Today, I spoke to Jay Baer, who is thePresident of social consultancy Convince & Convert, and author of the forthcoming book The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social. In this interview, Jay talks about why and how businesses should be and shouldn’t be engaging with customers, and more.
What is the NOW revolution and why did you write this book NOW?
The NOW Revolution occurs when customers’ demands to engage with businesses immediately and authentically force major shifts in company structure and behavior. We wrote the book because that tipping point has just been reached. But yet, most companies are trying to succeed in real-time and on the social Web with yesterday’s playbook. Many Facebook pages are nothing but Yellow Pages ads 2.0, for example.
Can you talk about the notion of winning and losing customers in real-time?
“In this new era, every customer is a potential reporter.”
We routinely praise and punish brands in a matter of seconds. Companies can amplify the positive and mitigate the negative by participating in these interactions with speed,
humility, and sociability. Danny Sullivan of SEO fame talks about the “anyone know” phenomenon in this regard. Search Twitter for “anyone know” + a term that relates to your industry. You’ll likely find tons of opportunities to interact in a useful, appropriate way that can create new customers or build loyalty among existing ones. In the book, we call this potential to win business by having your antenna up The Opportunity Economy.
What should be the selection criteria for selecting the right talent to evangelize your brand?
It’s much more about passion than experience. The reality is that if you don’t love the brand and what it stands for, you won’t be a particularly good advocate and steward of that brand. As Jamie Grove, the VP of Marketing at ThinkGeek pondered when we interviewed him for the book, “Why don’t car companies only hire people that love cars?”
Further, we see social becoming a skill, rather than a job. Most companies have dedicated, siloed social media persons today. Eventually, when the flood of customer contacts and inquiries via the social Web really soars, that centralization will become an impediment to speed. Social needs to be a part of many people’s jobs.
How do you get your brand to move along the Humanization Highway as you call it?
You can’t do it at bayonet point. Humanization isn’t forceable in any meaningful way. So much of social media success, at both the individual and corporate level, is cultural. If you believe in sociability, and if you believe that having conversations with customers that may not always revolve around your company is important, you’ll succeed. So much of what you talk about on this site is in alignment with that principle.
That said, the 5 steps on the Humanization Highway are ignoring, listening, responding, participating, and storytelling. Each move forward requires companies to broaden their social participation, both topically and from a personnel perspective.
What are some common mistakes brands make when it comes to interacting with customers in real-time?
- Most companies don’t interact in real-time. The perceived difference between a tweet answered in 2 minutes and a tweet answered in 15 minutes is tremendous. To be in the 2-minute business, you have to have constant listening and people empowered to respond fast.
- Expectation management. Some companies interact in real-time, but only some of the time. We put hours of operation on our front doors, and mention them on our voice mail messages, but we don’t acknowledge them in our social outposts. If you don’t monitor your Facebook page at night, say so. Let customers know what to expect. @xboxsupport does this well on Twitter.
- Businesses are trying to close the sale in a single contact. How about dinner and a movie first? The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but that difference is enormous. You earn the right to promote and sell in social media – as a person or as a company – by your demonstrated willingness to help others without immediate reward for yourself.
The great irony is that success in The NOW Revolution is often actually derived over the long term, not real-time.
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Jay Baer is a tequila-loving social media strategist and speaker, and President of social consultancy Convince & Convert. Founder of five companies, he’s worked with over 700 brands since 1994, including 25 of the Fortune 1000. His Convince & Convert blog is ranked among the world’s top marketing resources, and he’s the co-author of the much ballyhooed, forthcoming book The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social. Before becoming involved with digital marketing, he was a political consultant; a marketing director for an environmental services company; and a spokesman for a state government agency!