The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [38]
Like Curtis, Mesh businesses can use the age-old tactic of “offering product samples” while encouraging prospective customers to tell their friends, in this case about the decadent dessert they luckily encountered. Social media coupled with product samples provide the type of broadcast benefits that digital products enjoyed when music or video could be sampled and then shared online. This is really the first time that physical products—crème brûlée!—can appreciate the same type of leverage.
out in the open.
Traditionally, many businesses haven’t wanted you to know anything about how the sausage was made. Transparency with customers was avoided, sometimes aggressively. But that attitude is changing rapidly. Certain users demand to know more. They want to understand what they’re signing up for. They want to know more about the record of the inkjet printer they’re considering—is it cheap to buy but expensive to maintain?—and where their clothes or cleaning products are made. People want to know if companies are abusing people, animals, or the planet. They want to know where their food comes from, how it was prepared, and what’s in it, for reasons of health, ethics, the environment, religion, and even taste.
Ideally, a Mesh business should strive for transparency in what it’s doing, with whom, and why. The current reality is that very few relationships, personal or business, are fully transparent, and for many reasons. Transparency is a little tricky. A business might not want to share certain information because it’s personal either to the business or to other customers.
My trust or distrust of a company partly revolves around how my personal information is handled. While most people want to know how their information is used, people’s perception of the relative importance of privacy varies. While I’m not super keen on giving out a lot of information about myself in exchange for goodies, there are a lot of people who will do so quite willingly. The requirements for privacy, interestingly, tend to be different for people in defined demographics. In particular, young people often have different attitudes toward privacy than their parents or grandparents.
Companies should be guided by “permission marketing,” a concept described by Seth Godin several years ago. The basic idea is this: if a customer exchanges personal information for something offered by the company, she should get back more than what was given. When I say that I trust a business with my personal information, I expect it to convert that information into real value for me. I want it to understand what I need, and to trust that it can and will deliver. Companies that take advantage of that principle are going to win in a big way.
A study at Carnegie Mellon University determined that half the users in a survey were willing to pay more for goods on Web sites that had better privacy practices—an average of about 60 cents more on a $10 purchase. The percentage shot up for what the researchers called “privacy-sensitive products,” such as sex toys. The moral: Mesh businesses need to take privacy concerns seriously, because their customers and partners do.
Any Mesh business that trades customers’ information without asking permission to do so undermines their trust. It’s also not up to the business to share who else in a customer’s Facebook network, network of friends, or zip code is also a member of the service, unless each person grants permission to do so.
Some users are very concerned about protecting their private information. Google’s version of a social networking site, Buzz, was slapped with a class action lawsuit because