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Cluetrain-a-Day 2009: People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

This post is part of a 95 post series discussing the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto as they relate to business in 2009. Read more about the series in the introduction post. And check out the rest of the series!

Thesis #5: People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

Listen first. Introduce yourself. Interact like a human being. Repeat.

What about the time in between that cycle, or between those cycles? Another aspect of marketing is establishing yourself as a leader in your field. Every day, more and more companies are beginning to get their heads around blogging, tweeting, and other methods of online publishing as a mechanism for posting news updates about their businesses.

The missed opportunity here is to use these publishing platforms for sharing more than the robotic, formulaic contents of press releases. Progressive companies are allowing their employees to share knowledge from the inside. The more editorial control that the company removes, the better these efforts tend to be. One of the original Cluetrain concepts was trusting your employees to know more than you do about whatever they’re best at. That’s what you hired them, right?

Then let them speak, and in their voice instead of yours!

This is a scary barrier to cross. What if they say something offensive? What if they misrepresent the brand? What if?

I think one of the best examples of a company embracing their internal voices on a large scale, and having more success than any of the negative alternatives, is Zappos.com.

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) is the proverbial “Tweeting CEO”. Beyond Tony himself being extraordinarily accessible and candid about his life and his business on Twitter, he’s gone one step further. He’s encouraged his employees to tweet, too. And not just about business stuff, but about whatever they want. Whatever they are thinking. Whatever they are doing. It’s up to them.

But Zappos didn’t stop there.

Zappos built a website that consumes all of their employees’ tweets and republishes them. A megaphone for the collective voice of Zappos employees, in real time, for anyone to read.

But Zappos didn’t stop there.

Zappos also runs a blog network within their company, with contributions from the CEO and COO, all the way through the depths of the company. These blogs share not just company news, but insights, event announcements, musings, and more. They rarely link back into their product catalog. Instead, Zappos uses these opportunities to provide value, and establish natual dialogue between their customers and their employees.

Why? Because people are interested in other people. We recognize the human voice in others, and identify with them. Companies are not human, so we humans do not identify with their voice. But if the voices within the company, the human voices, are allowed to shine, customers can once again identify with “the company”.

Rather than have an ivory tower with now windows or doors, Zappos purposely put not just one human face on their company, but hundreds (435 at the date of writing this). What are the odds of calling in an order or customer service request to Zappos and getting a twittering CSR? Reasonably high. And that’s the Zappos way. Tony explains that Zappos culture, the collective voice of Zappos, is Zappos brand.

The result is what we’re really interested in, right? Well how’s this for results.

Right before the new year, Zappos announced that they had achieved $1 Billion in annual revenue a full 2 years ahead of their anticipated goal, and attribute every bit of success to their customer inteaction and extrodinarily high value placed on corporate culture. From Tony:

Our focus continues to be on building our brand and our culture around providing the very best customer service and experience. Our hope is that 10 years from now, people won’t even realize that we started out selling shoes online. (emphasis added).

Zappos is close to that hopeful goal already. More and more people know that Zappos sells shoes, but they’re never talking about how great the shoes are; they’re talking about how great the service experience is. Need more evidence? Take a look at this tweet from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.


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09
Jan 2009
AUTHOR Alex Hillman
CATEGORY

elsewhere

COMMENTS 9 Comments
TAGS

  • http://www.nichedig.com/ Find Niches Online

    Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!

  • http://www.nichedig.com/ Find Niches Online

    Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!

  • Pingback: Doc Searls Weblog · Cluecade

  • http://www.mutantpop.net/radioclash/ tim from Radio Clash

    I can see some real problems with branding your employees – demanding their outside lives to be ‘for the company’ can lead to a Japanese company man paranoia for change or image projection.

    It’s one thing I have a problem with on Twitter – and I think @1938Media agrees with me on this – is that you can’t really express yourself while managing your personal or even worse, someone else’s brand. It leads to self-censorship and real Dooce issues.

    Some could say Zappo’s approach is rather cult like and insidious – the ‘culture fit’ can express itself in many ways – and the guardians of that – the HR departments – might not be the best people to ensure that. 4 weeks? Sounds like a bootcamp. Same idea?

    Social engineering, as the military and governments have found is very hard – bring it into the workplace via new technology and without either the company becoming more human (which you’d hope; but experience says otherwise, a company is not going to endorse sex drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, not really when VC and shareholders are breathing down their neck).

