praise for recommend this!

“Deftly weaving the worlds of storytelling, brain science, marketing automation, and social media, Jason and Kirby offer a common sense approach to engaging online audiences, and converting them to raving fans. Recommend This! is highly recommended!”

— John Neeson, Co-Founder, Managing Director, SiriusDecisions

“Practical, sound advice for anyone who wants to stop shoving messages down an audience’s throat and start actively engaging with them—a far, far, more effective way to market.”

—Steve Duplessie, Founder and Sr. Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

“Written in a totally usable style, and designed for quick referencing, Recommend This! should become part of the canon for 21st century marketers grappling with the new centrality of relationships in how we sell, market, and support our customers.”

—Brad O’Neill, CEO, TechValidate

“Big Data makes it possible to create personalized online interactions, and now  Recommend This!  shows us  how  to use that power to fully engage every visitor. Read this book!”

—Chris Lynch, Partner, Atlas Ventures

“As an early stage investor, I see intense competition across a lot of markets every day. Companies need a way to differentiate and it’s hard to do it on products. Jason and Kirby have deftly explained the only way to truly differentiate is through relationships, and they have provided a roadmap to help companies start focusing on building them.”

—Will Stewart, General Partner, Rogers Venture Partners

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“Connections, relationships, and insight—we all need it. Jason and Kirby have fundamentally reminded us of the critical need to meet people where they are. Customers, friends, loved ones, neighbors—each provides us with the opportunity to connect in a genuine way. Technology becomes the powerful enabler, but without a roadmap we will never capitalize on our potential. Jason and Kirby offer a pragmatic, solutions-oriented approach to help us drive business and personal relationships. Story after story demonstrates that technology is not just about efficiency, it’s about relationships.”

—Jane Shannon and Sandy Brisentine, MyExecutiveSolutions

“The daily increase in online noise makes connecting with digital audiences ever more difficult. Recommend This! offers a thoughtful, hands-on approach to breaking through the noise, to make and optimize online relationships.”

—Dr. Ellen Lary, former Vice President and General Manager, Xiotech

“Digital experience is how we now create and manage relationships. Recommend This! is a breakthrough—not only offering a new method for measuring the value of relationship networks, but offering a practical guide to optimizing that value.”

—Michael Levinger, President and CEO, Digital Collaboration Solutions

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Delivering Digital Experiences

That People Want to Share

JaSon ThibEaulT | Kirby WaDSWorTh

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Cover image and design: Wiley

Copyright © 2014 by Jason Thibeault and Kirby Wadsworth. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through pay-ment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with the respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.

For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

ISBN 978-1-118-83669-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-87285-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-87288-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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v

Contents

Foreword by Phil Fernandez viiAcknowledgments xiPreface: Is Digital Marketing Dead? xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Business as Usual Is Over . . . or Is It? 9

Chapter 2 Digital Changes Everything 19

Chapter 3 The Importance of Relationships 43

Chapter 4 How We Connect in the Digital World 53

Chapter 5 Measuring the Value of Relationships 81

Chapter 6 Bridging Digital 95

Chapter 7 Understanding Need 99

Chapter 8 Developing History 107

Chapter 9 Offering Curation 117

Chapter 10 Recognizing Faces 123

Chapter 11 Telling Stories 135

Chapter 12 Being Authentic 147

Chapter 13 Delivering Consistency 163

Chapter 14 Maintaining Credibility 173

Chapter 15 Helpfulness 185

Chapter 16 Nurturing Online Communities 197

Chapter 17 Delivering the Promise 211

Chapter 18 Looking Forward 227

Notes 237Index 247

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vii

Foreword

In Revenue Disruption, I claimed that virtually all buying processes—whether as consumers or businesspeople—begin well out of reach of

traditional advertising, marketing, and sales activities. At this very early stage, buyers may have an idea about something they want, a feeling about an unmet need, a vague sense that there must be something out there to scratch an itch. Buyers search online, and begin to conduct research—whether they consciously realize they are doing so or not. They begin to scope out their options. They ask their networks of friends and connections for advice and recommendations. They latch on to helpful content, wherever they find it. And today, most often this all happens online, often anonymously, in the vast and ever-changing sea of digital and social media.

