Cluetrains, Conversations, Trust and Openness

When you’re given just 20 min­utes to cover the notion of the more open busi­ness mod­els the pro­lif­er­a­tion of social net­works encour­age, there’s not a great deal of time to waf­fle. Hope­fully I didn’t the other day, when I gave this talk to close off the speaker ses­sions at the Tech­nol­ogy to Drive Growth work­shop at the National Growth Sum­mit con­fer­ence in Sydney.

Today’s busi­ness world suf­fers many prob­lems, many of them seem­ingly intractable through their com­plex­ity and fre­quently chang­ing scope. These prob­lems now have a name, wicked prob­lems.

A 2008 sur­vey by Neu­tron Group and Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity asked 1500 exec­u­tives to cite the most com­plex of the wicked prob­lems they faced. Look­ing at just the third:

Inno­vat­ing at the increas­ing speed of change

we can see that change is a big issue.

The increas­ing per­va­sive­ness of access to the Inter­net and the empow­er­ment that access places in the hands of the stake­hold­ers of a busi­ness — staff, exec­u­tives, stake­hold­ers and espe­cially cus­tomers — makes busi­ness inno­va­tion a key dif­fer­en­tia­tor today. If we go online to look for a new fridge, or com­puter, or flow­ers for Valentine’s Day, or a hol­i­day, there’s so much on offer that we need a bet­ter way of mak­ing a choice. Often, we’ll choose the most inno­v­a­tive provider of that ser­vice or product.

But what do I mean by inno­v­a­tive? A few year back, every­one was defin­ing this in terms of Seth Godin’s Pur­ple Cow. I think that’s a good start­ing point. We do want remark­able prod­ucts. But flow­ers are flow­ers, right? A fridge is a fridge? A book from Ama­zon is the same as the book from Bor­ders. So it’s rarely the prod­uct itself that’s the dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing point.

The dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion point is, in part, rep­u­ta­tion and cus­tomer focus. Which provider do my trusted, expert friends rec­om­mend. What is it about the provider that they rec­om­mend? Is it incred­i­ble cus­tomer ser­vice? Is it the lit­tle touches like choco­late mints in amongst my hard­ware orders (like one online store I shop at does)? Is it that they put a human face on an oth­er­wise face­less company?

Let’s focus on the last of those points, because it goes very directly to the point of one of my favorite books, The Clue­train Man­i­festo, and to the heart of what I’m talk­ing about.

While Clue­train presents us with a com­pre­hen­sively argued 95 the­ses for bet­ter, more human busi­ness, I want to focus on just the first. Mar­kets are con­ver­sa­tions.

Any­one whose ever been to a fresh pro­duce mar­ket in Aus­tralia, or open air mar­kets any­where in the world will under­stand this com­pletely. Things get done in busi­ness in these sit­u­a­tions because peo­ple talk to each other and act in a human way.

Mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion, one of the favorite tools of busi­nesses over a cer­tain size, divides their poten­tial cus­tomer base into demo­graph­ics they can then tar­get their sales and mar­ket­ing efforts at. I’d argue that while you might want to do this to under­stand what your mar­ket con­sists of, it gives you no insight into who your mar­ket con­sists of. And, in today’s con­nected, ever-​​changing world, we need to know who we’re pro­vid­ing our prod­uct or ser­vice to because they are so empow­ered by the hyper­con­nected world they live in that the mar­ket seg­ments break down.

Every cus­tomer is now a mar­ket seg­ment of one.

And you bet­ter know them. Per­son­ally. And treat them like a human being.

Because, it’s a demon­strated fact that if you don’t, it’s going to back­fire on you in a big way. You could suf­fer irrepara­ble brand and busi­ness dam­age if you fail to treat your cus­tomers like humans.

So you do you behave like a human busi­ness and treat your cus­tomers the way they frankly deserve to be treated; as humans?

Start by lis­ten­ing. Lis­ten online and off. Make sure you know what peo­ple are say­ing about you, about your prod­ucts and about your competitors.

And, when you hear some­thing, reach out. Ask “how can we make this bet­ter?” or “how can we improve?” or, per­haps unusu­ally, point out some­one say­ing bad about a com­peti­tor to that com­peti­tor and let them know they need to fix it. If they don’t, then it’s your chance to get that cus­tomer. After you’ve been the good guy first.

It’s not that hard. It’s just a case of ensur­ing that in all things, you con­tinue to act like a human, instead of that inhu­man con­struct we’ve man­aged to cre­ate for our­selves, the busi­ness. Some­times, that act­ing like a human leads to good that you can’t imme­di­ately mea­sure in dol­lars but that has a pro­found impact (BTW, great job on this Tel­stra. You won a lot of friends for this).

At the core of behav­ing like a human in busi­ness is the notion of trust. Par­tic­u­larly trust­ing your staff, every one of them, to be a face for the busi­ness and empow­er­ing them to take action on behalf of the busi­ness to do good, to solve prob­lems and to make sure that issues go to the per­son in the busi­ness who knows how to solve them.

And trust your cus­tomers. They know bet­ter than you what they want from your offer­ing. So ask them. Not as you’re about to take some­thing to mar­ket, but all through the process from con­cept to deliv­ery. It’s like hav­ing a 24×7×365 focus group on hand. And you know what? Do some­thing nice for the cus­tomers that helped, some­thing human, if they made the prod­uct bet­ter by their ideas.

Busi­ness has always been about keep­ing secrets. About hid­ing your ideas. But what hap­pens when you switch that on its head. You don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to go the whole rad­i­cal trans­parency route, but what about expos­ing your ideas, your think­ing, and the humans that work for you? Make these things your point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. Make them the things that keep you inno­v­a­tive as you adopt an approach that keeps you agile and razor focussed on deliv­er­ing the best prod­ucts and ser­vices you can.

When you hide, and keep unnec­es­sary secrets from your cus­tomers (of course there will always be things you don’t reveal — but think about what they should be), your fail­ures can, and will go global as dis­grun­tled cus­tomers, some of them with mighty big soap­boxes, point out your fail­ings. You get what you deserve.

It is far bet­ter to be out there, being human, being trust­ing and trust­wor­thy, being open. Wouldn’t you rather be a part of the con­ver­sa­tion than the sub­ject of it?

I believe by com­bin­ing these fac­tors into a for­mula, we can have a lit­tle fun with this, and also make some sense. So here it is.

Con­ver­sa­tion + Trust + Open­ness = Delight, or more sim­ply C + T + O =

Focus on that. Imagine.