When is the last time a Tweet or a Facebook post caused you to buy something that you didn’t even realize you needed or wanted? When is the last time a negative post on social media caused you to think twice about frequenting a business again…or maybe caused you to retweet and share the frustration you read in the original post? Social media is here to stay and organizations, businesses, and leaders must be intentional about how they leverage the conversation.
If you were to do a survey of your customers…would they share that they feel valued and worthy of your time? Do your customers trust you to look out for their best interests?
Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia wrote The Thank You Economy to reflect his values as a leader and to share some of his own experiences with other businesses.
I highlighted several things while reading and have posted them below…
- When it comes down to it, the only thing that will never change is human nature. When give the choice, people will always spend their time around people they like.
- Great news is in the eye of the beholder.
- Word of mouth is back.
- Recommendations and contextual social search are the future.
- Social media is a great tool for putting out fires, but it’s an even better tool for building brand equity and relationships with your customers. Once you stop thinking about it as a tool for shutting customers up, and rather as a tool for encouraging customers to speak up, and for you to speak to them, a whole world of branding and marketing opportunities will unfold.
- Valuing every single customer is mandatory in the Thank You Economy.
- Your engagement has to be heartfelt, or it won’t work.
- It’s not the number of followers you have or “likes” you get, it’s the strength of your bond with your followers that indicates how much anyone cares about what you have to say. In this game, the one with the most real relationships wins.
- The Thank You Economy explains how businesses must learn to adapt their marketing strategies to take advantage of platforms that have completely transformed consumer culture and society as a whole.
- Even if only a small percentage of your customers become true advocates, there is a tremendous ROI in treating your customers as well as possible.
- 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.
- 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.
- “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors, or obsessing over customers, we [Amazon] always obsess over customers.” Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO
- Legacy trumps everything.
- ROI-return on investment replaced with RCV-relationship context value
- The companies that understand how to genuinely connect with their customers, online and offline, are the ones that will emerge over the next twenty-four and thirty-six months, putting significant distance between themselves and their competition.
- You never know what platform is going to explode. You never know which customer is going to mean the most to your business. The only way to prepare for all eventualities is to take some chances, and no matter what, treat every customer, online and in person, as though he or she is the most important customer in the world.
- Anyone waiting for the marketing landscape to stabilize before incorporating social media into his or her business strategy is living in a fantasy world. We’re riding a really, really fast train; the changes we’ve seen mark only the beginning of the transformations yet to come. Stable isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
- The day you recognize that the Thank You Economy exists, and you begin to take the steps necessary to execute properly within it, will be the day you ensure your business or brand a place in the future.