In response, I introduced the term seed nurturing: the notion that any organization with something to sell must get to these pro-tobuyers early on, providing useful information to mold the buyer’s process and planting the seeds for a future sale. Yet at this early stage of the revenue cycle model, it is very uncommon for a vendor to have a relationship with these protobuyers, and even if it does, it’s unlikely that the vendor knows that these early-stage buyers are considering its offerings. The organization and the buyer are strangers.

But there is rich pay dirt here. If we can begin to master this early stage of the revenue cycle, our organizations have an opportunity to stand out, separate from the pack, outcompete our rivals, and drive real, profitable revenue growth. To do this, we must redefine our market-ing and sales process. Success is no longer about finding buyers, it’s about being found by those who might eventually value our offerings and services.

And once we do attract early interest, the focus must be on devel-oping long-term relationships with prospects, rather than clumsily try-ing to close them. If we hand inbound leads—precious gems generated at this early stage through our compelling content and helpfulness—to a greedy, sales-driven next step, we risk abject disaster.

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viii Foreword

Early-stage buyers are firmly in control of their buying pro-cess. They don’t want to talk to a salesperson, or even register on an online site . . . yet. And in the digital world they have a most important power—instant and frictionless choice. A better, friendlier, more help-ful alternative is only a mouse click away.

So we have a gap. Let’s call it the relationship gap. Early-stage buyers are interested in learning about us and our organization’s prod-ucts. They do want to hear suggestions and advice, and they are open to input on how to evaluate solutions and make decisions. They will take all that, and more, into consideration if (and it’s a huge if ) they trust that the information is fair and balanced, and the organization offering it is attempting to be authentic, transparent, and helpful.

To succeed at this stage we must focus on developing relationships with these potential customers, building trust and creating a sense of collegial friendship. We must move from ABS (always be selling) to ABT (always be teaching). Or even to ABDR (always be developing relationships).

Digital is becoming the first stop in a new buyer’s journey. Trying to understand what visitors want, or might want, when they first inter-act online with our organizations is hard. But it is not optional. If we are going to build true relationships with these protobuyers, we have to capture their attention, build trust, and seek to begin a two-way conversation with them. Technology can help. But technology alone doesn’t solve the core issue. We must transform our entire approach to business. Innovative marketing and sales leaders will dramatically rethink traditional roles and processes to embrace the relationship revo-lution. Those who do will grow their networks of buyers and recom-menders. In doing so, they will find a new source for the true sustained, profitable, top-line growth that every company needs.

Throughout their many years in business, Kirby and Jason have proven themselves not just innovative thought leaders, but also researchers and guides in our collective journey toward improved revenue process management. Recommend This! does a fantastic job of uncovering and supporting the value of relationships. Moreover, it provides a clear method for quantifying that value—a method that will certainly stir debate, and may even spawn a new branch on the mar-keting analytics tree. Finally, the book gives us a set of simple, crisp, actionable steps to help us optimize prospect and customer relation-ships at scale using digital technologies.

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Foreword ix

Recommend This! is a must for anyone who needs to understand how digital relationships change the way we do business, who seeks the means to measure and manage relationships, and who has the determi-nation to drive revolutionary change by focusing the organization on what’s really important—relationships.

—Phil Fernandez

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xi

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the following people for their help and support in getting this book to our readers:

Jay Baer

Nigel Dessau

Ann Handley

Joe Pulizzi

John Neeson

Ted Rubin

Robert Scoble

Mike Volpe

Tony Zambito

Our relationship gurus, Jane Shannon and Sandy Brisentine at MyExecutiveSolutions; our talented illustrators, Thomas Upson and Josh Carpenter; our social officer, Eileen Foran; our air traffic control-ler, Danielle Mitropoulos; our web design goddess, Jenn Moreira; our editor, Shannon Vargo; and our bail bondsman, James Todd.

