Your Database is Stale

Say what you want, social media is not a fad. It's not a useless heap of shiny objects that will go away any day now. The technology will change, you can bet on it.

The term "social media" is tired, in fact all the terms that float in the space are stale - that's because they've been beaten into the ground and stepped on by many who have no business - none - abusing such beautiful - and meaningful - terms.

Conversation, connection, social Web, engagement, interaction, reaching out, partnership. Half the time, no make that three quarters of the time, these terms are being abused, taken out of context, invoked in vain.

Stop this nonsense and start thinking a little. I get it, you're enthusiasts, you need to move "consulting"  inventory. It's really ugly out there. There are so many other words you can choose from - like providing a service to your customers, being helpful (yes, a new fad), aligning your business to the people it serves, inside and outside the organization (that does include the real partners).

Try civility. Customers are lost through rudeness—to less effective but more civil competitors. Top employees are lost by the bushel in rude workplaces—even if such workplaces offer great technical opportunities. Whose presence do you value? Show them you care. They might turn around and trust you, next time.

Caring, being civil, providing a service, these are not such new concepts, are they? Hold on to those thoughts as you'll need to remind yourself about those nice attitudes (all that soft stuff) when you think about the reason why your customer outreach programs are failing miserably.

Your database is stale. That's the really hard stuff, the numbers you can produce at the drop of a hat. Yet today, you have no idea where those people formerly known as actual names, titles, preferences, buying patterns (if you're really good), are today. In your system, they became fields, or codes, or simply a record to be pulled, rented, or built.

If technology is in constant flux, so are people. When we talk about social media, what we really mean is making those necessary changes or adjustments inside your organization so that the business is more responsive to its customers. Today, an organization has less to go on when it comes to culture if its employee base is in constant churn on top of that.

That's because technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change, writes Owyang. And that's why the people part is the critical piece to come online - a more powerful database is not going to self populate with real customers, even when it connects with the newest and most hyped technologies.

To the likely critics of tools - show me the money, show me alternatives. How do you scale showing and enabling opportunities? If I didn't have this blog, I would likely speak with a couple of people every day, you wouldn't have a place to comment in and think out loud with others, and nobody would be the wiser as to what kind of learning we could do together. Same with Twitter, I wouldn't be moderating #kaizenblog, or collecting #twittertales and meeting you on the basis of your content, or project preferences.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's think for a moment about the power of actually having a way to embed remembering people, their story, their contact with your product and service, their contacts with each other and carrying on that relationship starting from where you left off last time. 

Putting the public back into relations is a good idea regardless of whether you may be proactive about heading off issues. Good communications inside and outside organizations are a must.

Your database is stale. What are you going to do about it?

[image from Salesforce.com product announcement]

Comments

[Damian Saunders]

I couldn't agree more.
Irrespective of what you call it, or what technology facilitates it at this point in time, this is now a two way conversation, and it’s happening almost immediately, you can only control your side of the message, your brand will now, more than ever before, be intimately connected to your reputation, not some one way strategy devised in your marketing department, and your reputation will be determined by the extent to which you participate in the conversation, and should you choose not to participate in the conversation, well, your customers will, no doubt, be having it without you.

[Brian Driggs]

It's unfortunate that there are still plenty of people out there unwilling to try a change because they want to see a concrete ROI on things like:

- Having a little faith in their employees.
- Enabling efficiency within the organization.
- Building a good reputation in the market.
- Actually listening to the customer.
- Improving products/services.

Some are so terrified of change (exposing them as clueless, overpaid frauds), that they will do their damnedest to lock down the organization. They demand the best and the brightest, only to stifle them and drive them away because they don't trust anyone.

Obviously, the only people in the company who might be smarter than you are those who out-rank you, right? Could this perception that power and aptitude/ability go hand in hand be somehow tapped to encourage the empowerment of more individuals on the team?

There is a time and a place for "this is the way it is," but I think that time and place should be on the front lines every day, where the market is telling the provider how the product/service is viewed/used - NOT when trying to justify business as usual.

"You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money; get their names to sell them. You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close sh*t, YOU ARE SH*T. HIT THE BRICKS, PAL, AND BEAT IT 'CAUSE YOU ARE GOING OUT." (Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross)

Perhaps Levine should have responded that the database is stale...

[Blake and Levine are characters in the movie 'Glengarry Glen Ross.' It's one of the best sales movies of all time. Guess I'm on a movie trip this week...]

[Leah Kaiz]

Great post, so true. The hardest part is when you are a loyal employee trying to move your company into a more interactive area to create positive change and relationships and you come up against a wall, doubting the validity of the process.

[Michael Zipursky]

Well done Valeria. Right on the money. When you get down to the core, it's always about people and the relationship.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Damian - the difference between a company with a future and one without one: customers.

@Brian - I could actually see that scene in Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin was magnificent.

@Leah - it seems that the database or the procedure may take away opinion, when in fact, they are cementing just one possible way of doing things at the exclusion of many others.

@Michael - thank you.