It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

—Dick Cavett

So far we have been talking about interaction and dialogue as if the only thing of importance to a marketer is the dialogue that can take place between an enterprise and a customer. But customers are human beings, and humans prefer conversing with other humans much more than with brands or businesses. Humans are social animals, and the same Internet-based technologies that have made it possible for businesses to interact directly with their customers have also made it possible for humans to interact socially with other humans anywhere on the planet. Moreover, the capabilities inherent in the Internet, via computers, mobile phones, and other devices, make it possible for individual consumers to produce vast quantities of their own content, from blogs and written comments, to pictures, podcasts, and videos. People can now create their own content and then upload it to the network for others to see on a wide array of social platforms, from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube. They can choose to make the content available only for select friends or associates, or for a variety of categories of other users, or for everyone.

The “social media revolution” that has occurred as a result of these new technological capabilities may actually dwarf the Industrial Revolution in its ultimate impact on the human race, eventually making possible an entirely new, noneconomic production system based not just on money and exchanges of value, but on social ties, trust, generosity, status, and informal “normative” mores. Complex works and projects, from open source software, such as the Linux operating system or the Mozilla family of Web browsers, to detailed and evolving documents such as the user-generated reference work Wikipedia, provide small previews of how this new production system might function and flourish.

But this is a topic for another book. What we are concerned with here is how these rapidly flourishing social ties among people, mediated by a proliferating assortment of software and interactive technologies loosely termed social media, are likely to alter an enterprise’s ability to interact with its customers and prospects and to create and manage profitable, mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Social media can be employed by an enterprise in a number of ways, but we should highlight four that are highly important for an enterprise trying to build stronger customer relationships:

1. Engaging and activating the enterprise’s most enthusiastic supporters to “spread the word” about the brand.
2. Empowering customers to defend the enterprise’s brand in times of stress, and help it recover from missteps or disasters.
3. Listening in on customer conversations that involve the enterprise and/or its competitors.
4. Enlisting the enterprise’s own customers (and, sometimes, other volunteers) to help provide service for other customers

Listening to Customers

Social media are two-way media, and in most cases the interactions and dialogues on social media sites have been initiated and are largely conducted by private individuals, not by company representatives or officials. This means the conversations are objective, frank, and highly informative. They can serve as an excellent resource for understanding what a brand’s own customers are thinking about the brand. Yes, “listening” has never been part of most mass marketers’ primary skill set, but forward-thinking companies are now realizing what an invaluable resource these social media conversations actually provide. In the next contribution, author and consultant Becky Carroll outlines some of the do’s and don’ts of social media listening.

Age of Transparency

If there is one all-pervasive requirement for social media effectiveness, by people and companies alike, it is the need for honesty, straightforwardness, and transparency. On one level, these values are driven by people themselves, because no one will tolerate deception and dissembling for long in any ordinary social relationship. Trustworthiness is probably the most important element when it comes to social relations among people, and if companies wish to engage in the same kinds of social relations as people do, then trustworthiness will be required of them as well.

It may be shameful to reflect on, but traditional mass marketing does not really require trustworthiness at all. It merely requires believability. Marketing and public relations (PR) messages are carefully crafted to be as appealing as possible, and the “spin” put on a tagline or a press release is an important marketing asset. Inherent in the whole idea of spin is the fact that there is a genuine reality— presumably known to the marketer or the author of the spin—while a separate, created reality is meant to be conveyed by the spin. Because they aren’t stupid, and they know that sellers have a vested interest in persuading them to part with their money, customers have learned to maintain a healthy skepticism about advertising claims, in general. Consumer research bears this fact out. One report found that 14 percent of consumers say they trust advertisements while 78 percent trust the opinions of their peers, and more than half trust total strangers whose opinions they find online. There is nothing evil here, and no one can really blame a marketer for wanting to put a brand or a story in the best possible light. The only reason such deception was tolerated in the past, however, was that it was beyond anyone’s capacity to detect, and even when the deception was detected, it was beyond anyone’s capacity to spread the news. But no longer. Spin is out, transparency is in, and the fact that this higher ethical standard is being applied today by more and more consumers in a wider and wider variety of marketing and selling situations owes much to the social media revolution and to the kind of word-of-mouth recommendations and experience sharing that goes on among consumers now electronically.

