A brand is no longer what we tell the consumers it is; it’s what the consumers tell each other it is.
—SCOTT COOK, Intuit
While nearly every business and organization has been exposed to and has adopted some foundational social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, maybe even Pinterest, Google+, or YouTube), even the most sophisticated brands are wondering “What’s next?”
Highly Recommended answers that question and provides a sustainable and scalable business approach that brings everything together. And not just marketing and communications. Social media and recommendations are reshaping all aspects of business, including human resources, innovation and R&D, and, of course, customer service.
All businesses, no matter what their size, can become recommended. However, the bigger the organization, the more its moving parts need to become aligned. Social media has uncovered the fact that, today, it’s not just your product or service that gets feedback but, in fact, the whole organization is open to and vulnerable to the need to become recommended.
Now everyone, on every team, in every silo, is a “spokesperson” for the company, and each department has to look at itself and also its relationship to other departments in an organization as well as to the company as a whole. This world of interconnectedness has brought about a stronger need to model your process—or at least try to.
For anyone desiring to learn, understand, and apply the new strategies for marketing success, Highly Recommended will provide the insight and support needed to accelerate business growth. Never before has this been so important, and that is what makes this book so important.
We all know by now the impact of a positive recommendation. However, it works the other way too: more than 80 percent of consumers report that a negative review or recommendation dissuades them from purchasing a product or service they are considering.
Think about the last time you bought a new product or service— large or small. Chances are someone proactively recommended it (“I had the best BLT and avocado sandwich at SUBWAY”), or you asked the opinion of someone you trust (“What do you think of the new Nissan Pathfinder?”).
Social media has supercharged the power and impact of recommendations. Today’s businesses can’t just use social media; they have to become social businesses, inside and out and from top to bottom. Ultimately, that is the goal of this book: to harness the power of being a social business to become the most highly recommended organization in your industry, category, and/or niche. The ability to easily research online consumer reviews or see which brands your social media friends like is fundamentally shifting how people buy— and sell—nearly everything.
Today we have the power to clearly understand where, how, and why brands get recommended (or criticized)—and then to proac-tively shape messages and directly connect with those who matter the most. The best part is that you can almost immediately see how people are engaging with you—and if that engagement is leading to a recommendation and ultimately a sale.
Whether you are an independent professional (like an attorney or a real estate agent), a leading consumer brand (like Frito-Lay), an industrial manufacturer (like Caterpillar), or even a global not-for-profit (like Rotary International), how people talk about and recommend you is the most important key to your success in this new world of doing social business. To succeed, let alone thrive, you can’t just be highly effective; you must come highly recommended as well.
Marketers know that they have to change how they do business in the realm of the social or connected consumer. Additionally, the majority of companies are aggressively working to adopt and integrate social media into their marketing plans. In fact, HubSpot (a leading marketing research organization) states that the average social media budget has nearly tripled in the last three years. In addition, inbound leads created from social media are 61 percent less expensive than push or outbound marketing leads. These statistics will only continue to grow and change the way companies market forever.
Meanwhile, the marketing world is still primarily focused on “push” marketing—pushing various marketing activities to get brand messages in front of potential and existing customers, essentially interrupting target segments, very seldom with success. Add to this reality the fact that a typical American is exposed to 30,000 advertising messages daily, the percentage of people even responding to direct mail, e-mail, telemarketing, and so on, in most organizations’ target market segments are often under 1 percent.
Another nuance to note is that a company’s marketing message— that is, tagline—is very different from a trusted friend or colleague’s word of mouth recommendation.
There is a dramatic difference between current push marketing methods with cool advertising lingo and pull marketing methods that have origins in real conversations between friends and colleagues based on preexisting, trusting relationships. Knowing how to create pull marketing initiatives that both accelerate sales and decrease marketing costs is a huge asset that hits a company’s bottom-line earnings as well as its top-line profits — a powerful double punch in the business world.
However, understanding why and how consumers talk about and recommend a product is a new concept to the marketing world. More important, these efforts require a very different skill set than having a one-way conversation.
In 2000, as social media was in its infancy, Malcolm Gladwell electrified the business world with his bestselling book The Tipping Point.1 Still on the New York Times Best Sellers list, readers remain captivated with the concept of having their brand become the next “social contagion.” But what Gladwell’s book missed, and what remains missing from the ongoing discussion, is an easy way for marketers to understand and act upon making their brand eminently “talkable,” shareable, and recommended.