And, most of all, our wives and families, who semi-cheerfully put up with our late nights, “emergency meetings,” angst, and anxiety, and who provided care, feeding, support, and help during our journey.

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xiii

Preface: Is DIgItal MarketIng DeaD?

If it ever truly existed, yes, digital marketing is definitely dead.

That’s because there’s no real distinction anymore between traditional and digital marketing.

All audience experiences are intrinsically digital by connecting in some way to the myriad of new channels like websites, social media, and apps. These experiences change the ways through which organizations form relationships with their audiences—all relationships must bridge the real and virtual worlds. Organizations are increasingly being forced to accept the new order of things. To form and transform relationships through digital channels, we must embrace the concept that matters most: the sum of the audience’s experiences across the entire spectrum of touch points. We must find ways to translate our stories into real- life experiences using nothing but those digital touch points. We must engage the audience at a real-life, emotional level almost from the very moment we touch them. Perhaps equally important is the realization that organizations must maintain that real-life, emotional connection throughout the engagement process, while reinforcing the intellec-tual and emotional responses from audience interaction as they visit again and again . . . until they form an enduring bond of loyalty.

We must transform marketing from talking at audiences to speak-ing with them. We must shift our attention from screaming, “Look at me!” to quietly asking, “How are you doing?”

We cannot simply bolt digital stuff onto our marketing plans, or hire an intern to do something digital. The entire organization must evolve to embrace the power that digital channels and technolo-gies provide us. As both consumers and marketers, digital is at the core of our lives now. We interact with digital tools and technologies throughout our day. Employees, processes—the entire organizational gestalt—must transform so that every interaction, live or virtual, is aligned to translate the brand’s story into a real-life experience for the audience . . . but within digital channels.

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xiv Preface

Are we suggesting that digital should replace traditional market-ing? No. We are saying there’s really no distinction anymore because digital has fundamentally changed consumer expectations. People now feel that an organization without a website or a Facebook profile is somehow “less” than those that have these resources. That’s because digital has given people a way, for the first time in history really, to connect easily with an organization, be it to laud and praise or vilify and complain. That digital availability is now becoming an audience expectation, which is why authenticity must become our lifeblood.

If the interaction between our audience and our staff, services, and processes does not align with our story, not only will our audience notice, but worse, they will tell each other! There is no getting away from it—digital has changed the name of the game from “sell” to “help with.” People are tired of the vultures.

As an interactive medium through which audiences can connect with organizations 24/7/365, the stories we tell must be good, engag-ing, and emotional. If we come to this digital party with nothing to talk about but ourselves, our products, our features, and our benefits, they won’t let us past the front door. Our audience members want us to care about, and be involved in, the issues they face. We must add to the conversation by understanding the issues and having an opinion on them. We must demonstrate not just on a monthly basis, when the magazine with our ad in it used to hit the stands, but on a daily, hourly, even per-minute basis that we belong in the conversation as an active participant . . . not the guy hovering at the door as you approach the car dealership.

Whatever an organization’s underlying purpose, it must learn to listen, empathize, contribute, solve, and evolve as the organiza-tion strives to develop long-term relationships with the audience. Relationships are what truly differentiate organizations in this new, digitally transformed world. Relationships cannot be copied by com-petitors. Relationships, when cultivated and valued, can’t be stolen. That’s why, more than anything, the first steps in the journey to build relationships must be taken with no ambition other than to do one thing—to help.

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1

IntroductIon

Sociologists will still be arguing into the next century about why invasive and assertive advertising worked, for a while at least, in the

late twentieth century, but things have definitely changed. Websites, social media, mobile, and all of the digital technologies that are rapidly integrating deeper into our lives point to one central thing—consumers have choice.

Consumers aren’t beholden to their television sets, or magazines, or radio to find out what product to buy and with whom to do busi-ness. Choice surrounds them every second of every day. The barriers to finding and engaging with competitors have been destroyed by the ease of clicking a mouse button or tapping on a screen, which makes what this book talks about even more important.

