Relationship Portfolios: B2B, B2C, and C2B

I was reading an article about managing a relationship with difficult suppliers, and stumbled across a bit of advice that I think applies to many relationships, and particularly the convoluted mess that has been made of social media by the commercial sector.

The advice to business was that most organizations have hundreds of suppliers and it is clearly not possible to develop close relationships with each and every one of them.  As such, a business should attempt to classify its suppliers to identify a "manageable portfolio" of key business relationships based on two criteria:

1. What is their value to you?   You have many suppliers, but some are more critical than others.  You do not need to develop a close relationship with your office supplies vendor, but you should seek to closely collaborate with the firm that provides components of your own product.
2. What is your value to them?   Not all suppliers will want to invest the time and effort into developing a relationship to your firm.   They may be a critically important vendor to you, buy you might be a small account to them, and they will not have sufficient interest in sustaining a relationship.  Chasing after them is not a productive use of your time.

Based on those outcomes, it should be possible to spend your time interacting with vendors more wisely and productively, and to reevaluate your relationship with certain vendors: namely, if a vendor is more important to you than you are to them, find a different vendor (and in this sense, dealing with a smaller firm for whom you are a prized client may be more productive than dealing with a large firm who considers you to be far less important than their major accounts).

This advice is immediately applicable to the common consumer, who purchases many things and many brands, and doesn't wish to involve a great deal of time and effort maintaining a relationship with every single vendor.   Particularly in the present age of social media, brands are eager to become more intimately connected to their customers, and some customers seem to be indiscriminate in accepting and nurturing relationships with brands that do not matter much to them (which in turn gives the brands themselves a false indication of their importance).

It occurred to me immediately that businesses would be well served by taking the same approach to their own customers: recognize that some customers are more valuable to you than others, in that they provide the greatest profit, but that your most valuable customers may not consider you to be a significant supplier in terms of their total purchasing budget, and pursuing a relationship with them would be a waste of resources.

My sense is that this is one of the primary causes of social media clutter we see today: brands are indiscriminate in chasing after customers, and make unfocused and general efforts to connect with as many people as possible, instead of focusing on their most valuable customers (and those who want to connect), and the result of trying to appeal to everyone ends up in a sloppy and inconsistent message that appeals to no-one.

I don't have the sense that customers have quite so much of a problem: people who indiscriminately "like" brands are deluged with promotions and image marketing clips that are of no interest, and generally learn to trim their list of friends to the brands that matter most.   The problem became so prevalent that Facebook relegated business to a separate feed, which I strongly expect few people ever check.

So perhaps the question becomes, is it too late to even consider a more moderate and focused approach to interacting with customers via social media - or has the well already been poisoned?

Social Media Missteps

The importance of getting things right, even in small ways, is that one minor mistake can call attention to a number of larger ones. Consider this Facebook post from bookboon.com, a (good) service that provides free access to a growing collection of (mediocre) pamphlets on various topics.

I've screenshotted it because I expect (or hope) that it will be corrected or retracted once they recognize the obvious error ... but I wonder if they will recognize that it's the least of their problems.

Problem 1: Her Name is Not "Mark"

The comment is from "Leen Coleen from Sweden" - and the company's response is "Mark, you are welcome." There's an obvious mismatch, and not one that isn't easy to make. It's not a typo in the name, or assuming "Coleen" was her first name rather than the last - it's just completely wrong.

Calling a person by the wrong name is a minor glitch when it's done in meatspace. Maybe it's not so minor, as people tend to be very possessive of their names and some take great offense when you get them wrong ... but it's understandable in speech because it's often extemporaneous and easily corrected.

In print or online, it is less forgivable - especially when their (correct) name is right there. Perhaps we can imagine that they had two positive comments to share, the one from Leen was better than the first one they got from Mark and rather than publish both, they chose hers, but merely cut-and-pasted their response, neglecting to change the name. Even at that, its' sloppy work and shows a disregard for the person who took the time to give them a flattering comment in public.

Problem 2: Attention Hogging

Facebook gives you a very simple way to share any post ... by using the "share" button. If it's a comment on one of your posts (which this seems unlikely to be), you can click "like" and it will call attention to your gratitude for the comment, and then readers who are interested will look to the comment itself.

Another consequence is that it denies Leen the attention she should get as the author of a comment. It's fairly common practice for social media to provide a link to a person's profile when they make a comment on a post - and it's pretty obvious that some people go around making comments on other peoples' posts just to get attention for themselves, but I don't think that's the case here.

When you take on extra effort to copy and repost a comment rather than just "share" or "like" it in order to disable the link and keep people looking at your page rather than clicking away, that's a violation of the conventions of social media. It's rude, inconsiderate, and anti-social. This is no small matter.

