customer scales in proportion to the bonds of the relationship. The ROI of your relationship with your mother is going to be much higher than that of the one you have with a good friend. Both, however, are more valuable than the one you have with an acquaintance, which trumps the relationship you have with a stranger. Without social media, you and your customer are relegated to strangers; with it, depending on your efforts, you can potentially upgrade your relationship to that of casual acquaintances, and even, in time, to friends. The power of that relationship can go so far as to convert a casual browser into a committed buyer, or a buyer into an advocate.

Every company should be bending over backward to transform customers into advocates—they are incredibly valuable. According to an IBM study of online retail consumer buying patterns:

Advocates’ share of wallet is 33 percent more than that of customers who aren’t advocates. Advocates spend about 30 percent more dollars with their favorite online retailers than non-advocates do. Advocates stick around longer, proving themselves less likely than other customers to switch to a competitor even if it offers similar products at similar prices. Advocates have significantly higher lifetime value than regular customers, for not only do they spend more now, they are more likely to keep spending, and even increase their spending, as time goes on.

Advocates are bred, not born. According to Nielsen, consumers are generally more motivated to reach out to a company with a complaint than with praise. However, they are willing to publicly praise a company when given the opportunity to do so. Social media allows companies to provide ample prompts for consumers to remember why they like a brand, and inspire them to say so publicly, whether on the company website or via social networking channels. Through an exhaustive consumer-engagement study that focused on moms online, Pete Blackshaw found that when brands started investing in meaningful interactions and conversations with mothers, the mothers were 30 percent more likely to become advocates. In other words, they were willing to write favorable online reviews about the product, essentially doing the brand’s marketing for it. According to Blackshaw, marketers consider online reviews among the most coveted form of consumer expression, because they tend to show up close to the “purchase event,” and because their clicks and links result in higher search results. The study showed, in addition, that mothers who became “high participator moms”—answering questions from other mothers, providing information, and creating online content about the product or brand—saved the brands 15 percent on call support. Overall, the numbers show that there is significant ROI in engaging with customers and strengthening your relationship with them. Blackshaw, who has consulted with hundreds of Fortune 1000 brands, says this is especially true in the early phase of a new product launch. “The early reviews can be as impactful as a $10 million media buy in shaping early perceptions, even among the traditional media, who increasingly lean on social media as a ‘cheat sheet’ to understand what’s really going on with brands.”

Even if only a small percentage of your customers become true advocates, there is tremendous ROI in treating your customers as well as possible. According to Jason Mittelstaedt, chief marketing officer of RightNow, a customer service consulting firm that published the Customer Service Impact 2010 Report, 85 percent of U.S. consumers say they would pay 5 percent to 25 percent more to ensure a superior customer experience. In addition, 76 percent of consumers say they appreciate it when brands and companies take a personal interest in them. In other words, advocates and non-advocates alike say they want superior service, and they’re willing to pay for it. Can there be any doubt that engaging one-on-one with customers, making each and every one feel valued and heard, constitutes a superior experience?

Consider these statistics pulled from the Customer Experience Impact 2010 Report as well:

40 percent of consumers switched to buying from a competitor because of its reputation for great customer service. 55 percent cite great service, not product or price, as their primary reason for recommending a company. 66 percent said that great customer service was their primary driver for greater spending.

It’s very logical: There is proven ROI in doing whatever you can to turn your customers into advocates for your brand or business. The way to create advocates is to offer superior customer service. In the Thank You Economy, a key component of superior customer service is one-to-one engagement in social media. It’s what customers want, and as we all know, the customer is king.

1. The metrics aren’t reliable.

The tools for tracking and measuring social media initiatives are becoming increasingly sophisticated and reliable. After all, this data is coming from Nielsen. If you place television ads, you’ve probably been making enormous financial decisions based on the Nielsen ratings for years, trusting them to tell networks who is watching what shows so the networks and cable stations can charge you a fortune to place your brand in your target demographics’ line of sight. And by the time you’re reading this book, you’ll be able to rely on metrics bearing the Nielsen seal of approval for your online ads, as well. In September 2010, Nielsen announced that it was launching a cross-media metrics tool that will measure a campaign’s effectiveness online, with ratings data comparable to that already offered for TV. One of its first partners to test the new tool? Facebook. In the press release, Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of Media Products, said, “This new system will provide marketers with a better understanding of their ROI, and will give media companies a much needed tool to prove the value of their audiences.”