The choice that consumers have today reflects another impor-tant change—businesses can’t compete solely on product anymore. Technology enables competitors to spring up overnight. To consum-ers, product features are all the same.

Thankfully, all this change has left one aspect of the business world untouched, the one aspect that, we’ll argue, is the crux of cre-ating a truly successful, memorable organization that people want to love. To share. To recommend.

Relationships.

The problem, though, is that digital makes forming, cultivating, and taking advantage of relationships difficult.

The concepts, arguments, and examples that follow will help you understand the fundamental components of relationships—what makes them good; what makes them memorable; and what makes them so powerful that people want to recommend them to friends, family, and complete strangers. But we also make the argument that everything a business does online, every engagement through a web-site or status post through Facebook, builds on the foundation of rela-tionships. When we strip away every brand message and every product feature, we are left with the one thing that truly differentiates an

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2 IntroductIon

organization—its relationships with customers, prospects, employees, competitors, investors, and any other stakeholders.

In addition to providing a proven method for engaging and build-ing relationships online, the book also provides a powerful framework to help measure and manage the “opportunity energy” of the relation-ships in a network.

relatIonshIps Matter

What is at the heart of every business transaction? A relationship.

Whether it’s a transaction closed with a handshake (or a hug) or one that is entirely electronic, it involves a relationship. It might have begun with catching someone’s eye at a trade show, or stepping up to the counter in a department store. Maybe it was an email or social media exchange. Regardless of the form, when we interact, work together, form partnerships, or decide to buy something (or not to buy something), a relationship is at the foundation. Relationships are the means to prosperity, success, achievement, failure, peace, and war.

Organizations have long understood the value and need for rela-tionships. Every organization must develop and manage relationships with its stakeholders—spouses, children, customers, voters, congre-gants, donors, players, fans, rivals, enemies. To be successful, an orga-nization must have objectives and goals for those relationships. Maybe the goal is to attract, to exclude, to liberate, to control, to defeat, or to uplift; it doesn’t matter. Without clear objectives, the value of those relationships goes unrealized (or at least unexploited).

All goals must be measurable, which makes relationship measure-ment so important as well—transactions, profits, dues, votes, donations, readers, likes, friends, and followers. Without the ability to determine whether objectives are successful, and to reset objectives as needed, relationship development and management fall to chaos.

Ultimately, these relationship targets and goals must drive every organization’s strategy, actions, and outcomes. Is the goal of building long-term customer relationships more or less important than growing revenue and profit? Are they mutually exclusive? Can a business succeed long term without long-term customers? Our natural reaction is to say, “Of course not!” However, how much time and resources does the business focus on acquiring new customers versus building on existing relationships?

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IntroductIon 3

Without measurable goals and executable strategies, the urgencies of the day will overtake even our best intentions for relationship development.

This brings into sharp relief the world embodied and articulated by AMC’s hit television show Mad Men. Does Don Draper and his crew care about relationships? If those heavy-handed marketing prac-tices were in full force today (and we would argue that many marketers and organizations do still practice them), would audiences really pay attention? Does a bigger marketing hammer really make a long-term impact on the company’s success?*

We are in a state of relationship transition. Relationships are, and have always been, hugely important to us as human beings. They drive economic success or failure. Relationships depend on communication. As the world evolves because of digital technology, organizations must adapt to a new set of rules and approaches for developing relationships using the technologies we are all adapting so readily.

are dIgItal relatIonshIps really dIfferent?As we mentioned just a few pages or so ago, the answer is “No.”

Relationships are so fundamentally human that our need for them—whether online or at a local coffee shop—may never change.

With that said, the world we live in today has a completely new set of rules thanks to digital technology. Those old methods of build-ing relationships, things like face-to-face communication, and having a personal history with a customer, may not seem to translate to the way we interact and engage in the digital world.†

Which brings us back to the purpose of this book.

