What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word,
As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee:
Have at thee, coward!
(Tybalt in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julliet – Act 1, Scene 1)
The digital revolution is now reaching the most remote areas of the world; not only geographically speaking or in terms of generations. The tidal wave is even touching the so-called ‘late majority’ and the ‘laggards’. But to the same extent as I am enjoying this movement, there is something that bothers me. It’s the feeling that this could all be going the wrong way if we let there marketeers do as they please.
Marketeers have their strengths, and one of them is that they almost always belong to the visionaries and the technology enthusiasts for any given technology or innovation. But there is a dark side to that: the pitfall of poor implementation. My take on it? Blame the marketing people (and let the games begin)…
Not that Innocent
Remember, these are the folks who turned the beautiful philosophy of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) into an ugly monster. CRM was intended to be about learning relationships between organizations and their customers. Now it’s nothing more than a nightmare of systems and scripts. But watch out, because the marketing people are doing it again with social media and this time they are sickening the place from two sides.
1. From the inside of organizations. They are trying to turn expensive CRM systems into even bigger monsters. The so-called ‘social layer’ of these systems promises the results we once hoped for when the whole thing was launched a decade ago. Instead of opening up these databases and connecting them to the customers who populated them in the first place (this would dramatically reduce the cost of data maintenance), organizations are tricked into believing that they should keep control of their data at all times and build their own social network. Nothing is further from the truth, but fear is an easy game to play.
Here’s a balance of the damage done:
- organizational costs are up;
- learning relationships are down;
- customers are still a number.
2. From the outside. Customer Engagement is the next victim on the list of the marketing folks. It holds the same promise as CRM once did: a learning relationship between customers and organizations. Granted, a decade ago the technology to support that did not exist, but now we know better. Social media are changing our society and the way people relate to each other. With a billion people on Facebook it is safe to say that we have acquainted a new literacy of collaboration (on top of the literacy of navigation that we acquired about a decade ago). We are in the middle of a paradigm shift.
Unfortunately, marketing people are turning this possibility for human connection into a gimmick. As they were the first to master this new technology – and as they want to outperform their competitors – they are turning social media into a circus of exaggerated customer service. So called brand-evangelists are preaching a neurotic way of communication with customers. All over social media we see brands and organizations cultivating individualism to the extreme by showing off with heroic customer service acts, putting scores and metrics on engagement, and rewarding influencers to the extreme.
The damage from this side is even bigger:
- another missed chance: hijacking a beautiful philosophy for the 2nd time;
- cultivating an egocentric form of individualism above a sense of community.
Don’t let them get away with it this time
The point I am trying to make with this rant is that we are risking another decade of numbed customer relationships. Only this time it could be topped with freaked-out egocentric role-models. It’s all wrong, and the marketing people are to blame for that. To hell with them. It’s time to humanize social media and to start using it for what it can really bring us: human connectedness and care. A system is not capable of doing that, neither is a metric or a score. So why would we even let ourselves trick into that?
So here is the request: I beg you not to get carried away with scores and metrics and to see the value of social media for what it really is: a tremendous opportunity for people and communities to express care and connection. Let’s never ever make the marketing people pull us into the helpless role of a consumer. Those days are over.