But what about engagement? The new tool from Nielsen measures the effect of online ads, not whether all that time a company spends talking to customers online translates to sales. Well, in 1990, how many execs imagined they’d be spending money to post banner ads on that thing called the Internet? Placing product in video games? It was unthinkable. How about paying for SEO? SEO, what the heck is that? Now, you put a lot of money into SEO.* Everything we count on today to tell us how our marketing efforts are working was once brand-new and risky. And then it wasn’t. So it will be with social media and the metrics that accompany it.

In 2010, Ad Week reported that Vitrue, a social media management company, had calculated that a million Facebook fans were worth $3.6 million in “equivalent media” over a year; $3.60 per person interested enough in your brand to friend you up is not chump change. If that number had come from Nielsen, everyone in the marketing and advertising industry would have treated it as gospel. The metrics already in existence are being refined with incredible speed, and the fixed standards execs crave so much are on their way.

Will there still be ways for consumers to game the system? Of course. But the vast majority of people on Facebook and Twitter are actually living within the medium. If they’re not there, the conversation stops. If they get distracted or lose interest, the conversation changes. The data businesses can collect about what their customers are talking about, with whom they’re talking about it, and how often, is far less ambiguous than it’s ever been. The problems in accurately measuring impressions that plague traditional media will continue for online ads, but the data about consumers’ experience and their perception of your brand is right there to collect with every tweet, button, heart symbol, comment, and share. Even better, by engaging one-on-one, you can ask for clarification, request details, and really delve into why your customer feels the way he or she does.

Every media platform has loopholes. When I first suggested buying Google ads, my father wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. How would we know that real people had clicked through? What if it was just our competitors making us think the ads were working and driving up our budget? Well, I didn’t know. But I was pretty sure that my competitors were too busy with their own marketing to spend the kind of time it would take to sabotage mine. Google claimed to have an algorithm to prevent fraud, and it seemed to me it was in Google’s best interest to protect me. Believe me, I wasn’t in business to lose money. But I was thinking long term, and long-term thinking requires that you look at all the options, including the ones that might take a little time to pay off. All media-buying decisions are based on best educated guesses, so it makes no sense for people to hesitate to use a new tool, especially one with such a low cost of entry.

1. Social media is still too young.

The wait-and-see approach, the one most companies have used while considering when to invest in traditional platforms, won’t work for social media. First-to-market in this hyper-fast world has impact. Companies can no longer just spend money and get in on the game. Before, it wouldn’t have mattered if, hypothetically, Nike (which wasn’t founded until the mid-1970s) had taken one look at the radio when it was first invented and said, “Cripes, this is going to be big, it’s going to be in cars!” and gotten a $3 million head start over Adidas. Six years later, once Adidas had looked around and said, “Darn, Nike was right!” and pounded the platform with a $4 million campaign, it would have been even with, if not ahead of, Nike. All Adidas would have had to do was spend a lot of money to push its message out and the consumer would have swallowed it, because there was so much of it they could hardly see anything else. It could have trumped the other company’s longer presence on the platform with volume, a push platform. Companies can’t buy volume in social media, though, so today, those six years Nike would have had on Adidas would count a great deal, because those are six years that Nike would have been going into the trenches, talking to people and inviting them to talk back, creating an emotional bond and solidifying its relationship with the consumer. Adidas wouldn’t be able to come out of nowhere and magically create relationships where there aren’t any, and it would have a hard time pulling customers away from Nike because they would be emotionally attached.

Adidas would not be locked out, though. If its leaders channeled their efforts in the right direction and created a campaign that really communicated with people and made consumers feel as though Adidas cared more about them and their business than Nike did, they could still close that emotional gap. It could take a little while, but it would definitely be doable.

For once, I’m begging businesses to take the easier path. Embarking on one-to-one customer engagement offers significant long-term rewards, but the company will also experience immediate benefits—greater brand awareness, stronger brand loyalty, increased word of mouth, improved understanding of customer needs, and better, faster consumer feedback—and suffer very few drawbacks, if any. Meanwhile, the drawback to resisting social media engagement is clear: the longer you wait, the farther the competition can pull ahead.

Jumping on social media platforms early gives you a tremendous advantage, because people are more engaged early on as they explore all the possibilities of the medium; there’s more chatter, more overall usage, and less noise to break through. You don’t have to shout and turn cartwheels to be heard. Being first on the scene is not all that counts, and you can certainly catch up later, but your cost of entry will be significantly higher, and you will work considerably harder.