*To encourage our audiences today to take action—we will use the term audience when we mean the target groups of people we are interacting with to achieve our goals—we must engage them in relationships. We can no longer lecture, cajole, fool, or demand that audiences do as we wish. We must interact, discuss, educate, argue, listen, and most of all help our audiences in achieving their objectives. Only when we do that can we hope to achieve our objectives.†We will use the terms real world and digital world throughout the book. We get that the real world is really the digital world now, but we needed a terminology structure to differentiate online interactions, engagement, and relationships from those we have face-to-face.

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4 IntroductIon

Sure, we want to convince you that the single, most important aspect of an organization’s success in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world is relationships, but we also want to give you something practical to help you make online relationships work. That’s why we’ve focused a huge part of this book on translating the principles of building relationships learned from the real world into the digital world. You will find helpful hints and takeaways with actions you can take that embody and lever-age our advice. We have also engaged the help of many well-known practitioners whose advice is interspersed throughout the book.

Our goal is to help organizations operating in the digital world build the same kinds of relationships they might have if their audiences could interact with them in person every day—the same kind of rela-tionships, honestly, that have worked for hundreds, even thousands, of years, to enable us to connect with one another, whether as neighbor, friend, proprietor, or customer.

However, this new shift to a digital world has not transformed the basic mechanisms within us that help form relationships, nor has it completely transformed the processes, tools, and structures that have served humanity for an eternity of relationship building. Since Peter1 scratched charcoal drawings on a cave wall, we have formed relationships through a cycle of attention gathering and trust building.

Today, when our kids are texting each other at the dinner table, or they’re snap-chatting their friends on the other side of the couch, they remind us that the lines between “digital” and “physical” are blurred when it comes to relationships.

They remind us that the past several years of digital innovation have utterly transformed the human race’s ability to communicate and, more importantly, have transformed our ability to form relationships with each other and organizations of all types all the time. While we tend to text and email a relatively small group of close acquaintances, we share Facebook updates with an often larger and more public group of online “handles” we refer to as friends, we may exchange opinions semi-autonomously with strangers on community sites, or even Tweet to a universe of millions.

gettIng attentIon

At the core of relationship development is the need for attention. In the physical world, it might be a glance from across the room, a firm handshake, or an irritating phone call. In the digital world, it might

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IntroductIon 5

be a comment on a Facebook status update. Ultimately, regardless of physical or digital, if no attention is paid, no relationship is formed.

If this issue of gaining attention only applied between two people, we could probably stop this book right now (or at least relocate it to the self-help section of the bookstore). Only it doesn’t. The same rules apply to organizations. They are participating within the conversa-tion as our friends do—through their Facebook pages they are don-ning a persona that is easily mistaken for a regular person.* But unlike us, they are actively out looking for “friends,” which makes garnering attention even harder. In the digital world, you don’t make friends by blasting out marketing messages about your product! Audiences only have a set amount of attention available, and they will spend it in ways that maximize their perceived benefit. Just as digital makes it easy for organizations to reach more people, digital makes it just as easy for people to ignore.

The level and length of an audience’s willingness to spend atten-tion on a particular subject, object, person, or organization is depen-dent on a vast set of factors:

• The relevancy and urgency of the message—if Peter is waving a spear and pointing at a stalking lion, the tribe is likely to pay close attention.

• The credibility and trustworthiness of the attention seeker—no one pays much attention, though, if they know Peter has been chewing the red poppy seeds. Again.

• The quality and intelligibility of message—if Peter yells at them in a foreign tongue, the tribe’s attention will quickly wander.

Just as it makes sense to think of audiences spending attention, it is best to think of organizations earning attention by providing a transaction of value. In traditional advertising, the audience received compensation for their attention through access to content—the TV or radio program, the newspaper article, or the website. This form of “attention hijacking” works when the audience has limited content

*Jay Baer, author of Youtility, points out that aside from the presence of “applications,” there is little differentiation between business Facebook pages and personal pages.

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6 IntroductIon

options. However, the audience is not necessarily a willing participant, so this approach loses effectiveness as soon as there is a choice.

