The Physical Web | Pervasive Memory | Digital Sensors | Social Influence
Social influence means customers talk to each other. A lot. Even when you are trying to talk to them. Especially then.
Social networks create an environment in which customers are talking to other people, learning from other people, asking questions of other people… while they are also interacting with the company.
Of course, it could be worse than this. Social influence has the potential to completely remove some companies from the equation. Even Google finds itself threatened by Facebook’s ability to help its members find content online (that’s one important goal of Facebook’s “Like” buttons.)
No more fudging the truth
What does this mean to the leaders of a company? Others will challenge your claims. They will review and analyze the quality of your products, the degree to which your firm is trustworthy, and the degree to which you perform as promised. All of these will be tested, examined, analyzed, discussed and shared by other people even as the customer sits in front of you.
One of us was recently sitting with a friend in an office furniture store, testing chairs and talking to the sales rep. At the same time, we were using our smartphones to look at reviews of these chairs. As the sales rep would tell us about a chair, we’d find a new review online. The opinions we were discovering became part of the conversation; we would see a review, mention an observation to the sales rep, and he would react to it. As a result, we were much better educated than we would have been in the past.
By the way, we also discovered that the chair we really liked – the one the rep said would take four weeks for delivery – was available online in three days. We left without buying the chair.
From the other side of this equation, the sales rep had to deal with the opinions of many people — none of who were physically present in his store. Social influence creates enormous issues for companies.
Truth is, we haven’t seen anything yet. Innovators around the world are hard at work trying to shift the balance of power away from companies and towards customers, using technology to empower individuals.
New habits, new expectations
Some people won’t order from a website that lacks customer reviews. Others won’t order from a firm unless that firm has credible customer feedback displayed prominently. By “credible,” we mean that the firm displays the good, the bad and the ugly feedback.
Social influence shifts the balance of power between companies and customers. It forces companies to be more open and honest, even when they would prefer not to be.
It’s sort of like democracy coming to a country that has only known a dictatorship. The current leadership thinks: it’s an unmitigated disaster. The people think: eureka, we are free at last! As we write this in February 2011, this is precisely what happened in Egypt, where a 30 year old Google executive named Wael Ghonim helped set up a Facebook page that was instrumental in sparking a chain of protests that toppled the country’s leader.
As The National (the Abu Dhabi Media company’s English-language publication) wrote:
The recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt have, more than ever before, successfully utilized social media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in the early stages to call for social action. In Egypt, the government belatedly shut down the Internet and mobile phone networks but it soon became clear the horse had already bolted. The Internet might not be the source of social change, but as a medium it enables unrivalled momentum.
Just to be clear, your company doesn’t have the option of shutting down the Internet to stop the spread of social influence.
If social influence can change a country, it can certainly change the way customers do business with – or abandon – your company.
Think beyond advertising
Don’t think of social influence as a website or a place to advertise. Think of it as an unrelenting mirror on the way your firm touches individual customers and your stakeholders in general. It’s a mirror that will force changes within your culture and your processes, and it is in your interest to make such changes before the social influence mirror reveals your firm’s flaws publicly.