Talk is (Not!) Cheap: The Art of Conversation Leadership by McCann Jim

Talk is (Not!) Cheap: The Art of Conversation Leadership by McCann Jim

Author:McCann, Jim [McCann, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00


Where Technology Is Going

The next evolution of marketing is taking place over social media. This is the technology that the conversation business must master to be successful. At its earliest stages, social media has been a personal rather than a business conversation. It’s a space where we gossip, talk about our weekends, and post pictures of our babies, vacations, and home improvement projects. But the speed and passion with which people have adopted social media indicate that business needs to catch on, and quick.

This is an opportunity many businesses are missing. I am often asked by smaller retailers to give advice. Most expect I will tell them something about their physical stores or perhaps suggest a marketing plan. But these days, I advise routinely that the next step for small business is social media—it is the medium in which the customer now wants to engage in conversation. In the old days, on First Avenue, they came in for coffee. Perhaps people don’t do that any longer—perhaps they don’t have the time or regular customers don’t live nearby the way they used to. But that does not mean that your customer doesn’t want to share with you what’s on her mind. She does. She wants to chat, casually, conveying her interests and her expectations. It doesn’t mean she wants to participate in your focus group or respond to your telephone survey. But she does want you to know that she’s got a huge Christmas list this year and it’s so hard to find something that will impress Aunt Sally, and plus, all the family will be coming to her house this year and she wants to make it special. These are the conversations that tell a retailer what he must do next to make a sale. And if they’re not stopping by the shop to tell you all this, you must meet them where they are conversing—in the social media space.

Our head of technology was on his honeymoon when we called him and asked him to pack up and come join us in a meeting with executives from Facebook. He wasn’t thrilled that we’d interrupted his honeymoon (and I can only imagine what his new wife must have said when he told her), but the opportunity to work with the heavyweight champion of social media was too good to pass up. We found in our work with Facebook that we could not only converse with our customers in this new space, we could also facilitate connections among them.

We started out on Facebook by using our page to provide customer support. But thanks to the insights posted there, we saw we could do more. As part of our work with Facebook, 1-800-Flowers.com added buttons to our e-commerce site, letting visitors “like” a particular bouquet or other product they that would be happy to receive. Every time customers clicked “Like,” the action triggered a story in their friends’ news feeds—and that flower power meant people were talking to their friends about the brand. We were able to look at the business through a Facebook lens.



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