What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [23]
Of course, Google’s lucky. It created a spectacular product that solved a problem at just the right time, becoming essential to the internet and growing as it did with no limits on its scale. People need Google. They love Google. You may not be so lucky; you may be stuck selling a product that doesn’t change the world in a market that’s old and competitive. Sorry. But you may have great customer service and that’s what people talk about. “Customer service is the new marketing,” venture capitalist Brad Burnham blogged after having lunch with the best-known customer-service rep anywhere, Craig Newmark of craigslist. That law gained momentum as the title of a conference in 2008 held by GetSatisfaction.com, a company that created a platform for any customer to get help with any company. “Listening to our customers is actually the most perfect form of marketing you could have,” said Mark Jarvis (no relation), chief marketing officer of Dell. Even if you don’t have a product to love, you can still have a company worth admiring. Alloy Media surveyed college students in 2008 and found that 41 percent preferred socially responsible brands, a 24 percent increase in two years. Maybe that’s why your customers will talk about you.
Once more, it comes down to relationships—relationships that are lived in public. Every time someone says something good about you online because of your product, service, reputation, honesty, openness, or helpfulness, you should knock another dollar off your advertising budget. Will it ever get to zero? Only if you’re lucky.
New Society
Elegant organization
Elegant organization
I sat, dumbfounded, in an audience of executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum International Media Council in Davos, Switzerland, as the head of a powerful news organization begged young Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, for his secret. Please, the publisher beseeched him, how can my publication start a community like yours? We should own a community, shouldn’t we? Tell us how.
Zuckerberg, 22 at the time, is a geek of few words. Some assume his laconicism is a sign of arrogance—that and his habit of wearing sandals at big business conferences. But it’s not. He’s shy. He’s direct. He’s a geek, and this is how geeks are. Better get used to it. When the geeks take over the world—and they will—a few blunt words and then a silent stare will become a societal norm. But Zuckerberg is brilliant and accomplished, and so his few words are worth waiting for.
After this publishing titan pleaded for advice about how to build his own community, Zuckerberg’s reply was, in full: “You can’t.”
Full stop. Hard stare.
He later offered more advice. He told the assembled media moguls that they were asking the wrong question. You don’t start communities, he said. Communities already exist. They’re already doing what they want to do. The question you should ask is how you can help them do that better.
His prescription: Bring them “elegant organization.”
Let that sip of rhetorical cabernet roll around on the palate for a minute. Elegant organization. When you think about it, that is precisely what Zuckerberg brought to Harvard—then other universities, then the rest of the world—with his social platform. Harvard’s community had been doing what it wanted to do for more than three centuries before Zuckerberg came along. He just helped them do it better. Facebook enabled people to organize their social networks—the social graph, he calls it: who they are, what they do, who they know, and, not unimportantly, what they look like. It was an instant hit because it met a need. It organized social life at Harvard.
At this Davos meeting (which was off the record,