listening not speaking

14 years ago, as a young record company exec I tried to convince my MD we should build a website. It was hard, there was no obvious reason for it.

Pretty soon everyone needed a website to tell a global audience about themselves.

14 years on and with (most) of the world understanding the basic utlity of a website the game has moved on.

The web isn't about telling people anything. Users of your product or service can very well find out the warts and all story about you, far quicker and more easily than you could, or should provide it. The game is now about listening to what people are saying about you. Shaping your brand around the the conversations you and they create.

In many ways, this (web 2.0 for want of a better way of describing it) is a much harder sell than 14 years ago. A website is a mouth piece. An electronic billboard. Nothing more. Listening to your customers often involves the reinvention of a business model. Profound change in pretty much every department of a business, from HR through to product development. In tough economic times many large household names could become extinct in the next 5 years.

Early adopter brands and companies who have twigged this of course are already stealing a march on their competition - see Dell, LG and Avis for some impressive growth figures even in a difficult economy.

Are Avis or Dell's products really that much better than the competition? - or are people starting to base their purchasing decisions on the views of an online audience and their own perception of how a brand seems to care about its customers?

I own a Dell computer and walk past an Avis forecourt with an Aston to hire every morning - I know what I believe.

I wonder how long it'll take to convince the rest of the online world to start listening....

what we mean by a global village

On from yesterdays post...

One of the most thought provoking pieces of writing on the web is by the late, great Douglas Adams. Read the whole piece here

The 2nd to last paragraph I love..

"We are natural villagers. For most of mankind's history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing."

More quickly than anyone really imagined, humankind is rediscovering, via technology, the ability to reconnect with itself. It is this phenomenon that is at the heart of the connected world.

To put the concept in context.....Within your village 250 years ago you would have known the business of most people. You'd have known who was sleeping with who, who brewed the best beer, which baker added sawdust to their bread and who slacked off at harvest time.

What digital technology has done is recreate this world, or at least, recreate the mechanics of it. To amplify human bonds, to make us feel, at least partially, more connected to everyone else, the world around us and ourselves.

For 250 years, as we've burned hydrocarbons and industrialized, the importance of these connections was downplayed, even considered "dated". Instead we learned to rely on 3rd parties - to trust businesses we had no personal connection with, to informed us as to the best products and services. We no longer knew who brewed the best beer. Advertising was born. We got to the stage where our sense of self became so caught up in these messages, many of us lost our identities. We became, in Marxist language, "alienated".

As people thinking about how to engage other people in the digital world, this concept, that we are "natural villagers" should be at the heart of our thinking. Only by recreating and harnessing the inbuilt desire to connect can we be effective - and more importantly, can be build brands who can usefully serve us again.