Problem 3: Credibility Fail

Another reason to use the "like" or "share" button instead of copying a comment and stripping out the link to the commenter is because it gives you credibility. People are used to seeing this and, even though most don't check up on you, it gives them the sense that these are real comments from a real person because that's the way it generally works.

Without proper attribution of a quote (including a link), there's the sense that the testimonial may be a fake. If it's not a complete fake, then perhaps they changed the words a bit, maybe for noble reason (Leen is from Sweden and maybe her English is a bit mangled) or maybe not.

In this instance, it's very easy to check up - there's a search box at the top of Facebook that doesn't even require leaving the page. And it looks like "Leen Colleen" does not exist. The damage to their credibility far outweighs the positive sentiment from a testimonial, which is itself instantly voided.

This is a very serious problem for the brand.

Problem 4: Uselessness

When people brag about themselves on Facebook, it's tolerated. It seems narcissistic and needy to post that "It's my birthday" or "I just won an award" because it is clearly an attempt to get others to congratulate the poster - but it may also be an event that is meaningful to them, such that they are inclined to share it with others and it's good to hear positive news about our friends. We want to hear it, and we want to congratulate them.

When it comes to companies, we expect them to flatter themselves with positive information, but it's done for a mercenary purpose: to get us to use their service or buy their product. It's a bit unctuous, but at the same time, it's typical behavior. Whenever you "friend" a company, or very shortly afterward, you realize that you're going to get promotional announcements. A lot of them.

Hopefully, some of those announcements will be of some value to you. For example, When bookboon publishes an announcement about a new booklet, there's a chance it will be something I am interested in reading. When they publish a positive comment about an older booklet, maybe they are calling attention to one that I have overlooked.

What possible use is there in publishing this particular comment? It merely states that the services is good in general. Especially since the post is seen by people who have friended the company and are presumably already using the service, a random comment from an unknown person that gives general praise doesn't have any value as far as I can see.

***

I could likely go further, finding other ways in which this particular incident demonstrates a gross incompetence in the use of social media and has done the firm far more harm than good - but four is enough. The specific aspects are far less damning than the underlying character flaw of a firm that fails to consider the interests of its audience, and is inconsiderate to those who seek to interact with it, in the social media.

The (Sad) State of Social Media Marketing

In the wake of reading a book on social marketing, I considered "liking" a number of companies on Facebook to see what they were doing ... but after looking them up and checking out the posts on their walls, I decided against it. After about an hour of poking around, I couldn't find a single instance of a company (or even a nonprofit) that seemed worth engaging with.

I'll concede that, after a dozen or so, I was more in the mindset of finding reasons not to "like" firms, which may have skewed my perception and made me more sensitive to bad practices and less forgiving of their missteps. But even so, I think it's fair to say that it's a disaster.

And while there's a bit of good news - most firms seem to be exercising a bit of restraint when it comes to making overt sales pitches - the information they are posting is dull and not at all useful. It's largely image marketing and product announcements - things that the company is interested in saying about itself, but not necessarily anything that would be beneficial to the people who subscribe to their feeds.

Arguably, the same can be said of people in social media. Not many announcements have been made by friends, family, and colleagues have an immediate "benefit" to me - but I cut them a bit of slack. They are people with whom I share interests, and with whom I am interested in staying in touch, and they're definitely not posting comments with the subsumed motive to get me to give them money.

But worst of all is the gross volume of it. It seemed to me that many companies involved in social media post three to five times per day, which probably doesn't seem like much, until you consider that it's every firm doing that. If a person selects twenty companies that they really want to keep on top of, that would mean their personal "news feed" would contain between sixty and a hundred posts per day, the vast majority of which are complete fluff. So in that sense, companies are well on their way to doing to social media what they have done to e-mail: abusing it to the point where people will simply ignore them.

Back to the comparison to people in social media, companies are doing far worse. I don't have any acquaintances on Facebook who post three to five times a day on a regular basis. Every once in a while, someone gets bored and spends some time surfing the Web and posting a string of two or three funny/interesting articles, links, and videos - but that's rare. Most people are a bit more respectful of others' attention and, presumably, consider whether something is worth sharing before posting it.

Additionally, companies are not really interacting with the social network, just using social media as broadcast medium. When fans comment on a post, there is no response from the firm- even when a question is asked, the firm doesn't answer. In some instances, an unflattering remark would get a quick (defensive) response - but that's about it.

And back to the comparison to real people, I can't think of a single person who is that one-sided. If someone asks them a question, they always answer. And while they don't post a reply to every single comment (which would be a bit too chatty for my liking), there is the periodic acknowledgement or retort that lets you know they are there, and listening, and value your attention.

So in spite of the vast amount of attention and budget that social media has received in recent years, companies still seem to be getting it wrong, and have not quite figured out how to successfully engage with customers, or even behave properly in a social setting.

