Or, It's the People, Stupid

Just stumbled across this as I was browsing around looking for something interesting: Charlene Li's post "Web 2.0/social computing explained, thanks to Common Craft."

The video itself I think hits the right notes in terms of demonstrating the value of social media, such as bookmarking tools, to the uninitiated. If I had my druthers, I'd put together something similar in rolling out a suite of social networking services in support of enterprise communities, whatever the context.

Strikes me, too, that in this Brave New World of ours, we've got to break the mold of corporate-speak and do what we can to humanize, as Josh Hallett suggests elsewhere, the ways that companies relate with their customers. The long-term impact on the "bottom line" could be enormous, if we really begin to think about business in terms of relationships where both parties benefit not just from the primary business transaction itself (item or service bought/sold), but also from how they connect as people, whether on a professional or personal level.

Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point and Blink fame illustrates this point well. He asks, who do you think gets sued more often for malpractice? The doctors who make the most mistakes? In other words, those who are technically the most incompetent? Nah. It seems that when physicians err or are perceived to err in their practice, the most important factor that separates the sued from the non-sued is whether or not their patients like them. Yes, that's it. It seems that people like to be heard, like it when doctors take time with them, and like to feel like they're understood and cared for. Imagine that people could have such an expectation!

Now abstract this observation and connect it to the software business. Surely, if we want to talk seriously about "winning the hearts and minds" of <insert audience here> or changing perceptions about <insert product or company name here>, it doesn't take much effort to see how important it is to focus in on creating real and meaningful relationships with and between customers.

Of course, you may say, no company of Microsoft's size, for example, can scale in such a way as to have "meaningful" relationships with every single customer. That could mean hundreds of millions (if not more) individual connections. But here we can benefit from network theory--that is, the power of human, social networks to make a difference in people's lives, or more aptly, in the way they connect with the companies whose products or services they buy and/or use.

We are at Microsoft some 80,000+ employees worldwide, per the latest figures I saw in the newspaper or perhaps in Directions on Microsoft. Each one of us is surrounded by a web of connections, some personal, many professional; some very close, others more like acquaintances. Each one of those people is connected to their personal and professional networks.... and so on, until eventually, it becomes possible to be virtually connected to everyone on earth, in varying degrees--"six degrees," by some measures.

We don't have to know, nor should we even try to know, more people than we as individuals have a capacity to know without losing all value in our relationships because we have too little to give any one of them. We've only got so much energy to spread around, after all. But with what energy we have, we can have a personal (albeit indirect) impact on many, many more people by virtue of the interconnected networks that extend outwards from each of us individually. Add to it the influence and impact that all of those people can have on one another, and you begin to get a feel for the potential of business strategies that make community engagement and relationship building--not just "customer relationship management"--ineluctable components of success.

I think that if we take the time to build relationships with our "patients" and help them help each other and themselves, in the long run it will be the greatest of differentiators in the marketplace.

- dave

del.icio.us tags: social_media, Gladwell, network_theory, social_networking, marketing, relationships