As Interactions Multiply, Trust Becomes More Important

Trust has always been touted as important, certainly. But one of the most important implications of a more highly interconnected world is the increased level of trust and trustworthiness we expect from others. The fact is that trust is becoming a more essential attribute of human culture, for several reasons, as people connect with one another more efficiently. First, of course, is the simple fact of transparency. The more interacting we do, the more transparent things will inevitably become. From WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring¹⁶ to a cable TV repairman asleep on your couch¹⁷ or an airline’s luggage handlers mistreating bags,¹⁸ people will find things out.

It’s important, however, not to confuse transparency with trustworthiness itself. Transparency increases the importance of trust because if something can be transparently exposed to the light of day without causing undue embarrassment then it must be considered inherently trustworthy and ethical. On the other hand, the reverse is not true. Keeping a secret might be valid for reasons of discretion, privacy, or competition, and not exposing everything all the time does not necessarily imply unethical or untrustable behavior. Businesses and governments have legitimate reasons for keeping secrets, and often these reasons are even enforced by laws and regulations. If your marketing department, for instance, were to voluntarily release its confidential pricing plans for a new product, tipping off your competitors, your executives could be jailed for collusion.

In September 2006, Wal-Mart set up a blog entitled “Wal-Marting Across America,” which featured two intrepid recreational vehicle (RV) owners, known only as Jim and Laura, driving from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart across the United States, visiting stores to buy things and interviewing a whole stream of ever-upbeat Wal-Mart employees, and then posting their insights on the blog. Other bloggers, however, suspected that Jim and Laura were fictitious, and not “real” people driving their RV across the country. Soon it was revealed that the two bloggers were actually paid contract writers for Wal-Mart and that they had been hired by Edelman Public Relations, the company’s PR firm, to create a series of glowing articles. This ignited a firestorm of protest from others in the blogosphere, and Richard Edelman himself apologized on his own blog for having created the idea.¹⁹

Enterprises wanting to engage their consumers via social media need to be highly cognizant of the requirement for straightforward transparency in all social media communications. If a company creates a blog for communicating with customers and others, it has to pay close attention to the authenticity and sincerity of its postings. Spin and marketing language are just not close enough to transparency for the blogosphere. A blog can be an incredibly powerful and persuasive tool for an enterprise, but only if it is used in a trustworthy and honest way.

In his manual for companies engaging their customers in social media, The New Influencers, Paul Gillin argues:

The premium on transparency may be the single greatest cultural shift that businesses will face as they engage with social media. The move from messages to conversations will tax many marketers and swamp some. The emerging culture of transparency and openness in social media is a story taking shape, but it’s clear that companies that choose to participate will need to speak to their communities in very different ways.²⁰

Wal-Mart eventually came back to the blogosphere with a series of honest, employee-written blogs—conversational postings from real people about real issues, treated personally. Many of the employees who author various blog posts for Wal-Mart will write about their own kids’ baseball teams in one posting, and the next day their posting will give the “straight skinny” on the best deals at their particular Wal-Mart store that day. Occasionally, a Wal-Mart blogger will even advise readers what products aren’t such good deals. Most companies that have figured out how to infuse their social media activities with honesty, transparency, and authenticity have come at it from the same direction. Several thousand employees at Microsoft, for example, write occasional blog posts about their work, their company’s products, and their lives in general. At most companies that have well-respected blogs that attract communities of customers, the blog-writing process itself is only loosely supervised as to content. Rules are applied to ensure quality writing and honest opinions, and to avoid legal issues and other potential dangers, but within these rules, forward-thinking enterprises allow their employees to create their own content.

So what about the opposite of faking your own good reviews? What if a competitor poses as your customer and posts a negative review?

This can be a problem in an online world characterized by anonymous user IDs, where masquerading is practical and easy and registrations can be treated as disposable. Remember the old New Yorker cartoon? On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.²¹

But here’s the point of transparency: Any competitor who stoops to this kind of dirty trick is playing a very dangerous game himself. Even if he succeeds for a while in remaining anonymous, sooner or later he is likely to be outed by the same transparency dynamic that operates on everyone else, and technology’s advances make this a more and more probable outcome.

