What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [56]
Live brings an important benefit to the web: It makes the internet interactive, person-to-person, nose-to-nose. When something is happening live online, we can have conversations around it, we can share the same experience and discuss it, we can influence events. But it also makes the web perilous for businesses being talked about—unless they have the facility to listen to and join the conversation as it happens.
Mobs form in a flash
In this live connection machine, people of similar interests and goals—call them communities or call them mobs—can find each other, coalesce, organize, and act in an instant. Howard Rheingold dubbed them Smart Mobs in the title of his 2002 book. Rheingold chronicled the fall of Philippine president Joseph Estrada at the hands of a smart mob of tens of thousands who were gathered together in only an hour by SMS messages on phones that told them to “Go 2 EDSA,” an address in Manila, and to “Wear blck.”
On a much less grand and profound scale, I watched Twitter form mobs at the South by Southwest conference in Austin in 2008 after attendees excitedly swarmed to the most anticipated party—Google’s, of course—only to find a line three geeks thick running three blocks long. One of those would-be partiers, Gary Vaynerchuk, a tech-savvy wine merchant and video blogger you’ll hear from later, in the chapter on retail, decided to chuck the Google party and make his own. He used his phone to send a message to Twitter asking who wanted to join him. Vaynerchuk already had a few thousand friends following him and scores of them were in Austin. It helped that Vaynerchuk had shipped a few cases of good wine to Texas. A party formed. On Twitter, I watched as one and then another and then another of his friends told their friends they were heading to the party. It came together in minutes.
Not long after this episode, I saw tech blogger Michael Arrington, who runs the powerful TechCrunch.com, complaining loudly on Twitter—as best he could in 140-character bursts—that his Comcast internet connection had been down for 36 hours. He gave us a serial narrative about his time on hold and how he was told this was a California-wide issue (though fellow Californians replied on Twitter that they had no problems). Arrington went to a friend’s house to get on the internet and Twittered that he would use his blog to make Comcast miserable. I linked to this on my blog and speculated that with Arrington’s reach, he’d gather a Twitter mob in an instant. Something surprising happened instead: Comcast called Arrington and sent technicians out to fix the problem. They had monitored Twitter and read about his difficulty. Other bloggers and Twitterers were dubious and said so, but a Comcast rep responded to them on Twitter, proving he was there and listening. Comcast knows that it has to be on top of the conversation as it happens. Every second counts.
The internet has caused you to lose control of so much—brand, message, price, competition, secrecy—but more than anything, you’ve lost control of timing. You can no longer decide when to put your story out or when to answer critics. You can’t subject your customers to waiting on hold—no matter how often you tell them that their call matters to you—without them complaining, revolting, and leaving quickly and publicly. The idea of holding back products and popping them out as surprises insults your customers (well, unless you’re Apple). The earlier they’re involved in your process, the better. The internet has changed the speed, the rhythm, and the process of business and next will do the same to government.
When customers come looking for you on Google, you’d better have answers to their questions on your web site before they are asked. When customers talk about you in public, you’d better have the means to hear and respond. It’s simple for a competitor with a better answer to steal your customers in a flash.
New Imperatives
Beware the cash cow in the coal mine
Encourage, enable, and protect