The kind of impression you’re trying to make can’t be bought the way it could on the traditional media platforms. This isn’t just about hitting someone with an image so many times it sears your brand name into the person’s brain. It’s about building relationships, and relationships take time. The twelve months you wait to get in on this is twelve months that your competitor will have spent connecting and building goodwill and trust with customers who could have been your customers. On this platform, it’s not just the thirty or sixty seconds of a well-placed spot that have value—all time has value, just as it does in the real world.

During my first three and a half years of high school, I was so consumed by my baseball card business and my job at Wine Library, which was then called Shopper’s Discount Liquors, I hardly ever socialized with my classmates. Then, around spring break of senior year, I realized that I was about to miss out, and that I had one last chance to make up for it. So I threw myself into the social scene. I have an outgoing personality and a good sense of humor, and I became more popular pretty quickly. But do I have the same connection to high school friends as classmates who invested all four years into building relationships with each other? Absolutely not. Real, lasting friendships take emotional investment, and I took too long to decide to invest. Social media relationships and personal relationships work exactly the same way—you get out of them what you put into them. You can’t buy them, force them, or make them into something they’re not ready to be.

The longer you hesitate to build a presence on this platform, the more you will struggle to make it work for you. That’s why so many brands, especially celebrity brands, are having a hard time with it. Many big names are not jumping onto Twitter and Facebook because they fear that if they do it now, they could hurt their brand more than help it. What if they launch and their numbers aren’t impressive? What if they don’t attract the huge flock of followers or fans they think they have?* Though as I keep repeating, the number of people with whom you have connections is far less important than the quality of those connections, it’s just a fact that most of the world looks at those numbers and judges you for them. Low numbers could hurt a brand. If this platform worked like TV or radio, a celebrity or an established brand might just buy someone else’s fan base to make themselves look better, much the way companies buy up smaller companies or databases. But that’s just it; this platform doesn’t work at all like yesterday’s platforms. Even if you could take over someone else’s fan base to boost your numbers, those numbers exist only because of the relationship that’s been built, a relationship entirely dependent upon a sustained authentic interaction between brand and customer. Rihanna can’t buy Kanye West’s fans; Blue Bell can’t buy Ben and Jerry’s fans. Amazon can buy Zappos, but it can’t buy Zappos’ fans. Amazon could do what many acquirers do—fold the newly acquired company into the parent company, adapt the Zappos business processes to match their own, take over the Zappos warehouses, suck all the soul out of it and leave nothing intact but the logo. Amazon would have the customers, sure, but it would not have the customer relationships. If Zappos were no longer the Zappos they knew and loved, the customers would abandon ship, and ultimately Amazon would gain nothing from the acquisition. Fortunately, Amazon gets that the key to Zappos’ success is to leave it alone and keep its soul intact, so it will probably reap the benefits it was looking to buy.

You can catch the leader in your space only if you get in the pool. So what if some people notice your numbers are a little low? I believe we’re dawning on an era when more people will recognize the value of quality over quantity, but until then, the effect of low numbers on your brand will feel like a bee sting compared to the hemorrhaging gunshot wound it will feel like if you do nothing. Get in, and then start swimming better and faster than anyone else. You do this by being more genuine and more caring, by creating better content, by keeping your thumb on the pulse of the space, and by being more engaged. By being better. You have to act like the guy who falls for the girl who just got dumped by the love of her life. How the heck are you going to get her to let him go, and make her see that you’re worth ten of that dude? With an unbelievable amount of patience, persistence, and understanding. Do it right, with genuine feeling, and there’s a chance that one day she’ll look at you the same way she used to look at him.

People want to have close relationships with their brands. It still sounds a little weird today, but one day it won’t. The right time to start building those relationships is right now.

1. Social media is just another trend that will pass.

One reason why business and marketing leaders may be slow to accept social media is that for all the talk about how fast the business world is always changing and how speed is of the essence, platforms have historically remained remarkably steady. Newspapers and magazines have been luring us with attention-grabbing headlines and alluring pictures for hundreds of years. It wasn’t until 1922 that radio gave companies a new platform with which to experiment, and then businesses had to wait more than two decades before TV gave them another opportunity in the late 1940s and ’50s. After that, forty years went by before the Internet arrived.

Given how spoiled they’ve been by the predictability and stability of the one-way platforms they’re used to, it’s no surprise that most business and marketing leaders have been skeptical about the viability of social media as the next big one. But there’s a saying in the NFL: speed kills. Ten years ago, a five-foot-eight, 180-pound player would never have been drafted. Now, a really short, shifty, fast running back like Noel Devine can go into the first round. That’s how much the league has changed in a decade, and it has totally changed the game. Social media has changed the game in even less time, making levels of communication that would have been unthinkable ten years ago the norm today. The growth and technological shifts we are experiencing today have a faster and greater impact on business than they used to. You can’t expect any product’s penetration to follow the same pattern that, say, the Walkman did thirty years ago.