    Real privacy and Orwellian issues here I fear. What boundaries do companies have to filter or mould their employees to a brand? If the culture fit is wide enough then cool, but I think the first response to that linked article about brand by Tony Hsieh is telling – where the person asks about the layoffs and Tony doesn’t respond. Not really a good message?

    The happy fluffy brand can’t stay that way in times of recession, or hard decisions, and isn’t a mother when it actually has it’s own interests at heart – unlike a real mother.

  • http://www.mutantpop.net/radioclash/ tim from Radio Clash

    I can see some real problems with branding your employees – demanding their outside lives to be ‘for the company’ can lead to a Japanese company man paranoia for change or image projection.

    It’s one thing I have a problem with on Twitter – and I think @1938Media agrees with me on this – is that you can’t really express yourself while managing your personal or even worse, someone else’s brand. It leads to self-censorship and real Dooce issues.

    Some could say Zappo’s approach is rather cult like and insidious – the ‘culture fit’ can express itself in many ways – and the guardians of that – the HR departments – might not be the best people to ensure that. 4 weeks? Sounds like a bootcamp. Same idea?

    Social engineering, as the military and governments have found is very hard – bring it into the workplace via new technology and without either the company becoming more human (which you’d hope; but experience says otherwise, a company is not going to endorse sex drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, not really when VC and shareholders are breathing down their neck).

    Real privacy and Orwellian issues here I fear. What boundaries do companies have to filter or mould their employees to a brand? If the culture fit is wide enough then cool, but I think the first response to that linked article about brand by Tony Hsieh is telling – where the person asks about the layoffs and Tony doesn’t respond. Not really a good message?

    The happy fluffy brand can’t stay that way in times of recession, or hard decisions, and isn’t a mother when it actually has it’s own interests at heart – unlike a real mother.

  • http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com alexknowshtml

    @tim: I think this really boils down to a cultural disparity, and one that I know for a fact is capable of being torn down (or never put up in the first place).

    Fear and perception of what we’re to be afraid of, behavior wise, is changing.

    Let me be clear: I don’t believe in imposing a culture, corporate or otherwise. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to succeed at imposing culture long term. Ultimately, imposed culture becomes a lie as well. And if I’ve learned anything from history books, lies aren’t sustainable.

    Maybe (to one of your points) this is a recruitment issue. Does modern HR know what the company needs, or more importantly, what the candidate needs? A resume certainly isn’t honest, for the same reasons I renounce the “pitch” as a mechanism for communication. When’s the last time you saw a resume that included someone’s weaknesses? It’s only ever half of the story and therefore not 100% honest.

    This whole game is just that: a game. This isn’t about designing and imposing a culture, it’s about setting a framework for it, based on a shared understanding between employer and employees, and growing it together. I think that’s why Zappos has been successful with what would be an otherwise radical corporate design.

  • http://alexhillman.myopenid.com Alex Hillman

    @tim: I think this really boils down to a cultural disparity, and one that I know for a fact is capable of being torn down (or never put up in the first place).

    Fear and perception of what we’re to be afraid of, behavior wise, is changing.

    Let me be clear: I don’t believe in imposing a culture, corporate or otherwise. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to succeed at imposing culture long term. Ultimately, imposed culture becomes a lie as well. And if I’ve learned anything from history books, lies aren’t sustainable.

    Maybe (to one of your points) this is a recruitment issue. Does modern HR know what the company needs, or more importantly, what the candidate needs? A resume certainly isn’t honest, for the same reasons I renounce the “pitch” as a mechanism for communication. When’s the last time you saw a resume that included someone’s weaknesses? It’s only ever half of the story and therefore not 100% honest.

    This whole game is just that: a game. This isn’t about designing and imposing a culture, it’s about setting a framework for it, based on a shared understanding between employer and employees, and growing it together. I think that’s why Zappos has been successful with what would be an otherwise radical corporate design.

  • http://blog.robfore.com Rob Fore

    It’s true, giving a voice to the people who are interacting with prospects and customers is critical if you want to have a real “business” versus a personal brand. If you build a business solely on the CEOs voice, what happens when the CEO is no longer speaking? We have employees and outsource personnel who are much more known, liked and trusted than the CEO or other Chief Muckity-Muck because they have the upfront, daily relationship.

  • http://blog.robfore.com Rob Fore

    It’s true, giving a voice to the people who are interacting with prospects and customers is critical if you want to have a real “business” versus a personal brand. If you build a business solely on the CEOs voice, what happens when the CEO is no longer speaking? We have employees and outsource personnel who are much more known, liked and trusted than the CEO or other Chief Muckity-Muck because they have the upfront, daily relationship.