Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Shi is right. For the cost of the time it takes to write as few as 140 characters we can give many others a sense of ourselves and our thoughts. Social media is useful for maintaining a new category of casual relationships, as well as those we hold especially close. So it is natural for us to want to find a way to use this powerful relationship maintenance technology with a wide circle of customers. Why then is it so difficult?

I suspect that keeping up relationships with customers is harder because the original relationship is more tenuous to begin with. Seriously, there is little or no foundation for a social relationship with most of the people who buy our products and services. Even the casual relationship you struck up last year at your cousin's wedding a thousand miles away has more to it than the default relationship that exists between you and the person who bought your widget.

That reality notwithstanding, we think nothing of trying to sell another widget through the social channel, even though one of them might be a lifetime supply for most people. We socialize the relationship because it's free and the cost of missing an opportunity is larger than the cost of annoying someone. Or is it?

An economist might tell you that the only reason the cost is so low is that we externalize the downside -- we don't count or even contemplate the relationship damage we might be doing by spamming through social media. It's like not counting the healthcare costs from the increased incidence of asthma from a new power plant.

That's where Habit 5 comes in, and with that comes the other side of social media. I have been covering social networking topics since 2002, well before things like Twitter or Facebook were available but right when Linked-in, Plaxo, and other networking sites were coming to market. But the biggest game in town in 2002 was communities.

A community was where smart companies began to go to implement their own versions of Habit 5 -- the "seek first to understand" part. Before communities there were surveys and focus groups and they were expensive to operate and time consuming to administer, so much so that few companies bothered with them. A good focus group could take you six weeks to find out what happened yesterday, but I digress.

A corporate social media strategy shouldn't be exclusively about blogging or tweeting or having a storefront on Facebook. It needs to incorporate the inbound as well as the outbound, to seek to understand. Companies that know this have very successful social media strategies that usually incorporate communities in one form or another. Those that don't, have people in marketing running around trying to figure out what self-serving message to put on the CEO's blog post this week.

I love Habit 5. Seven years of research tells me it's right. It's simple, direct, and clear. Understand?

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About the Author: Denis Pombriant is the founder and principal analyst of Beagle Research. He blogs frequently on the Beagle Blog.