Some marketing planners don’t dismiss the idea of social media so much as they mistrust the sticking power of any particular platform. After all, in 2006 MySpace was hot, and within three years Facebook had overtaken it in terms of users and engagement. Why wouldn’t Facebook suffer the same fate when the next hot platform comes along? Well, if it’s not as good as the new thing, it will suffer the same fate as MySpace (though it should be noted that MySpace is not anywhere near dead yet, attracting 65 million unique users in September 2010, according to the market research company comScore). But it wouldn’t matter. If users one day abandon Facebook in favor of something better, they won’t be jumping off the train, they’ll simply be moving to a new car. Move with them. The relationships you’ve worked to build won’t evaporate so long as you follow your customers and keep up the caring. There have been plenty of lifelong friendships that started when someone from New York met someone from Florida while vacationing in Las Vegas. Before social media, they exchanged phone calls, and sent letters and holiday cards. Now they friend each other up. What happened in Vegas never has to stay in Vegas unless you choose to let the relationships you begin there die.

1. We need to control our message.

I would love to see that companies have recognized the stupidity of this argument by the time this book is in print, but I have a funny feeling many still won’t. A lot of companies resist building a Facebook wall, blogging, or starting a Twitter or YouTube account because an irate customer might post negative comments. So what? Would you prefer that the customer post them somewhere else where you have absolutely no way to reply? Or somewhere you can’t even find? If you’re that afraid of your customer, you might want to take a closer look at how you’re doing business.

You can’t control the message; that ship has sailed. Yes, things can go crazy-mad online, and companies have suffered from out-of-control negative word of mouth. But it’s highly unlikely that when companies sink under the weight of a mistake, it was entirely because of that mistake. If they folded, it was because there was something fundamentally wrong with the business model or with management that resulted in too many repeated problems. The one that brought the company to its knees wasn’t the only straw, just the final one that broke its back.

Small or midsize companies might fear that they wouldn’t survive a big faux pas the way a juggernaut might—like Tylenol, which suffered a blow almost thirty years ago when someone put cyanide in its pills and placed contaminated bottles back in stores—but they needn’t worry.

Overall, problems can be fixed if you catch them in time. If you plead your case quickly and sincerely, you’ll gain back the customers’ trust, as Ann Taylor did. When Ann Taylor LOFT introduced their silk cargo pants on their Facebook page in the summer of 2010, a wave of online customers complained that no one except a giraffe-sized, skinny model could possibly look good in them. To prove them wrong, LOFT employees of all heights and sizes posted photos of themselves wearing the pants. The response was extraordinary: tons of comments from women thanking LOFT for listening, some even admitting that they might wear the pants. This customer couldn’t be swayed, but her comment illustrates why it is in a brand’s best interest to nurture customer relationships:

I love LOFT and I sooooo appreciate you taking the time to “listen” to our comments and show these pants on “real” women. I hope you will continue to do this in the future. However, I still maintain these pants are UGLY. They dont even look like capris on #2. I did want to say thank you though and to let you know I shop at Loft, but these pants are FAIL. ;)

The customer still hates the pants, but now LOFT knows they’ve still got their evangelist out there, and there’s a good chance that she’s spreading the word.

When I first started working for my dad, any time a customer called or came to the store to complain, it would ruin his life. The man would go red in the face, he would get upset, he’d just want to go home. He was just crushed, which is a great testament to how much my father cared about his customers (and I respect and love him so much for being that way). I, on the other hand, was ecstatic when one of these unhappy customers called, because now that I knew there was a problem, I could try to fix it. I would spend the rest of my life fixing things for that customer if I had to. And it always worked, even when dealing with some of the toughest SOBs I have ever met. More than once I had to go to someone’s home and orchestrate a dinner and pour the wine—all for free. In this case, the cost of what I put into getting that customer back was rarely close to the yearly, maybe even lifetime, value of the customer (which is, by the way, the huge advantage that companies that aren’t trying to hit quarterly numbers have over publicly held companies). But I was creating a culture, and I was establishing my brand. I wanted my employees to absorb my vibe and mission, and layer it over everything they did. It’s possible that I lost eight hundred bucks bringing a particularly difficult customer back into the fold. But every time I did something like that, I won, because I was strengthening the DNA of my employees and my company, which paid off in the long run.