For example, Samsung faced a lawsuit in Taiwan and significant fines when the company was accused of hiring students in South Korea to post negative reviews of a competitor’s product and positive comments about its own. When the deceit was sniffed out, as it so often is, Taiwan Samsung felt compelled to make a public apology on Facebook, reaffirming its values of honesty and transparency.²² Posting positive book reviews for a fee has become a lucrative business for many as favorable reviews boost sales for authors. One provider of fraudulent reviews was eventually exposed by an angry customer who posted a negative review of his service, saying he didn’t produce the quality of review she felt she deserved for her money. Consequently, Google took ads for the reviewer’s services off its site, and Amazon removed his reviews from its database.²³ The problem, however, continues to loom large. Bing Liu, a researcher at the University of Illinois–Chicago who is working on a program to detect illegitimate reviews, estimates “one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake.”²⁴

A sockpuppet is an online anonymous persona employed to hide a person’s identity. And sockpuppeting has become a time-honored technique not just for protecting your own privacy but also for getting up to mischief—deceiving others, manipulating opinion, cheating on your spouse or partner, or violating trust in some other way.

Fake reviews and other forms of “opinion spam” are a significant enough threat that sites depending on reviews for their credibility have often put in place complex algorithms designed to filter out fakes. These algorithms are similar to the spam filters that block out inauthentic e-mail messages. Yelp blocks a substantial number of the reviews it receives, but it also allows you to view the blocked reviews. The company won’t discuss its algorithm. One Cornell research team publicized the fact that they had developed a new set of algorithms for detecting opinion spam, and they were immediately approached by a number of firms, including Hilton Hotels, TripAdvisor, and Amazon.²⁵

Amazon’s customer review system is considered integral to the success of the company. Amazon has made several moves to protect this asset and its credibility. Amazon’s review system averages all the ratings submitted for a product to award it a star rating, one to five stars. Fake reviews, or reviews bought by sellers to boost rating of product and sales, undermine the system. In April 2015, Amazon sued four Web sites that offer review writing and placement services for a fee, and in October 2015, it sued more than 1,114 providers of fake review services.²⁶

In June 2015, Amazon rolled out a new review platform that has learning technology. Developed in-house, the new system “will give more weight to newer reviews, reviews from verified Amazon purchasers, and those that more customers vote up as being helpful.”²⁷ The new criteria for sorting reviews will affect the order the reviews appear in and the calculation of the five-star rating. Amazon also solicits reviews of products from verified buyers to boost reliable product assessment. Amazon is believed to have the largest review bank, outranking even big specialist stores in certain categories. And though thought to be by some a rather clunky example of social media, no one argues with the Amazon review system’s success for leveraging community feedback.²⁸

But something interesting about the e-social revolution is that it is rapidly reducing the usefulness of anonymous comments when it comes to sharing and evaluating brands, opinions, products, or services. One of Facebook’s biggest assets, for instance, is that it’s almost impossible to pose as someone else on the service. After all, who’s going to “friend” someone they never heard of? And if you do agree to be friended by someone you don’t know very well, isn’t it because you share some mutual acquaintances, or perhaps a school or business relationship? Chris Kelly, Facebook’s onetime head of privacy, maintains that “the friend infrastructure and an identity base ultimately is the key to safety. Trust on the Internet depends on having identity fixed and known.”²⁹

One of the quickest ways for people to verify the trustworthiness of information or opinion, including product reviews, is to see whether their friends or associates find it trustworthy—if they vouch for it.

So as the importance of trust increases and our e-social connections multiply, you can look for a rising number of services and applications that allow consumers to filter what they pay attention to by tapping the opinions or judgments of their friends and colleagues. More and more, it becomes a part of the “experience” on the way to buying or using a product or service, as well as living the rest of life.

This kind of social filtering will soon come to dominate how people evaluate information and opinion for its trustability. Rather than just looking at the opinions of complete strangers when they evaluate a product or service, your customers will very possibly check the opinions of their friends first. Or of the friends of their friends.

So, although many customers have more trust in a five-star review from a stranger they never heard of (and who could easily be a paid shill) than they do of advertising claims, customers will more and more be able to see what their friends, or the friends of their friends, or maybe even their friends, have said about some product or service.

