Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Social networks, of course, are the “buzz” in marketing circles today. Customer recommendations, word-of-mouth marketing, viral marketing – however you want to frame the issue, the study of social networks arises from the fact that human beings live their lives among interlaced networks of friends, whom they both influence and are influenced by. Malcolm Gladwell’s landmark book The Tipping Point is a good place to begin your study of this issue, but a whole host of new books are arriving on the scene every day with tips and techniques for benefiting from people’s social networks and their tendency to “spread the word” among friends and acquaintances. A very promising entry soon to appear is Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking (Sernovitz is CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association).

Now the truth is it’s not very interesting or useful to hypothesize some kind of terminological boundary between the theory of 1to1 and the theory of social networks. At best, this strikes me as an academic exercise with little to offer by way of advice or help for the enterprising marketing professional. Nevertheless, there may be a couple of issues worth thinking about.

First, the real interaction in a social network tends to be driven by “alpha” members – those people with the biggest rolodexes and the most influential views, who tend to be the most responsible for spreading the news, whatever it is. And certainly, to the extent you could identify these kinds of people – the key influencers in your customer population – then establishing trusting, 1to1 relationships with them would be very advantageous. Pharmaceutical companies and other firms have known this for decades, of course. A good pharma company sales organization will know which physicians have the most credibility with other doctors, and redouble its efforts to win over these particular clients.

Second, whether an alpha customer actually buys more from you for themselves, or gives you a higher profit because of their own patronage, is somewhat beside the point. Rather, you want an alpha customer’s good will because that customer will drive other customers to buy more from you. And since your objective is not simply to increase the business done by this type of customer, it’s quite possible your message to them should be different. You want to facilitate their spreading the word, so simply campaigning to gain a greater share of their business may or may not be the right course. In the pharma business, you might want key influencer physicians to have more current, concise and persuasive information about your drugs, for instance, so they will be aware of the latest issues when communicating with their peers. If your business has a fashion element to it, on the other hand, it might pay off grandly for you simply to give your alpha customers the shoes to wear, or the purse to carry, or even the hot new PDA to use.

But third, what about the dynamics of consumer to consumer communications? How, if at all, do 1to1 principles apply to the relationships among consumers themselves? On this issue, I confess I am stumped, at least for now. I do think that the I. D. I. C. method – identifying customers, differentiating them, interacting with them and customizing for them – is a good framework to apply to almost any kind of relationship management problem. Your relationship with Friend A will be quite different from your relationship with Friend B, because the friends are different themselves, the nature of the interactions are different, and so forth. But is it possible to use this idea to gain any advantage in encouraging word-of-mouth referrals in your business? Sorry, I just don’t know.

Anyone have any ideas?