When attention is earned and spent, a transaction occurs between audience and organization. Whether for a split second before grabbing a spear and running for the hills, or for hours at a time learning new hunting tricks by listening to stories around the campfire, Peter and his audience engage and share information, energy, and a moment in time together that adds to their historical bonds.

And when that transaction occurs, or especially when it repeats, relationships develop. Positive transaction after positive transaction leads to a relationship with positive value. However, as we know, rela-tionships are not always positive. If a chest-pumping Peter takes credit for another hunter’s kill, he loses credibility. . . and might even lose his head!

The key to achieving the organization’s relationship goal is trans-lating the audience’s investment of attention into positive engagement by using it effectively to provide value, build trust, and earn the right to further investment of attention. All this happens with an eye toward building long-term positive relationships.

Why are We strugglIng WIth dIgItal?The key to effectively engaging online audiences is to understand and leverage the fundamental nature of human connections. Why do we connect? How do we connect? What works and what does not in attracting attention, earning repetitive investment, and layering con-nections to building long-term habitual relationships?

even BIg Brands faIl at connectIng

Robert Scoble is a technology celebrity. With over 4,000,000 people following what he posts on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, he has some influence. You would think that organizations, adopting digital technologies at an astounding pace, would bend over backward to make sure they were catering to his every whim.2

Apparently, even the most “customer-focused” organizations sometimes don’t get how to leverage digital technologies to build and cultivate relationships.

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IntroductIon 7

Robert lives right down the street from the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay, California. By his own admission, he frequents the hotel quite a bit—dinner, drinks and chat, or just relaxing with his wife and watching the sun set. Yet, it would seem, despite all of his visits, the Ritz has little knowledge about him as a person.

The Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay operates four separate com-puter systems—one for the spas, one for the hotel itself (reservations, bookings, etc.), one for the main restaurant (OpenTable), and one for the smaller restaurant. Unfortunately, none of these systems appears to be connected to each other. So, if Robert checks in at the hotel, the hotel system knows who he is (and the person checking him in can leverage that history to make his stay more personal) but doesn’t know what he ate for dinner last night when he visited the restaurant (OpenTable does).

“It’s like having a friend and starting over every time you meet,” says Robert. “Imagine going to dinner at a friend’s house and the next day them not remembering anything about you or the night before! That’s what my experience with the Ritz is like.”

What is the Ritz doing wrong?

According to Robert, the histories contained in the Ritz-Carlton’s computer systems are not connected.

“If they pulled their systems together,” Robert says, “my experi-ence would be much more personalized. They could even integrate third-party data like Foursquare and provide me a more personalized experience based on my history with them. That’s kind of like Castello di Amorosa winery in Napa, where if you follow them on Instagram, they’ll give you a different tour (more focused on the photography) than the usual crowd.”

What makes it worse is when Robert visits the Ritz in London—there is no connection between the two properties—they have no idea he has a long history with the brand through the Half Moon Bay property.

“There are very few companies doing it well,” Robert adds. “So there’s a lot of room for improvement, especially as we get more com-fortable with contextual technologies. Almost every business could offer a really personalized experience.”

What Robert’s experience and insights illustrate are that not many organizations get the connection between digital and real-world relationships. They are good at forming relationships face-to-face (when they have a physical presence), but when their customers are digital or when digital could be applied to make those face-to-face interactions better? Not so much.

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8 IntroductIon

According to Jay Baer, the author of Youtility and an accomplished speaker, the real reason organizations struggle is because they don’t know how to behave in the digital world.

“Businesses now have to use the same online venues that we use for personal and social interactions. That’s the digital equivalent of selling in church. They have to be very careful,” says Jay. “They must behave. They must act like humans online. But companies are tone-deaf. We are past the ‘hey, should we do this’ stage and now we’re in the ‘how do we do this well’ phase, which is also known as the awkward teenage years.”3

This book is about connecting the real world with the digital world through methods that organizations can use online to re-create the connections we make in the real world .  .  . and finding ways to expand on them.

