Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

In pre­vi­ous posts, I’ve talked about rela­tion­ships in social media and why I think “friends” is the wrong way to think about a brand’s rela­tion­ship with their customers.

The old rela­tion­ship model wasn’t bro­ken. It’s just evolved as cus­tomer con­tacts have moved to new envi­ron­ments. And this has made some rela­tion­ships a lit­tle weird. Kinda like when your preacher starts show­ing up at your favorite water­ing hole or your boss joins your ten­nis team. It’s not like you can yell at your boss for miss­ing a shot – well, maybe you can, but I wouldn’t.

To stick with the boss anal­ogy for a moment, just because your boss is on your ten­nis team doesn’t mean she’s a ten­nis buddy all of a sud­den. You’re still depen­dent on her for your income. The power dynamic hasn’t shifted. Only the place where your rela­tion­ship takes place has changed.

It’s the same with brands and their cus­tomers. You’re not peers or friends. Good mar­keters under­stand fun­da­men­tally that the cus­tomer has the power in the rela­tion­ship. And with Web 2.0, includ­ing social net­works, that power has been magnified.

In friend­ships we give and we get. We expect reci­procity. We share fun and heartache. We ask favors and we give them.

Cus­tomers and clients? We give to them and we thank them for their busi­ness. We then ask them if we could please bust our asses for them again. And maybe, pretty please, could they men­tion us to a friend.

Things get con­fus­ing when rela­tion­ships shift to new areas – peo­ple either get used to the changed dynamic to them or they opt to end them. Tra­di­tion­ally, Face­book has been about social friends. (For some peo­ple, who’s jobs are in rela­tion­ship sales maybe it has always been about busi­ness.) As the Web 2.0 world evolves and Face­book and oth­ers cre­ate strate­gies for the future, busi­nesses will have to con­stantly adapt to chang­ing rela­tion­ships online. But brands will need to walk a tight rope – engag­ing cus­tomers in new places with­out for­get­ting who’s boss. This will require con­stant study of cus­tomers, rela­tion­ships, and technology.