As Ferris Bueller said “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”

You can also get so involved in the now, that fundamentals can sometimes become blurred in the day to day.

So on Friday afternoon I though it a good time to just reiterate a few essentials when working in this fast moving world…

1. Listen

Before you can take a step forward, take some time to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand, your products, your competitors etc etc. If you want to know how to listen, we should talk!

In fact the best way to visualise what good listening means is to consider the following scenario:

You, or rather your brand, has just arrived a cocktail party. You’re welcomed by enthusiastic guests who love your work! They can’t help but rush to tell you how much they adore you (there’s a lot of company Facebook pages like this!). The odd guest might have a slight niggle about something, but you can deal with that. So you thank everyone and at a certain time you make your excuses and leave (there are a lot of company Twitter pages like this!!)

In fact doesn’t this sound a lot like customer review tools? Feefo and the like?

But what you didn’t notice were the other guests at the party who spotted you across the crowded room. And of course these guests had their opinions too. They did what we all do, they talked about you behind your back!

This is where the richest source of gossip is to be found!

So listen to the people talking about you, not just to you!

2. Social is something you are, not something you do

How many times do you hear marketing bods ask “Oh yes, we’re doing a lot on social media now”? Of course they probably mean, “we’re pushing out offers on Facebook”.

That’s just selling. The fact it’s on Facebook doesn’t make it social.

So quite simply, stop being a carpetbagger and be human. Be the customer and consider what they’d expect.

3. The opposite of love is indifference

Salmon P. Chase served under Abraham Lincoln but always harboured ambitions for the Presidency himself. However, whereas Lincoln was a master at cultivating relationships with apparent enemies, Chase lacked the charm or natural inclination to relate easily to people. As a consequence he lacked the support of those closest to him, even in his own state of Ohio. After failing to secure enough support to run for the presidency, Chase lamented, “I think the hardest kind of death to die is that occasioned by indecisive, or lukewarm friends”.

And so it is with customers. Those who simply leave you without a complaint or a rant In fact those who do rant are manna from heaven! You can always over deliver in compensating these people. Far more dangerous to the health of your business are those who just stop buying and disappear.

By focusing on nurturing relationships with customers, your best ones, you can help to make the hole in your bucket of customers smaller. Not just by throwing more and more discounts at them, but by talking to them about things that matter to them.

And how do you find out what matters to them?

You could always start listening….

Here’s a link to a great blog post from the guys at Business Grow.

It says everything I’ve felt about Google +, so why bother to rehash?

Enjoy!

With interest rates at record lows, inflation at twice the Government’s target, unemployment still ‘unacceptably high’ and with economic growth barely managing to register anything more than the promise of a recovery, we all know just how tough a tough economy can be. And it’s not going to change anytime soon.

What’s fascinating in all of this is just how impotent the state has become. As a leading commentator in the US said recently about the American landscape, “the economy really is on its own now”.

Well to me this feels as though we are in a cathartic realignment of things. People are having to accept that fundamentally, they are also on their own. The level of debt and size of the deficit means that benefits are being cut along with every other area of government spending and so an almost Darwinian state of affairs has arisen.

Survival of the fittest and natural selection sounds like a terrible way to describe the way that civilised society should operate, but in the world of business, that’s what’s always happened, and now people in society are feeling the same pressures. No longer will the state be able to fund income support, pensions or maybe even provide a free NHS, for an indefinite period. Priorities have changed.

The Obama administration’s stimulus packages of 2009 and 2010 – paid for by huge levels of borrowing – have run out and many publicly funded programs now lie unfinished and the workers they briefly employed, have returned to the unemployment lines. The truism that government can’t create real jobs is now clear.

With nowhere for governments in the UK and US having anywhere to turn, economics has been stripped bare and now we see it for what it always was. A balance between incentives and disincentives.

In his great work, Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt analysed human behaviour in a number of situations – from drug dealers, sumo wrestlers and day care centers – and observed that it is incentives, or the lack of, that truly effect power from one body over another.

For example, it wasn’t the levying of a small fine on parents that dissuaded them from being late every day to collect their children at the day care that changed their behaviour (that was just viewed as cheap babysitting!) – it was publishing their names and addresses on the front door. Naming and shaming.

Now businesses can only grow in three ways:

1. Increase the number of customers
2. Increase the average transaction value
3. Increase the number of transactions per year
For each of these, incentives are the key. But crucially I’m not talking merely about simply discounting, or BOGOF offers.

I’m also not talking about naming and shaming!

The Fajita Effect

The incentives businesses need to consider revolve around what Chris Brogan has called the ‘fajita effect’. You know how it is in a restaurant when someone at the table next to you has a sizzling hot plate brought to them and everyone turns to watch the theatre unfold? Immediately everyone thinks, “I’ve got to have that!”

So how can you create this effect amongst your customers? How can you incentivise customers to spend more and recruit new customers?

Well in the same way the sound of the sizzle and the aroma of the dish appeal to very basic human emotions in the restaurant, by demonstrating your brands awareness of your customers, by not just seeing a number, but by being human yourself, by recognising customers needs, concerns and genuine preferences, you can create a powerful incentive for them to interact and engage with you.

The greatest incentive you can offer your customers and prospective customers is one that’s based on a very real human need. That of being recognised and seen. By demonstrating that you respond to people on a one to one basis, that you don’t switch off your customer service channels, or your social media channels at 5pm and say, “call us in the morning – goodnight”, you can powerfully demonstrate that by listening and engaging directly with individuals, others will hear about your levels of care – in the same way they currently hear about your lack of care – and you’ll be seen as a generous brand forever, not a mean one who offers 15% of for a limited time only.

Strip down to essentials and be human.

I had the pleasure of speaking at Internet World in London last week and my final point to audience was the headline from a recent blogpost of mine – social is something you are not something you do.

It was thrilling to then be mentioned on Twitter as having delivered the quote of the day! It’s something I picked up in the US last year and I now use it as something of a mantra in client meetings, in proposals and interviews.

And then I read this week that the UK Government are to appoint Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas to save Britain’s High Streets, through a series of ‘engagement’ events with customers.

The decline of the high street in the UK is quite shocking – it’s not just the UK by the way, but it has failed to deliver just what people want. In an age when books and music can be downloaded and shared and when generations young and old are more than comfortable buying online, the question is surely – “what is the high street for?”

In hard times, those offering huge discounts are clearly satisfying one need – that of saving money. But this isn’t a sustainable model. The prospect of deserted, once thriving commercial centres is very real.

But I’m optimistic about the future. I don’t agree with Ed Miliband’s view that legislation should be introduced to prevent large retailers moving in to homogenise the high street. That’s crazy!

What’s not crazy is to look at what it is that has always been valued by people – an exciting, engaging, friendly but overall human experience.

At Internet World I spoke of the retailers of our grandparents generation who knew their customers so well. That the butcher would save a prime cut for Mrs Miggins because he knew she had family staying – because he’d actually spoken to her about things other than meat!

These are things people have always valued and I would argue value more and more now in these harder times.

Add social media to the natural conversations that shopkeepers should be having with their customers and this approach becomes scalable. Learn about your customers lives beyond their relationship to you. They can be quite interesting people you know!

What is it that gets you onto the high street and off the laptop?