It’s about helping you through those “awkward teenage years.”

We designed it to help you unleash the awesome power of building relationships, engaging online audiences, and fostering raving fans so that your customers aren’t just fanatics of your company. They love you.

Enough to put their personal stamp on your organization.

Enough to recommend you.

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9

Chapter 1

Business as Usual Is Over . . . or Is It?

If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

—Einstein

W hen B.L. Ogilvie & Sons opened for business in 1919, it faced little competition selling coal and household goods to the well-

heeled residents of Weston, Massachusetts.

If you visit Ogilvie’s today, you will find a crowded but neatly laid out arrangement of everything one might need in the way of hard-ware and home goods. The store is brightly lit, immaculately clean, and smells faintly of turpentine, kerosene, and pine. It is a good, old-fashioned smell. Clear, sometimes hand-lettered, signs indicate which aisle holds screws, and where to find the charcoal briquettes. Several uniformed employees constantly fuss about, tidying and arranging merchandise on the well-stocked shelves, eager to answer questions, explain how to DIY, or talk about issues in the local community.

At the rear of the store on a raised platform several steps up above the crowd, behind the wooden sales counter, Kevin Whittemore surveys the establishment while seated at the same wooden desk that served his father, and several grandfathers before him. An old cow-bell clangs, and his well-trained eye shoots to the front door. Mrs. Appleyard enters, and stops to let her eyes adjust from the sunlight outside. A spry and passionate gardener, Mrs. Appleyard, by Kevin’s count, must be 89 or 90 years old. She takes a step or two farther into the store and stops to admire the bird feeder display Kevin’s team has just set up in aisle one. He is pleased to see Ray Glover, his hardware

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10 Recommend This!

manager, step forward to greet her by name and offer assistance. Kevin cannot hear the conversation but senses, as she pulls a small darkened lightbulb from her purse, that Mrs. Appleyard is having trouble with her refrigerator again.

Kevin watches as Ray walks her to the proper shelf, selects the appropriate replacement, and slips it into a small brown paper sack. He nods as Mrs. Appleyard smiles, slips the bag in her purse, and offers a small wave to Kevin up on his dais. No money is exchanged. No credit card swiped. No signature needed. Ray will note the purchase on her account, and Mrs. Appleyard will receive a bill at the end of the month, with a handwritten note from Ray, “Nice to see you. Hope you can find the cat food for Mr. Whiskers’ dinner in the back of the fridge more easily now!”

How can such a place still exist? Is it an anachronism, a throw-back, a pleasant stroll down memory lane for the ultrarich?

Hardly.

Ninety-three years after opening for its first day of business, Ogilvie’s is a thriving mecca for “in-the-know” locals seeking a new screwdriver, suet for the bird feeder, lumber to repair the deck, framing to build a house, or advice on ridding the garden of those pesky gophers. Located on a back road, near an old abandoned railroad track, with no sign to speak of pointing the way, Ogilvie’s parking lot is brimming with Land Rovers, BMWs, Mercedes-Benz station wagons, and rusted out Ford pickup trucks from 7 a.m. ’til 5 p.m. on weekdays, and 8 a.m. ’til 1 p.m. on Saturdays.

Kevin Whittemore and his staff have all the business they need, want, and can handle, despite the opening of a Home Depot Superstore, a Lowe’s Home Center, and a Walmart on the highway outside of town. In short, Ogilvie’s is thriving.

How can a place like this survive in the age of Amazon? Isn’t it doomed to fail, a dusty bookstore in the era of e-books? A tube TV repair shop in the time of hundred-dollar flat-screen LCDs?

As he surveys his fiefdom of old-fashioned service, his knowl-edgeable staff trained to remember names and personal details of his customers, and as he looks back at his bearded, mutton-chopped, and mustachioed ancestors glaring down from their portraits on the wall above his desk, Kevin Whittemore’s face shows no concern.

What does he know that we don’t?

