Business Insight Zone

Keep bringing it back to the users and their needs.

No matter what, never forget that it’s not about your product or service or coolness or ineffable oomph. It’s always — always — about the users and what they get out of your product, what they do with your service, how they partake of your coolness, or how they participate in that oomph.

It was ever thus. The nature of social-media communities merely intensifies the effects.

The wisdom of Kathy Sierra

This is a conversation that’s been going on for some time. Kathy Sierra nailed it long ago, when she said that the point of the software you’re writing (or whatever else you’re doing) is to help your user “kick ass.” That’s a verbatim quote — Kathy doesn’t mince words on this stuff — and it’s a point she made over and over and over and over and over. Which is appropriate, because it’s a point most of us miss, most of the time.

Just in the past couple of days, Aaron Strout and Chris Brogan have written posts that mesh with this theme:

• Aaron Strout and Bill Fanning: Would You Join a Toothpaste Community?
• Chris Brogan: Cafe-Shaped Business

Let’s think about each of these in turn.

What Your Product MEANS to People

Aaron and Bill rightly question why consumers would want to join a social network centered on a particular brand of toothpaste, and called on their readers to present them with even tougher challenges in terms of building community around a particular product. (By all means, dive in and read the comments on the post — very interesting stuff from a bunch of smart social-media types.)

In my own comment on their post, I suggested ways that a company like Procter & Gamble or Colgate-Palmolive might build up a community, not around toothpaste per se, but around good hygiene habits for growing families (this helps you recruit concerned moms to your community) or around extending good hygiene health to the less fortunate (this helps ally your product — which is, after all, only toothpaste — with a larger, nobler cause).

The point, again, is to skip the often-fruitless effort of talking up your product’s intrinsic niftiness, and play up the ways that your product (toothpaste, ball bearings, software, whatever) can enhance the lives and address the concerns of its users.

What Your Company MEANS to People

In his post, Chris Brogan doesn’t talk about products; instead, he talks about the ways that we as consumers relate to businesses, and how we as businesspeople can relate to our customers. He centers his post on the example of Carolyn Jordan of You Are Here Books, a tiny bookshop that Chris loves.

It’s a quintessential “cafe-sized” and “cafe-shaped” business (a theme that Chris has explored before), which means that Carolyn’s efforts to make her customers feel at home translate more or less directly to feelings of warmth and loyalty and satisfaction on the part of Chris and everyone else who buys books there.

This point is particularly important because Carolyn is selling something — books — that can be had just as easily, if not more so, from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You, too, might be in a line of work where your widget or service offering isn’t, in and of itself, all that special. Step One in your strategic plan might be to transform your product into something special, but Step Zero could be to give your users / customers / clients a reason to become raving fans of your product / company / community as it already exists.

As I pointed out in my comment on Chris’s post, one of the grand challenges for larger businesses getting into social media (including Hoover’s, I might add) is to come up with new ways to create many “cafe-shaped conversations” with smaller groups of users who, with the right kind of support from the company, can be enabled to kick far more ass — and feel great about the company while doing it.

No matter what else you do, discipline yourself to keep bringing it back to your users / customers / fans and what they need, whether that’s books or toothpaste or (more likely) a desire to connect with like-minded people and to solve their own pressing issues — not yours.

Keep bringing it back to users.

Talk to them. Get to know them. Gather feedback on their concerns, and give them feedback on their concerns.

When you’re tempted to get too fancy, or when you’re tempted to use the social media inappropriately — as one more blunderbuss for your cut-and-dried marketing messages — keep bringing it back to users. (When you’re a user, do you like being blunderbussed? That’s not why you join a community.)

Keep bringing it back to users. Make it easy for them to kick ass, whatever that entails. Once in a while, it may even mean pointing them to your competitor around the corner. That’s okay: just go ahead and help them kick ass. They will reward your service sooner or later.

The moral of this story: keep bringing it back to users.

Sometimes, it really is that simple.

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Related posts:

• Social media makes merchants of us all.
• Does your audience know where you’re going? Do you?
• Social media breaches barriers.
• Social media: the right tool for the job.

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Image by Southern Foodways Alliance.

Category: Marketing & Sales, Social media