I had the pleasure of chatting to Josh Chandler last week where we discussed social media and its role in small business. Download it here:

http://joshchandlerblog.com/

It’s only 15 minutes long and just trying to get some thinking going!

We’re going on a treasure hunt today. The prize is finding the beauty in our business. Beauty is everywhere. That building across the street, in the walk you have just been on. The book you have just read, in the lunch you have just eaten, or the photo you just took. Perhaps even in the person you have just met for the first time who blew your mind! Yet we rarely seek it out in business.

You might discover it in design, a product, even in the new customer process you just implemented that works like a dream. It could be in that revolution you are creating. Sometimes you can’t even imagine it until you see it. Then its that WOW moment, it has impact, it distinguishes itself and life isn’t quite the same again. Not in true beauty anyway.

When beauty is present, it makes you think deeper, it raises emotions perhaps long buried and it definitely makes you think differently. Beauty usually leads us to be more explorative, because once you find it, you just want more. It can often push you to another paradigm.

In business, we need to give close attention to those things that extol beauty in our business. Once we do that, it changes. You set the rhythm, you convey elegance, even charm. Believe me its there. Your business is doing something really beautiful right now! Once we know where it is, what it is and why, we can learn about how to do it more.

As Evelyn Underhill said “For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday.”

Remember the old saying “going to borrow a cup of sugar” Referred to as the best way of getting to meet or know your neighbour. Just occurred to me, that perhaps we should do this more often in business.

Today is a lot about connections and relationships. We need to get out and about more and visit that company over the road or next door and say hello. Borrow a cup of sugar virtually from that person who has just followed you on Twitter who looks interesting. Better still what about the last person to visit your website or post a comment on your blog. Or, even the customer you haven’t talked to in ages.

We’ve a lot to learn by looking back at how our forefathers built relationships and its a great excuse to use a coffee break productively too!

Moving that static database where you ‘buy’ customers to a healthy, engaging, vibrant business community isn’t going to be easy, no one said it was. It’s also a long and windy road too. However, the only limitations to it are what you place on it, not your customers, nor, the community you already have. There is a clear step by step approach that I feel is appropriate using some leading edge thinkers for help and bit of my own brain power.

In simplistic terms, you need to understand that all community members are equal but they will have and want different roles. Participate and engage in different ways! In the past we would grade our customers based on A, B, C and D or whatever denomination that was. That’s a little outdated. Using a mix of Frank Reichheld’s model and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s model in the book “Groundswell” can provide a great solution to getting to grips with the dynamics of your community.

Identifying the following groups is essential to planning your reputation and marketing campaign where you can engage with individuals, maximise the intelligence and intellect and ensure you communicate the right things at the right level.

I suggest these are the critical game players in your business community:
1. Pillar influencers - significant influencers, they are not afraid to challenge you, intellectual about the future and have the ability to refer potential customers.
2. Connectors – well connected either online or offline or both
3. Promoters – people who promote, without any incentive, what you do
4. Passives - people who buy from you on a regular basis but who can also become promoters with some encouragement
5. Collaborators who could also be co-creators

There are sub groups of people that are important but these are your main ones. These members will significantly shift your business towards the new competitive advantages of innovation, engagement and building relationships with the relevantpeople.

What’s non-negotiable is the fact that the groups are made up of people. People have replaced products, connections bind communities and, with that, comes the rocky movement from broadcasting at customers to being social with your community. It’s a hell of a challenge, but at the route is building the right relationships with the right people.

If competitive advantage has nervously changed its position to one of constant innovation, talent and customer experience, how do we make a sustainable business out of a profusion of ideas?

A plethora of questions come to mind; How do we work co-operatively with competitors? How do we cope with ‘open’ and ‘free’ systems? How do we innovate? How do we pool resources? How do we retain, afford and keep the best talent? How do we cope with being social? How do we deliver exceptional customer experience? How do we start sharing knowledge when our mindset if one of secrecy?

Business communities and eventually business eco-systems will be created to exploit not just the physical nature of development but the human one to. The challenges we will meet in the future and the answers to the inevitable difficult questions will be met by us all forming business communities around our brand.

Our businesses are already surrounded by an economic web of companies, individuals, suppliers, customers and employees which collaborate, converse, connect and compete on a daily business, building a web of relationships that evolve over time and are heavily influenced by the people involved. Those connections are powerful.

Effectively it is a community of players, within a business environment who have common purpose, share interests and have similar values. All I’m suggesting is that, as a business, we start facilitating and guiding those groups into a business community that delivers both financial and non financial value. We have the platforms and ability to do it now. Instead of spending £50k (or whatever it is) a year on buying people, why not divert it to people that already love what we do and can help us do it better.

Despite what we may think, humans need systems and structure. We know groups of people best perform when there is a set of boundaries in place covering expectations, behaviours, beliefs and how things will work. But why do they have to be overbearing, cumbersome and bogged down in irrelevent detail? In their purest form, systems are meant to make life easier when in reality, they tend to double your effort without doubling the rewards.

Systems should demolish barriers, clarify reasoning, promote agility. And, systems must encourage integrity, reputation and calm. A seamless and graceful movement of information, people, money and product. Humanising our systems results in our businesses being centred on the well being of our people.

