Les: Yeah.
Craig: I think you just spoke to that. I get why it’s called social media, it’s the society that we’re in and how we engage with our communities. Why do you think some companies do succeed and others seem to fail? It sounds like a redundant question, because it seems like we often answer that with fundamentals, principles. When it comes to social media, tell us why you think, outside of the key factors that you just mentioned, why don’t you share a couple of more things with us.
Les: I think that why companies succeed and some companies fail is, this big marketing thing. I used to be under the impression that social media is separate from marketing. I’m coming around to, I see how the two can marry each other or be married to each other. I think one enhances the other, you can’t replace the other. What I mean by that is, social media can’t replace marketing, and marketing can’t replace social media. I think if you look at some of the companies that are succeeding in it, without going into details and case studies, is the companies that are succeeding are being honest and they’re building a community. They’re doing it for the long term. They understand that their strategy is to create evangelists.
Strategy is to create people that are loyal to their brand or their organization. Their strategy is to talk about what their customers want to talk about, as opposed to telling them what to talk about. The ones that fail, are the ones that try to create a commercial on social media and wonder why it didn’t happen. They didn’t spend the time building up the trust and creating loyalty. The trust is a big thing, you’ve got to spend time building that trust before you can then cash out that trust. People want to go on social media and just have people buy stuff. If I don’t trust you, if you’re brand new and I don’t know you, I’ve never heard of you, until you build trust with me, I’m not going to buy anything from you.
I think the companies that are spending the time developing the success of trust and developing a atmosphere of, “We do what we say we’re going to do,” are the ones that are succeeding. The companies that are saying, “We want you to do what we tell you to do,” are the ones that are failing. There’s only been one company, that I’m aware of, that was successful in putting out a product and saying, “You need this,” and that was Apple. Every other company that has tried to do that hasn’t done so well. It’s about building that trust and trusting the people that work within that organization, and letting those people have a voice outside of the company where people can get to know them.
Think about it this way, would you buy a car from just a used car salesperson, or would you be more likely to buy a car from, same used car, from a college friend of yours, that you’ve known for all your life? That’s the same type of mentality that people now have to have. If I don’t know the people that work in the organization, I may not do business with them. Why do you think they have things called, Angie’s List? Its got a name to it, she’s on the commercials. You feel like you know her, you feel like you trust her. Clark Howard, he doesn’t sell anything, but he’s got a radio show that talks about how to do things the right way for your financial stability. You know him, you get to know him through his radio show, through the things that he says.
If you look at it from a social media standpoint, it’s about truly understanding who the voice is of your organization. Whether you have ten people working for you, or ten thousand to five hundred thousand people working for you.
Craig: To take advantage of a successful digital or social media strategy, what lessons do companies need to learn before they do that, to really take advantage of that?
Les: I think the biggest lessons, we’ve covered already, but the biggest lesson is that companies have to do thing differently than they have in the past. That hundred year old steadfast way of doing business is over. I think that some companies are having a hard, hard time learning those lessons. That mentality of, if I’m a public company especially, that mentality of, I’ve got to make sure the analysts are okay, and the shareholders are okay, and that’s it, is proving time and time again that it doesn’t work. I’ve got to make sure that not only the analysts are okay and the shareholders are okay, but my customers feel like we value them and the employees feel like we value them.
If you look at a great example, I always forget the name of the company, I wish I had written it down, the shoe company that …
Craig: Zappos?
Les: Yeah, Zappos. If you look at Zappos, they’ve always been really big on customer service. Special little gifts that may show up in their box by the people that are working on the line. They got big really fast. What recently happened, is they went through and they, basically, offered people buyouts to leave the company and told people that, “Okay, well maybe you’re not a good fit.” They’re going back in and recreating a world that made them successful. They’re saying, “Okay, we’ve gotten big, now we have some people who just look at this as a job. We don’t want those people working for us.”
