Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Adore.
Adore who?
Adore is between us. Open up!
When I was a child, "Knock Knock" jokes were one of the many jokes doing the rounds that you would hear at school.
"Knock Knock" jokes are actually a great metaphor for the way you should talk to and engage with clients today. What happens is that there is a "permission" conversations that takes place. It's a two way conversation.
In the past, brands would interrupt you and then broadcast a message. Advertising, unsolicited emails, cold calling is all based on this notion. It's a bit like a company standing on top of a building with a megaphone and shouting. "We are number one", "We are the biggest" etc, etc and of course we don't care.
What's changed? The internet, social media and mobile.
While in the past, people took these interruptions as it was a way of finding what was going on. Now we have access to an infinite amount of information, so the psychology of the buyer has shifted and we hate being interrupted, we hate being pitched too. Nobody get up in the morning and says "the first thing I want to do today is talk with a salesperson". The internet, social media and mobile means I can go online, in sales avoidance mode and buy whatever we want.
We all research what we want to buy, read reviews, all without a salesperson pushing their product down our throats.
How about if brands stopped shouting at us and interrupting us, but started listening to us and having a conversation? Here's a great case study of how corporate marketing isn't working.
I'm going to pick a company at random, which has 74,000 employees and probably millions of customers. Based on a Permission Marketing form of marketing they should have all their employees (or most of them) listening to them on social and they would have all their customers listening to them. They should therefore have literally millions of followers on social. They have a total of 347,575 followers on Twitter.
Something is obviously wrong. It's wrong because they are broadcasting how great the company is and of course, nobody cares. There cannot be much going on at the company as the last Tweet was in February and I'm writing this in May.
Let's look at an approach of using social media and activating their employees. Even if they only activated 10% of the workforce and if that 10% of the workforce had only 100 followers, they would have a network of 740,000 first degree connections. Double what they currently have.
If you activated 30% of the employees and those employees all had 500 followers, which is a more likely result, the first degree connects would be 11 Million.
So what do they need to do? They need to stop broadcasting and they need to start listening and then they need to start engaging. They also need to empower their employees to talk online. This is NOT another channel to stuff social media with all that corporate content that people are ignoring. But for the employees to be themselves and to talk on social in an authentic way.
Just think, not only will you reach 11 million people (not the current 347,575) but that 11 million will share and amplify that content.
So by listening to your clients, engaging with your customers on social media and empowering you staff to talk on social in an authentic way. You will get the sales people, more leads and meeting, sell more, reach more people with your brand message and turn your business into the employer of choice. That would be a great legacy for any CMO, CEO, CFO, CDO etc..
The only way to provide a good experience is to listen to what your customer is saying. If done right, listening paths can help you gain insight into the mind of your customer. They can also help you identify what you’re doing well, and what you need to do to stay ahead of the competition.
