The Social Capital, Social Business & Customer Engagement Discourse

You hear a lot of people talking about Social Capital, Social Business, & Customer Engagement these days. Some are talking about UX or User Experience for your website, others talk about Content Strategy or Content Marketing, Direct Marketing, Social Media Marketing.

When it gets down to it, the discourse is about making your business "Social", about meeting the consumer / customer halfway. It's about listening to your customers, it's about pulling in signals from The World Wide Web, a.k.a. The Social Web, signals that mean something to your business, critical statements for your business interests.

I see a problem here. I'm seeing all these experts talking about how they can make the customer feel better, how they can make the customer trust their brands, how they can make customers participate and engage, but I can't help thinking that it all sounds a little fake. What every business really wants is penetration in the market and a strong brand perception. At the heart of most businesses, there really isn't a care in the world to be found there for how the customer really feels, so long as the consumer / customer is purchasing YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

In the end, business itself is not all that "Social". Some service companies, though, are all about the customer, but most of these individuals talking about social data and transactional data, about web analytics, and customer engagement, their interests are clear: They want to boost their business, and this only happens to please their customers as a side-effect.

No, I don't want to hear people talking about customer engagement anymore, unless they say that their goal is to maximize profits and that a strong brand helps achieve this goal. At the end of the fiscal year, if you're going bankrupt, you won't care very much about how happy or unhappy your customers are, when you're deciding whether to file for bankruptcy or not.

So don't pretend you care when you really don't. Some individuals care about people, care about customers, care about doing "Social Business". But companies themselves are not people, they don't have feelings. So if you're the CEO of some marketing company, make it clear that your job is to make money and that you perhaps actually care that your customers are happy, but when you're talking about web analytics & social data, data mining, etc.. when you're talking about algorithms & other strategies to augment customer engagement, and you're talking about it in an almost clinical way.. don't make us believe you care about the actual individuals who purchase your product or service.

What you care about is that the numbers make sense, that the numbers are positive. What you care about is that your brand has a positive image in peoples' minds. What you care about is that you're never going to go bankrupt if you can make the customers happy. But the happiness of the customer is almost never your #1 reason for existence, yet you try to make us believe it is.

Consumers are much smarter than you think. We smell the bologne coming from a hundred miles away. We can tell if you just want to augment TRUST in your brand as a marketing strategy to augment profits for the fiscal year. We smell it and we'll stop listening to your bullshit and stop buying your products or using your services. When all you care about is your "social data", we hear you loud and clear, and we're going to steer away from you.

The honest thing to do is to tell customers that you need their money to survive and that for their money, you're willing to trade something.. You need to be willing to fess up about your real goals and real motives, and trade some time.. Spend some time with us.. NOT just because your direct marketing team told you to. Do it because you don't know who your customers are and you want to get to know them, purely for no other reason than to get to know them. Ask them why they like your brand, ask them about their lives, ask them to tell you their story, and actually listen.

But none of this can be done with behavioral targeting & other number-&-data-crunching. To really go "Social", you have to forget you're a business and just spend time with your customer. You need to find who your strongest advocates are and fly down to go visit them in their towns. You need to share your profits with your customers if you really believe in this going "Social" bullshit.

Don't tell me that Coca-Cola and Nike shoes are about "people". That's just bullshit. The truth of the matter is the "Social Capital" doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the customers. And if you want to cash in on the social capital that belongs to customers.. then you have to be willing to trade something off for it, something of value. That's it, Social Capital doesn't belong to you, and to capitalize on it, you need a convincing trade-off with your customers. Business, in many ways, is "antisocial". And the way these "experts" are talking about manipulating & mining social & transactional data, it really, really is pretty antisocial. You should follow the conversation on Twitter, it will blow your mind away how clinical and antiseptic it all seems!