User Irresponsibility

I went off on a bit of a rant in my reaction to a blog posting about privacy issues and Facebook - which is getting to be rather a habit lately and I probably need to work on it - and am reposting it here to maintain the information in my own repository.

In the original post, the author seems to be implying that Facebook is to be held responsible for users who indiscreetly post information about themselves, and that they are purposefully trying to make things difficult by having an unnecessarily complex interface (he refers to the need to go into "advanced" settings) and an incomprehensible privacy policy (he indicates that it's longer than the U.S. Constitution).

That rankles a bit, because from a perspective of UX design, we go to great lengths to make things as easy an understandable as we can, yet users seem to bumble along without bothering to read instructions or heed warnings and, when they find they've made a mistake, seek to blame the site operator rather than learn from their own mistakes.

It's a side effect of our litigious culture, I suppose, but I sense that the long-term effects may be severely detrimental. But rather than paraphrase myself further or add to an already-lengthy rant, here was my response:

The question you ask – how many of users bother to check their settings – is the thorn in everyone’s side when technology is adopted by the masses.

It’s not just highly sophisticated technologies, but even simple ones: for the longest time, there was this running joke about people whose VCRs were constantly flashing “12:00″ because they never bothered to figure out how to set the clock … and 10% of the audience laughed at the notion that people could be so stupid, while the other 90% laughed because, back at home, their VCR was flashing, and they felt a little awkward and embarrassed by it.

And in most cases, it’s not because the manufacturers of VCRs made it difficult to set the clock – a child could figure out how to do it within half a minute – it was just that people didn’t bother. I don’t think the Facebook privacy “issues” are much different – the settings are easy to access and modify. But people don’t bother.

There are sites like lamebook.com and failbooking.com that provide thousands of instances where people indiscreetly posted information that they probably shouldn’t have – and much like the VCR joke, 10% are laughing at the carelessness of others and the other 90% are a bit nervous because they may be doing the same. But unlike the VCR joke, being careless with social media isn’t a private embarrassment, but a public one.

In the end, what disturbs me most of all is that the carelessness of the user has the potential to become a liability for those who provide these services. And it’s not that Facebook is evil or is trying to make things unnecessarily complex – it’s about as easy as it could possibly be, but people just don’t bother.

No matter what Facebook does, how easy or obvious they make things, there will be people who simply won’t bother – and Web usability will bear out that even if you give them a “big red warning,” they’ll just click OK without bothering to read it – and worse, will get litigious when they seek someone else to blame for the consequences of their own disregard.

If these problems continue, and if lawsuits side with the faction that wants to hold Facebook liable, the only choice is to shut down the service or disable it to the point where it’s not useful at all.

That may seem a bit melodramatic from a short-run perspective of specific complaints and incidents … but over the long term, it’s a serious threat to the availability of technology in general.

If it’s not feasible to provide a technology unless you can render it safe in the hands of users who won’t bother to read instructions or heed warnings without risking liability, than most companies won’t.

My hope is that incidents such as the one you describe are used to illustrate to users the importance of paying attention – but in the “not-my-fault” climate of our current culture, I despair that may not be the outcome.

This impromptu rant could probably use a bit more development, but I think that further consideration will uphold the fundamental theses of the argument.

Your Loyalty is Worth $3.60

AdWeek recently republished that the value of a "Fan" on Facebook is about $3.60 - which is a number that's going to cause a lot of people a great deal of grief, as some decision makers will invariably (mis)interpret the number to mean real dollars and pressure their marketing staff to drum up its "fan" base or use the value of Facebook fandom to decrease their advertising budget for more productive channels.

The calculations were done by a social media consulting firm, whose interests lie in pumping up the value of fandom as a way of getting businesses to hire them, but even so, they seem fairly reasonable: they consider the value of a "fan" to be equivalent to the cost of buying advertising that reaches the same number of people. So this "value" represents the amount the company would have paid if it had bought conventional advertising to reach the same number of people.

I don't see an inherent value of being listed on a person's profile as something they're a "fan" of: many users' profiles are cluttered with "fan" references to a lot of inane things. However, if the company uses social media in a less frivolous manner, each "fan" receives a stream of news and updates that add to the brand experience and may serve to bolster customer loyalty and word-of-mouth appeal ... so there's certainly some value there.

And naturally, accounting-minded types compulsively want to assign a dollar-and-cent amount to anything that has "value" - so this calculation will fill a void and give an appearance of specificity to something that is only vaguely understood.

But in the end, it isn't "real" money in terms of profit (or even revenue), nor is it even a cost savings, unless the company (unwisely) decides to reduce its advertising budget by a corresponding amount and rest on the assumption that a "fan" on facebook is as good as a paid promotion to a well-targeted audience .... which is the specious and unfounded assumption upon which these calculations are based.