Are your customers people or automatons?

With profit quotas and bottom lines, it gets difficult to think of customers as what they are – people. Instead, some businesses often tend to think of the customer as another variable in an economics equation. Attack that X value tenaciously, and it will convert into a sale. It is paramount to think of customers not as pieces moving on a chessboard, but as people with families and lives, who can benefit from your product. The recent trend of advertising online through social networks reflects this idea: Rather than push a message on people, provide information and useful content, and let that person viewing it decide on their own to continue further.

Walmart’s own doomed foray into social networking shows how this can go wrong if you do not think of your customer on human terms. They understood the technology of what they were creating, they just couldn’t get around the idea that someone might want to log on and talk about things unrelated to Walmart's brand, products and specials. Rather than simply pushing a product on an unsuspecting public, we strive to understand what a potential customer’s needs are. We attempt to understand how your product will better serve their lives, and invite them find out about this benefit for themselves. After all, decades before the first 30 second TV spot, the most effective advertising was simply placing the product – in all its useful, entertaining, tasty glory – in a shop window for passers by to see. What was the effective shopkeeper’s trick? Understanding those people outside the window well enough to know what they needed.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)