Take that document you are working on now. Look at it. Can you cut its wording by 30%? Can you cut the number of processes involved without compromising its purpose? Is it a ‘dry’ read, or actually an exciting one? Its the same for the proposal document as it is for the financial procedures. Punch your system in the middle and re design it for the future of your business.

There is a lot of dispiriting going on. There must be something in the air. I’ve made a list:

1. My local Caffe Nero’s not offering free wifi.

2. Companies House making it nigh impossible for you to do business with them, as their website is an entanglement of mush thats completely unusable.

3. The Chelsea Building Society devaluing houses, so on paper you have less equity and they can charge you a higher interest rate. Nice way of promoting customer retention.

4. Biscuits that you used to get in your hotel room, but you don’t now. Cut stuff from behind the scenes, not on the stage!

5. People like lawyers, accountants and public sector workers thinking they have a right to be aloof. Get your parachute chaps, you’re heading for a big fall.

6. People still trying to ’sell’ stuff. Features and benefits is just so yesterday.

7. People using social media to broadcast. In the past we just had companies doing it, now we have thousands of individuals.

8. People who just show up at work, dream all day about doing something else and never get round to it because they didn’t take time out to find their passion and purpose.

Just thought I’d dump that. Ah, feel much better now……..

The trouble with online stuff is we forget how powerful offline influencers still are. You can plot this on a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who aren’t even online yet save email. At the other end are those people who spend most of their lives online. For those of us immersed in online activity, its easy to be consumed by it. Focusing all our efforts around online influencers. And, for us personally to be drawn into influencing online too. Online influencers with significant followers are rarely offline influencers too.

This will of course change. Our offline customers will increasingly participate in online activity and its our job to help them get there. We will all, in the next few years, gain equal status both in the physical and digital worlds. In the meantime we need to take some time out to consider how we help our offline influencers. Some questions to ponder:

1. Who are our offline and online influencers? Name them!

2. What is the real value, not perceived value, of our offline and online influencers?

3. How do we engage on a regular basis with our offline influencers and how do we make it work better?

4. How do we as a business, encourage and practically help offline influencers to start online stuff? This is not an option but an obligation. Its our responsibility.

5. How do we physically meet up with our top 25% of influencers online to cement the relationship?

Its important now to look at converging interactions between the offline and online worlds that are authentic, organic and synergised. Bringing the two sets of influencers together and connecting them could make a whole heap of difference to our businesses.

The first Word from ‘Hang On’ the new eBook provided by Phil Rees @ www.defacethis.com

Being distinctive defines us. Distinctive is about people (there is that word again) having a distinct idea of us in their mind. For a lot of companies, it’s easier to remain indistinctive than to become distinctive! Our product, even service is probably not as distinctive as it used to be. It’s possible its competitive edge has been backed into a corner by the plethora of new products in the market place, or, the bad ones just caught up.

Tom Peters said years ago “Ask yourself what on your turf (local and global), is clearly unusual about the services you offer.” For me, if we can’t answer that in five bullet points, we’ve lost the right to be a great business. Look at the worst bit of your sector, even your closest competitors and change the customer experience; it at least gives you a stab at the five points of distinction.

We need to almost forget about our product. It’s great isn’t it? Cheaper certainly is distinctive but how is being mediocre? Being distinctive now is about how we use design to differentiate, by building a community from our clients, being recognized for meaningful work, the passion we inspire in people, how we engage and build relationships. Get used to it. Don’t get me wrong it is about developing a sense of currency and curiosity in parallel, however, the biggest barrier to us identifying what makes us distinctive is internal not external.

Little question; is your business more like a circus or the waiting room at your doctors? We really can’t afford to be ignored by the masses and silent to the few. Don’t be known for everything but something! Distinguish by identifying your tangibility.

A shift is a shift only if it sits in reality and that’s what’s happened in marketing. Mass marketing is redundant. It used to be about reach and recognition accompanied by the blind faith that some customers would drop out of the bottom. Marketing these days is all about reputation and credibility. Let me simply explain:

Reach – Your companies profile, its market share. Broadcast was used to reach and hit millions of customers. It was about casting the net as wide as possible and occasionally you’d catch something. Sprat to catch a mackerel was the term.

Not only is this just not affordable anymore, its intrusive and interruptive. It sends a message but the wrong one. Reach is not about banging out something anymore hoping its right, where’s the economic sense in that. Reach is the complete opposite, its focused. Focused on your influencers. Its not hitting the millions. It’s the 10’s, 100’s or, if you’re fortunate, 1000’s of people in your community. The people who are fans on your company Facebook pages. The followers you have on Twitter and, just as importantly, those people on the database that are your advocates.

Recognition – You’ve heard the old saying; everyone knows the Ford brand but not everyone wants to drive one. The worst situation you can be nowadays is if people think indifferently about your brand. In essence recognition can engage the many but impact the few.

Recognition is approaching that influencer list in bite sized chunks by communicating your values, ethics and distinctive way of doing things. Its better to have a small group of people attuned to your very brand’s soul than have lots of people who are absent from you.

Reputation – The real differentiator. Influence a number of influencers and your marketing strategy is not just powerful but well on its way to being tremendously effective. Reputation is about making a remarkable impression on the people that matter.

Reputation is closely linked to credibility. You do not gain credibility by mass marketing anymore. You gain it by being transparent, trustworthy, open and by sharing. Powerful marketing now comes in having a freemium model.

I’ll be talking more about this in Exeter on the 27th May. Book here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/509178968