I would never put myself out of business, so I lost only what I knew I could afford to lose. Anyone can scale that kind of service and attention. What’s great is that now it’s far cheaper to cater to your customers this way than it used to be. Back then I had to go to someone’s house and pair wines with food for dinner, which kept my efforts local. Now I can make a personalized video on YouTube for free and send it to anyone, anywhere, with a bottle of wine or a $100 credit. There are so many more channels we can now use to communicate our good intent directly to our customers, with a personal, individually customized message that is impossible to achieve through TV or print.

You can fix anything unless you’re doing something grossly wrong. If you’re putting rat poison in your pickles or using child labor, no matter how cheap or convenient you are compared to your competitor, you’re eventually going to lose. But if the only issue for the pickle company is that the new lid is too hard to twist off, or the new and improved flavor of your dill pickles is making people gag, you can do something about that.

I suspect that even BP has a prayer, and their screwup in the Gulf is one of the worst man-made environmental disasters we’ve ever seen. People were pissed off at Exxon for a while back in the 1980s, too—remember, when the Valdez ran aground and sprung a leak off the coast of Alaska? Exxon took a hit, but it’s not hard to find one of their gas stations almost anywhere in the country, even though there have always been plenty of other oil companies people could choose to buy from to refuel their cars. Tylenol is still going strong almost three decades after its cyanide scare, and it will certainly survive the two recalls it announced in 2010. People still go to see Hugh Grant movies. Over time, if a company or brand handles its disaster management plan properly, most people will forget, and even forgive.

Business leaders consistently underestimate two things. First, they underestimate people’s willingness to forgive. They are afraid to put up fan pages because they think any negative comment is equal to a 60 Minutes private investigation showing the whole world how much they stink. Very rarely is that the case, and if you are honest with your fans, followers, and customers, and allow them to see exactly what steps you are taking to make things right, the only feature 60 Minutes will be interested in doing on you will be for your savvy social media skills.

Second, they underestimate people’s bullshit radar. That’s why it never works when a brand launches an effort that effectively tries to trick people to retweet, like a “Fan me up and I’ll donate to Haiti” campaign, or tries to make something go viral. You can’t make something go viral. All you can do is put out fantastic content. If it’s that good, it will go viral all on its own. (And I’ll say it again: just donate to Haiti and shut up!)

The best thing you can do for your brand and your company is to make sure that you put the truth out there for anyone who wants to hear it. You want negative comments to show up on your fan page. The person who posts a negative comment is a customer you can talk to. The customer you should be scared of is the one who has a bad experience, doesn’t say a word, and never returns. Thinking about that person should keep you up at night. You have no idea how to get the person back, and you might not even realize that you’ve lost a customer. The person who says to you on Twitter, “I bleeping hate you!” is an awesome customer to have. If you can give alienated customers what they want, they will come back to you stronger than ever. Every time.

Giving people what they want doesn’t translate to caving every time someone makes an unreasonable demand or threatens to tweet out something ugly. You have to listen to your customers, but you don’t have to do what they tell you to do. Even if you can’t satisfy every desire, you can make it clear that you wish you could. You can express regret that someone is dissatisfied with the outcome of your exchange. You can try to offer an alternative. (For a model example of how a CEO should talk to an unhappy customer, see the email note from John Pepper of Boloco, in Chapter 4.) Many times people lash out because they feel as though it’s the only way to get some attention—the squeaky wheel gets the grease, after all.* Hear them, make the call, and explain why you made it. As long as you always take the high road, you will minimize the impact of their dissatisfaction on your business. Negativity launched online out of spite will be easily spotted as such if you keep your own tone polite and your message clear and consistent. Don’t bother to get into a debate, even if you’re right. It’s not worth the effort, and again, you won’t win.

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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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 six-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.

In the end, no matter what obstacles a company faces in the Thank You Economy, the solution will always be the same. Competitors are bigger? Outcare them. They’re cheaper? Outcare them. They’ve got celebrity status and you don’t? Outcare them. Social media gives you the tools to touch your consumer and create an emotion where before there might not have been one. It doesn’t matter if you’re not small or cool or sexy—people can get pumped up about the craziest stuff. I mean, really, who could have predicted the guy in a trench coat pulverizing iPhones in a blender? (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, check out willitblend.com. It’s fantastic!)

There is one thing that the speaker at the 1997 Chamber of Commerce dotcom talk got right: in the end, it is the businesses that have established strong relationships with their customers that will come out on top. It’s unfortunate that so many companies had to fall by the wayside while the Thank You Economy took shape, but now that it’s here, the playing field is becoming shockingly equal.