Bob Garfield, the outspoken author of The Chaos Scenario, introduced the concept of “Listenomics.” Over a period of time, the marketing realm has revolutionized the idea of how to communicate with people and has shown us that we can no longer talk at customers, but we need to listen first and foremost. We, as marketers, no longer have an effective power to target, lecture, invade and dictate customers (who can sometimes be strangers).
We have, what Garfield calls, entered the Relationship Era, where building connections with people is more valuable than reaching an audience and selling them something. Instead, we must LISTEN, CONNECT and CULTIVATE… in a nutshell.
Just as Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff argue in Groundswell, marketers and advertisers need to listen. They need to be reading reviews and ratings of customers on products, brands and services they are consuming and understanding what people are saying about them. Such reviews offer a valuable skill set for receiving feedback (whether it is positive or negative).
An example of a company that utilizes social media in their marketing strategy is the worldwide establishment known as Starbucks. To get a better understanding of what Starbucks customers were chatting about, the company created a “My Starbucks Idea” on their web page. The idea was to empower customers by allowing them to voice their opinions about products they wanted to see in store. Options included sharing ideas, voting on them, discussing suggestions and seeing which ideas were the most popular.
The “My Starbucks Idea” campaign was a huge success because of one factor: asking customers what they want and providing a platform for them to talk about it. By reading and listening to what their customers had to say, Starbucks was able to act on the information provided (and publicly) to illustrate that it was in fact serving their consumers (no pun intended).
Not only has Starbucks established themselves on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but Starbucks also created an “Ideas in Action” blog that allowed Starbucks employees to provide their acknowledgments of customer insights. The blog also keeps their customers updated with information about the store and its products, which Ayelet Noff of The Starbucks Formula for Social Media Success argues, helps increase brand loyalty, and perhaps even acquire new customers.
Starbucks’s enthusiasm to provide customers what they want through a social media platform allowed customers to connect not only with the company, but with other customers as well. This many-to-many communication paradigm permitted individuals to share, express, discover and aggregate ideas on the company’s own network blog.
The most salient feature of this blog, however, was that the customer had agency in cultivating their own project through a social media platform while Starbucks essentially stood by and watched on the sidelines. They watched, yes, but also listened, then served what their customers wanted based on the insights they provided. Who knew that one click on a mouse could get you so far as a cup of coffee?
Hi Lisa - Yes, it's interesting to me to see how well Starbucks seems to be doing on this and so much of it seems to be about experimentation. A corporation like Starbucks always seems to walk a tight rope here - a big corporation can seem inauthentic in social media and, yet, irrelevant if they aren't using it.
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