Today, of course, we are just scratching the surface of consumer-to-consumer interaction. In 15 or 20 years, Moore’s law suggests there will likely be a thousand times as many product and service reviews and a thousand times as much information content, from news articles to blog posts and Twitter trends. And 15 or 20 years after that we’ll have a million times as much as today. So service applications that get the jump on helping consumers benefit from social filtering are likely to see a strong competitive advantage within just a few years, because we’ll all be relying more and more on our friends’ opinions for help. It will be part of a trusted relationship in the long run and part of the customer experience in the short run.

If a company wants to influence social sentiment, but in a trustable way, forget sockpuppeting and instead start by trying to think about what actually motivates an influential blogger or Twitter user—someone whose opinions matter to thousands of followers. Yes, most key influencers would be offended if you offered to compensate them for a favorable post, but they are still human beings, and like all the rest of us, they have ambitions too. They want to be noticed and to increase their own influence. They want to write better, more original and authoritative posts. And there are a number of noneconomic services or benefits you can provide to key social media influencers that will help them achieve some of these ambitions. If you’re a student of employee motivation, what we’re talking about here is focusing not on “extrinsic” benefits, such as compensation and perks, but on “intrinsic” benefits, such as appreciation, encouragement, camaraderie, and fulfillment.

And before delving into the intrinsic benefits that influencers will find most appealing (see sidebar), a quick word of caution: Be sure you understand your influencers’ own perspectives. The overwhelming majority of social influencers do not consider themselves to be experts on any particular business category, company, or brand per se. Rather, they think of themselves as having an authoritative point of view with respect to some particular issue or problem of concern to them and their followers. It might be a business issue or a health issue or a relationship issue. But it’s unlikely that they will think of their own central mission in terms of rating or evaluating the products and services offered by you or your competitors. Their central mission is to be of value to their friends and followers—those who depend on their opinion and thinking. Talking favorably or unfavorably about a particular brand or product has to be seen in this context—as a service they are performing for the benefit of their own network of friends.

Influencing the influencers, if done right, will help empower customers to share their ideas and thoughts with other customers, to help other customers solve their problems, and to simply participate more in the social world that surrounds every set of commercial transactions. In addition to the benefits a company will realize in terms of being seen as more trustable, this kind of customer-oriented activity is almost certainly going to create better customer experiences and generate additional revenue and business as well. Twenty-year-old eBay, for instance, created customer support forums for its customers so buyers and sellers could exchange tips and suggestions, but it later found that customers who were active users of the support forums were generating 50 percent more revenue for the firm!

As a result of social media, the word gets out, and it can’t be stifled. Secrets—particularly dirty, nasty, deceptive secrets—are quickly exposed for what they are. “Word of mouth” spreads faster than ever through social media, as customers share their experiences and impressions with each other. Good products are easier to find by checking out customer reviews, and bad products die quicker deaths, as people communicate with each other more and more prolifically. Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2009 movie Bruno, for example, was apparently awful, at least in the eyes of those who paid to go see it the night it was released. In an event remarkable for its speed and severity, box office receipts fell 40 percent within 24 hours of the movie’s release, as opening-night viewers texted and tweeted it into oblivion, interacting with their friends through what is now a vast social media infrastructure. According to L.A. Times film critic John Horn, this rapid a death for a bad movie was unprecedented. “Even if they had a turkey, [studios] used to get two weeks of business before the stink really caught up to the film,” according to Horn. “Now they have 12 hours.”³⁰ In 2015, Ted 2 suffered instantly, whereas Max, a hero dog story, and Jurassic World prospered so fast that theatres had to reconfigure the number of screens offering the popular films.³¹

Most people are familiar with the kinds of product reviews that usually can be obtained online for a variety of purchases. Surprisingly, however, a majority of companies, at least as of this writing, do not host those kinds of reviews on their own Web sites. That is, only a small minority of marketers allow their customers to post honest reviews of the products and services that they sell, for the benefit of other customers. Research shows that when an enterprise allows honest reviews on its own Web site, its closing ratios increase—that is, the percentage of shoppers who go ahead and make purchases improves. So it is puzzling that more companies aren’t already hosting product reviews. Regardless of whether it’s through Google or someone else, the technology is readily available, and the consumer demand for this kind of service may be irresistible, because humans want to talk to other humans. And when they talk about products, they won’t be talking about the spin on the tagline or brand promise. They’ll be talking about their own customer experience with the product. Before customers connected, advertising ruled. Now that customers talk to each other, it’s the customer experience that counts.

