dangerouslyawesome

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 #25: Companies need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.

The issue with companies coming down from their Ivory Towers, as we’ve discussed repeatedly, is that companies aren’t particularly good at talking to people.

Worse, is that the real people inside the company that are good at talking and building relationships aren’t empowered by the company to do so.

At the Twestival in Philadelphia this past week, I met Phil Baumann and Carrie Estok. We had a really awesome discussion about Carrie’s work with Yelp (one of my favorite companies) as a community advocate, and the real value that she’s able to provide to the Philadlephia community, as well as the businesses being reviewed on Yelp.

If you’re not familiar with Yelp, it’s a review site. But unlike Amazon, it reviews businesses. And more importantly, it’s local. As we’ve discussed before, people don’t trust marketing nearly as much as they trust their peers, so the recommendations shared on Yelp are authentic and peer-to-peer. They can be good, they can be bad. They’re all honest, from the perspective of the author. And Yelp continues to find ways to capture the customer-to-customer conversations and expose them for the benefit of other customers, and ultimately, for the businesses being talked about as well.

I think part of why I like Yelp so much because of how “Cluetrain-y” their model is.

There’s two things I took away from my conversation with Phil and Carrie related to this thesis:

First, Yelp as a company embraced a mechanism for coming down from their Ivory Tower: hiring and empowering community advocates. This type of job has been recognized as extremely important for any community oriented business, and increasingly, any business at all.

While Carrie and I didn’t discuss this explicitly, I’m fairly certain that she’s able to do her job best because Yelp empowers her (having carefully selected her) to be their representative, and to represent the community she’s a part of.

That’s the difference. It’s impossible for “Yelp”, the business, to be a part of every community that they service. But they knew the importance of building quality relationships with their users and the businesses that their users review, so they needed representation. Furthermore, that representation would be most effective if it came from within the community. There was no Ivory Tower for that person to have to come down from. That person, in this case Carrie, is able to continue being a member of the Philadelphia community and have the tools and facility that Yelp provides at her disposal. Yelp trusts her to be an ambassador for their communication. If they didn’t, there would be no point to having her on staff.

The second takeaway from our conversation will address the next thesis, Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.

Last weekend at Social Dev Camp East, I was sitting in a session about location based services. We were talking about cool examples of location in apps, adoption rate, the barriars to adoption. We considered the fact that social apps are great for presence, but the implications of location as a part of that presence were not only bordering on intrusive, but didn’t really have a huge payoff for the user so the attraction to adopt was low.

At one point, J.P Toto (one of our illustrious BarCampPhilly organizers) told a story about how he’d recently had his car break down in an area he wasn’t familiar with. Rather than panic, or even run for the phone book, he knew exactly what to do: he pulled out his iPhone and fired up the Yelp app. It automatically discovered where he was, and typing in “towing service”, the search became instantly relevant to his location. In just a couple of taps, he was on the phone with a reputable, nearby towing service was on it’s way.

After telling this story, one of the other session attendees pointed out that this was an example of success in location-based apps: when they behave as “Big Mother” (a guiding force) rather than “Big Brother” (an imposing, controlling force). I’d like to give credit to the session attendee who came up with this phraseology as I really love it – but I don’t know who it was. If anyone knows, speak up!!

“Big Brother” is a common concern when it comes to privacy, but I think that privacy is just one layer of intrusion. People don’t like feeling like their lives or experiences are being intruded into, especially with the purpose of being sold.

They DO, however, like it when their quality of life is improved and made easier.

Consider this when you’re working on your social marketing initiatives.

Having a clear value proposition is helpful, though it’s not always possible. In these cases, you can to create a related tangential value proposition – something that guides them rather than controls them – to gain their attention.

Once you have that attention, be mindful of intrusive actions.

In social marketing, it’s critical be a guiding force rather than an imposing force. Be Big Mother instead of Big Brother.