Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

So much of what is dis­cussed in social media revolves around engage­ment in terms of inter­act­ing with the brand as one would a friend. What we for­get is there have been offline mod­els for decades, and even cen­turies, of how busi­ness rela­tion­ships should work — iron­i­cally they have noth­ing to do being a “friend.” Alan Wolk writes a nice series about not want­ing to be a brand’s friend. It’s a great, thought pro­vok­ing read.

The inter­net, and social media specif­i­cally, has caused many peo­ple to reeval­u­ate not just how we inter­act with brands, but what that rela­tion­ship should be. I think Wolk makes a great case that it doesn’t need to be a friend­ship. And in the real world, many of us don’t really like doing busi­ness with our “friends,” we’d rather just have a beer with them.

So let’s think about how we inter­act with brands in the real world.

For con­sumer goods it’s gen­er­ally a retailer, cus­tomer care rep­re­sen­ta­tive or a sales person.

For B2B inter­ac­tion, it’s often a series of sales peo­ple before the pur­chase and, after­ward, a ser­vice representatives.

None of these peo­ple are friends per se. But they can be friendly, and that’s a big difference.

On the flip side, what’s wrong with the mod­els. From the ser­vice providers mind­set, they can be expen­sive, and with the econ­omy way down there’s cer­tainly room for improve­ment on any­thing cost related. Obvi­ously this is why mar­keters want to trans­fer as much of the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship online as pos­si­ble. Social media on the sur­face seems a great way to do this.

Web 1.0 was cheap. Put a wid­get up, let peo­ple find it, and then let them “inter­act” with it — not nearly as expen­sive as a real per­son answer­ing a phone and pos­si­bly more effi­cient. And the cus­tomer is prob­a­bly even will­ing fill out an online form to order a prod­uct or receive cus­tomer ser­vice at a later date. That’s awe­somely cheep.

The real-time web is chang­ing all of that. The pub­lic now expects real-time answers to ques­tions. Mar­keters enter­ing the social media space and using Web 2.0 tools are feed­ing this per­cep­tion. What’s the prob­lem with that? It’s not yet scal­able. And that equals so expen­sive. So it bet­ter have value beyond “friends.”

As more and more cus­tomers begin to expect direct inter­ac­tion the more expen­sive imple­ment­ing this is going to be. Where am I going with this? I think not only do most peo­ple not really want to be your brand’s “friend,” the ones that do are going to be expen­sive to keep. And if you can’t man­age all those rela­tion­ships, you can expect some blow back.

So whats a brand to do? Decide what’s valu­able and pro­vide that instead of engage­ment for engagement’s sake. Like I said ear­lier, there are some tried and true rela­tion­ship mod­els that have existed in busi­ness for years that don’t involve being anyone’s friend. And they cre­ate value to boot.

Why shouldn’t a sales guy, who already exists be answer­ing prod­uct ques­tions on a blog. Then his answers become search­able and cre­ate scal­a­bil­ity in a pos­i­tive direc­tion instead of a neg­a­tive one.

Why can’t a CSR field sup­port ques­tions on Twit­ter? No extra per­son required, just some train­ing. Again, a scal­a­bil­ity plus.

And why mar­keters are online, they can and should ask for the sale. Wouldn’t they in the real world? Isn’t that what rep­re­sen­ta­tives of busi­nesses do. Of course, they shouldn’t be a jerk about it and butt into other people’s conversations.

So what about mar­ket­ing? Isn’t that what we were sup­posed to be replac­ing with this whole friend­ship thing? Stay tuned.