Summary

In this chapter, we have outlined how a forward-thinking enterprise can best employ the tools and capabilities of social media to engage with customers. Our goal here has been to discuss the principles, since the technology will continue to change rapidly. Without question, social media has exponentially increased opportunities for companies to interact with their customers and develop Learning Relationships at rates previously impossible. But at the same time, successful marketing today requires a much higher standard of trustworthiness and transparency.

Enterprises, however, cannot simply interact with individual customers and expect them to remain loyal. The Learning Relationship must mature even further. The enterprise needs to address another task in the Identify-Differentiate-Interact- Customize process by customizing the relationship with each customer—by modifying how it behaves with her, how it communicates with her, and how it manufactures products or provides services for her. A relationship can’t exist without customization; without a change in behavior that results from feedback, the best a company can do is give the appearance of a relationship. But how can customization be done effectively and efficiently? We take a closer look at that issue in Chapter 10, after we consider the privacy issue that inevitably arises when we address customer interaction and data.

Food for Thought

1. You’ve been appointed as the new chief marketing officer (CMO) for a large packaged-goods company. Your CEO has decided that your company will be the premier “relationship” company in your industry.
   • What could that mean?
   • How will you execute that?
   • What will you use as data collection tools?

   • What role will interactivity play in your plans?

     What role will e-mail play? Mobile devices? Social networking platforms? Be as specific as you can.

2. Now imagine you work for a large automotive company and answer all the questions in number 1. Are your answers different? Why or why not?
3. Now answer the questions in number 1 for:
   • A natural gas company
   • A retail shoe chain
   • A company that makes pneumatic valves for construction
   • The U.S. Navy
   • Other kinds of organizations (you decide)
4. What do you think about Comcast customers taking Frank Eliason’s place for the day? Would you ever help a fellow consumer through Twitter or Amazon or any other Web site? Would you be shocked if a stranger offered to help you?

Glossary

Age of Transparency

The era of human history characterized by increasing levels of transparency in all human affairs, as a result of the pervasive interconnectedness of people, using social media and other ubiquitously available communications technology.

Complaint discovery

An outbound interaction with a customer, on the part of a marketer, to elicit honest feedback and uncover any problems with a product or service in the process.

Crowd service

Customers helping other customers solve problems online.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

As a term, CRM can refer either to the activities and processes a company must engage in to manage individual relationships with its customers (as explored extensively in this book), or to the suite of software, data, and analytics tools required to carry out those activities and processes more cost efficiently.

Customer service

Customer service involves helping a customer gain the full use and advantage of whatever product or service was bought. When something goes wrong with a product, or when a customer has some kind of problem with it, the process of helping the customer overcome this problem is often referred to as customer care.

Most valuable customers (MVCs)

Customers with high actual values but not a lot of unrealized growth potential. These are the customers who do the most business, yield the highest margins, are most willing to collaborate, and tend to be the most loyal.

Needs

What a customer needs from an enterprise is, by our definition, synonymous with what she wants, prefers, or would like. In this sense, we do not distinguish a customer’s needs from her wants. For that matter, we do not distinguish needs from preferences, wishes, desires, or whims. Each of these terms might imply some nuance of need—perhaps the intensity of the need or the permanence of it—but in each case we are still talking, generically, about the customer’s needs.

Open source

Products (software, etc.) created by unpaid individuals, usually in collaboration with others online, typically distributed for free.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The process of affecting the visibility of a Web site or a Web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as natural, organic, or earned results. [Wikipedia]

Social filtering

The practice of relying on opinions or judgments of friends and colleagues, particularly when evaluating the reliability of product reviews.

Social media

Interactive services and Web sites that allow users to create their own content and share their own views for others to consume. Blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter) are a form of social media, because users “publish” their opinions or views for everyone. Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace are examples of social media that facilitate making contact, interacting with, and following others. YouTube and Flickr are examples of social media that allow users to share creative work with others. Even Wikipedia represents a form of social media, as users collaborate interactively to publish more and more accurate encyclopedia entries.

Sockpuppet

An online anonymous persona employed to hide a person’s identity.

Word of mouth (WOM)

A customer’s willingness to refer a product or service to others. This referral value may be as small as an oral mention to one friend, or a robust announcement on social media, or may be as powerful as going “viral.”