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Business as usual is oveR . . . oR is iT? 11

The cowbell jangles again as a young mom wearing jeans and a sweatshirt enters in a rush, her toddler in tow. The child instantly reaches for a shiny object on the nearest shelf, but she swoops him up on her hip before he causes any damage. With her free hand, she brushes back a lock of hair that’s fallen across her eyes in the process.

“Hello, Marjory!” calls Whittemore, rising from the desk and stepping down to the sales floor. “What can we do for you this fine morning?”

“Hey, Kevin.” She sounds tired and it’s only 10:30. “We need a gate, or something, to keep Teddy out of the kitchen. He’s figured out how to open the cabinets and thinks it’s great fun to dump my pots all over the floor.”

“Ha! Maybe we have a budding new drummer for the Warrior’s marching band?”

“Please  .  .  . that’s all I need. Seriously, what can we do? I tried those handle-tie bars, you know, the ugly white U-shaped thingies? I hate how they look all over the new kitchen, and Dave got so frustrated trying to open them that he cut them off and threw them all out.”

“Sounds like Dave . . . . Right this way . . . I think I have just what you need.” He leads her to a display at the end of a nearby island. “Here you go. It’s the latest baby-proofing set. These clips install just inside the door, so they’re invisible, no ugly white U-shaped thingies. You slip your finger in here, push sideways, and voilà, the cabinet opens up. No problem.”

She tries the latch. “That is easy to open, and they don’t show.” Brushing off a small hand tugging at the end of her nose, she asks, “Don’t suppose you sell aspirin, do you?”

Kevin smiles, “Of course, right at the register. These may be easy for you to pop open, but little Teddy won’t be able to work the latch with those tiny fingers—for a couple more years, at least. By the time he can get his hand in there, hopefully his interest in banging your pots will have subsided.”

“Looks good, Kevin, but you know Dave . . . he’s a fine teacher, but he’s not exactly what you’d call . . . handy.”

“They’re super-easy; it’s just two screws.”

“I dunno. He can be a real klutz, and those are expensive cabinets you sold us.”

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12 Recommend This!

“I’m more worried about what else little Teddy might find in those cabinets than I am about Dave messing them up,” Kevin says, his expression showing a faint concern. “You did take all the bleach and stuff like that out from under the sink, right? I remember coming into our kitchen once—Brian must have been three or four—and finding him sitting on the floor in front of the sink with a bottle of ammonia in his lap. Thank goodness I reached him before he got the top off. They didn’t have safety caps back then.”

“Oh my! He could have. . . .” She squeezes her kid, and kisses him on top of the head before flicking off a Cheerio she notices glued to his cheek.

“Here, listen, take one of these cool new electric screwdriver flashlights. Just came in. Dave’ll have so much fun playing with it, he won’t realize you have him doing chores.”

She smiles as she takes the new tool.

“You know him pretty well . . . you’re right, he’ll love that thing.”

Well, come to think of it, Kevin thinks, I guess knowing Dave—and all the other folks in town—well, that’s my real job. Isn’t it?

“He can do it, I’m sure,” Kevin nods his head at her. “But if he has any trouble, any trouble at all, you call me and I’ll stop over and help him out. Meantime, get that stuff out from under the sink, and look around in the other cabinets, too. You can’t be too careful.”

Customers at Ogilvie’s do not roam the aisles, smartphones in hand, Googling the online price of every pint of Velux paint, demand-ing Whittemore and his staff match their competitors’ prices on paving stones and bricks. Ogilvie’s charges a premium for virtually everything they sell, and they get their price without complaint.

So what is going on here? How has Ogilvie’s been able to survive for so long? Why do people prefer to go to Ogilvie’s rather than lower-priced super-mega stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s?

Because Kevin Whittemore, and the entire staff at Ogilvie’s, understand that relationships matter more than money, more than time, more than almost anything else in our human existence. Relationships tie us together and form the social bond that keeps us all alive. The adage “People do business with people” is as true today (even on the Internet) as when it was first uttered. Of course, digital compli-cates that by allowing organizations to build relationships at a scope

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