Have you ever heard or used any of these terms in your daily business life?
- Customers
- Users
- Eyeballs
- Readers
- Followers
- Consumers
- Clients
Most of these terms seem innocuous. (Okay, referring to people as “eyeballs” is a little disturbing.) But all of them, as well as other common terms like “hits,” “impressions,” “traffic,” and “page views” have a similar effect: they reduce people to numbers.
To some extent, that’s necessary. Most of us work at for-profit businesses. In our worker-bee role, we often have to talk about customers. We have to generalize. We have to talk about people in terms of numbers.
But talking about the generic “customer” and especially talking about eyeballs or hits, distances us from the actual individuals who make up our followers, readers, or customers. In the same way that we tend to de-personalize and de-humanize the enemy in wartime, in business, we tend to de-personalize customers. Customers are out there. Them. Some vague, fuzzy, mass that you don’t clearly visualize.
Social Media Makes Customers Real
Social media, though, puts you touch with those vague masses. From their avatars–each depicting a unique individual–to their tweets or posts, with all the jokes, different styles, common misspellings, and other personal elements. Each post and picture, each interaction combines to paint a picture of each customer. You may not truly know these people, but they certainly aren’t removed either. They are real, and you have real interactions with them.
Anyone who has studied history knows the drawbacks of de-personalizing and de-humanizing. It’s much easier to drop a bomb from an airplane than shoot a man face-to-face. It’s easier to hate some indistinct image of a people, then to hate the young man whose history you know and whose family you can see standing about him. It’s easier to flip off the woman in the car who cut you off, then the co-worker who just pulled in front of you.
If the customers are indistinct, distant creatures, then it’s easier for us, doing our day-to-day work, to make decisions that are good for the company and may not be so good for the customer. It’s easier to make poor or questionable decisions when you’re customer contact is only through reports that summarize market data.
It’s a lot harder to make questionable decisions when you interact online daily with your customers. When you see their pictures, read their posts about a sick kid or their concern for a colleague. Harder when they’ve done you a favor by RTing a link to the latest company blog post or defended your company, after another user’s negative comment.
As individual customers come into focus, it becomes harder to view customers in general as just a set of numbers.
Seems to me like a good reason to encourage employees to use social media.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a very wise observation, Neicole. When I was in sales and really wanted to make a point with my management, I would let the customer do the talking instead of me. Nothing can beat that!
Thanks, Mark. My experience in usability/user experience is the same. There’s nothing like observing a real user struggle with a UI, or watching the focus group tape. You don’t need to add much beyond that.
One of the main attractions of social media is that it forces companies to be more honest. There are no guarantees, but when thousands of eyeballs are observing what a company is doing, it is harder to get away with something.
In addition, when people have an ability to tell the entire Internet what a company is doing wrong, I think it tends to keep companies more honest.
Hi Neicole, (love the name spelling). While I vehemenently agree with your info regarding the de-personalization of customers, I actually disagree with your view that social media helps makes customers real. With all of the “followers”, “following”, “twitter lists”, “connections”, “fans” and “friends” stats, I feel it’s still a numbers game. Unless companies are analyzing the responses they’re receiving (which AdAge and a few other marketing and social media resource channels say is not happening) then it’s still: “Here’s our message, jump on board so others will jump on board.”
Perhaps with smaller businesses there’s a more customer-focused online social strategy but that’s generally true for small businesses on any platform. They have smaller customer numbers and are trying to make a bigger impression in hopes of drawing more customers. But I doubt companies with 12,000 followers and individuals with 1,000+ connections/fans takes the time to notice avatars and personal comments. Even though I wish it were that way, I don’t believe it is. Perhaps it’s…just…me?
Excellent post, Neicole. The war analogy was a very poignant one, especially at this time of year. I agree that as businesses make more use of the online social communities, it will make it much more difficult to make sweeping decisions based solely on the bottom line. Well written! Thanks again!
Boy, there are a lot of differing opinions on this. Misti, you may be right. It’s true that in a larger business, only a certain number of people in the company are going to be doing social media work. The others won’t see those customers. And if you’re only looking at @’s and company mentions, you won’t connect as much. On the other hand, the act of coming up with a social media strategy, I find, involves thinking about your customers and what they need, first. That’s one of the reasons I like the user experience field, as well. It forces that kind of thinking. That also makes the customer at least a little more real.
Thanks for your comment, Cheryl. I was actually a little nervous making those analogies. I’m glad you liked them and didn’t find them offensive.
Neicole
Your blog post leaves me a bit puzzled or at least wondering. For instance, personalising the customer relationship as a global brand is difficult. I am not sure if social media does help here very much. But maybe we see things a bit different across the pond here in Europe. Most consumers here don’t want to be friends with brands or have a so-called relationship – however we wish to define this term.
Nevertheless, I want to be treated with respect and get value for money. Moreover, I do want to get help in case the product fails to work properly and if the product fails to work properly while still being under warranty it needs fixing.
Just recently I had to bring my garment bag in for having a zipper inside the bag fixed. Unfortunately, product warranty had expired by then. Going to the store and convincing the manager that this needed fixing took a bit of talking but in the end the Bree people came through.
I doubt if a stream of tweets with the Bree people would have done the trick. And no, neither have I ever gone to their website or blog, why should I when I can get great service including the touch and feel of their products in their stores?
So for me things get real face-to-face and not on Twitter or Facebook as we discussed here:
http://commetrics.com/articles/twitter-wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee-have-a-conversation-instead/
What you think? Am I not getting the message here?
@ComMetrics
I don’t think of clients as friends, for the most part, either. And I totally agree with you that most consumers (including me) don’t want to be friends with businesses or brands. All the research indicates that, and it isn’t really a surprise, is it?
That said, the research also shows that a lot of consumers are willing to have “relationships” with businesses, when they get things like coupons, discounts, freebies, etc.
The point of the post wasn’t that consumers want to be our friends. It was the other way around. If you are following your customers and reading their tweets or posts, they become more real to you. I’m thinking that if businesses are engaging in social media in the “traditional” way of conversing and building relationships, or at least following and monitoring people, then they are forced to encounter customers as regular people every day, rather than just reading reports about sentiment, etc. And these encounters have a psychological impact.
That said, if you’ve read my blog, you’ll know I’m not a big adherent of the traditional approach