I met some terrific people at the meetup and enjoyed the discussions which focused on reviewing some of Seth Godin’s blog posts. I particularly enjoyed talking with others about his post What’s the Point (July 2010). After the discussion I started thinking back to a blog post by Forrester’s Augie Ray’s from a couple of days ago, Do You Want to Succeed in Social Media or Social Media Marketing.

All of this got me thinking more about the effort that companies aren’t putting into customer engagement. In Linchpin, Godin says, “Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back.” He paints these people as “victims” of a societal education that teaches people to fit in: “For hundreds of years, the population has been seduced, scammed and brainwashed into fitting in, following instructions and exchanging a day’s work for a day’s pay.”

I think very highly of Seth’s ideas and am a fan of his blog and books. In Linchpin he reaches out to inspire people to understand that they have a brilliance and a genius to be more and break out of the norm by contributing value and creating something precious. I love that idea and hope people take heed, but I ponder whether he’s right about society’s guilt. Societal norms certainly have a major impact on how people act and behave in their careers, but I think it has much more to do with the high value our society seems to place on laziness.

Too often workers in every industry look to do the least amount possible to still receive their paycheck and move on in their career toward desired goals. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with efficiency or looking to accomplish a goal by using fewer resources, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Our society, particularly in America, seems to think freedom means free and doing as little as possible is good. But that’s not very rewarding. Freedom as a right doesn’t mean you deserve to get things for free. Doing as little as possible to get by doesn’t inspire others and rarely results in amazing innovation. I say it’s time that our society reconsiders the value proposition on putting in time and effort to accomplish something. Remember the saying, “an honest day’s work?”

Now I’ll turn my attention on these ideas stated above in regards to businesses. So many companies are jumping on a social media bandwagon of some kind trying to get at consumers in a new way, but they look at hiring interns and consider social media a free activity. Many wonder why their social media efforts are not yielding a high return on new customers. Do these businesses really think they’ll get something for nothing?

Social media as a platform (or many new types of platforms depending on your view of social media) is a major innovation in communication and companies should be taking advantage of the fact that this new medium gives them a greater opportunity to engage with their customers. To Listen, Speak, Care, Share and Build Relationships with their customers and other stakeholders. Instead, companies are being lazy. They’re using social media as a new means of talking “at” people and expecting people to just accept that. Just because they put up a Facebook Fan Page doesn’t mean their interacting with customers. Think of how often you go to a store or a restaurant and you’re treated badly or ignored or have a bad experience trying to find items, return purchases, understand a glitch in your bill. How long have you sat on hold waiting to talk to a customer service representative only to be rerouted to another person who also couldn’t help fix your situation and eventually you’ve spent 10 hours, hundreds of dollars and now don’t even want the service you are locked into for a year on contract?

I hope that this blog post helps inspire companies to understand that putting a bit of time, money, effort and other resources into using social media, and consequently, improving their customer service, store offerings, products/services and support lines so that people had a reason and desire to “friend” them on Facebook or tag new products and recommend their services. Offer your customers something novel–offer them an energized commitment to caring about their needs and wants and providing them with the best possible services and products. Then put up your fan page and Twitter stream as a means of sharing information with them, but also as an invitation to engage with your company, to provide feedback and build trust so that they want to remain your customer and recommend you to others.

Or perhaps you don’t spend much time with family because conversation feels awkward because you don’t have things in common. The same is often the case in a business situation. It may turn out you have things personally in common with a business contact, but when you’re meeting for the first time you won’t know this off the bat. Or if your addressing a large audience you don’t have the opportunity to address everyone on an individual level.

As a child you learned, through family interactions and school situations, how to behave and what you were interested in, and you were subsequently drawn to others who wanted to talk about common interests. Unfortunately, in the business world, you can’t simply rely on having the common interest of your products or even your industry to make conversations lively and ignite engagement from your audiences. Many of the audiences you need to reach (particularly potential customers) come to the market conversation because they have a need or want and not because they want to discuss your product or the industry. This conversation is very different in nature than the conversation you would have with an industry analyst or reporter or engineer within your industry and this distinction should not be taken lightly.

Though most people learned how to “make” conversation by doing it—as an after affect of learning how to speak and interact with other people—make no mistake, it is a skill and has many outside influences and factors. And as with most things in business, as opposed to your personal life, it should be planned out and not done off the cuff. Conversation coaching is a best practice to consider and being done by many companies today, particularly with the growth of social media and the expansion of the number of employees who are now becoming spokespeople (whether officially or unofficially) for their companies.

Conversation Coaching

Conversation coaching can include a variety of techniques and exercises to build skills and develop comfort levels with different types of situations. Coaching activities might also include role playing, media/interview preparation techniques and active listening exercises. Re-evaluating the corporate messaging and understanding it from the perspective of how it helps people/companies fulfill their wants/needs is of key importance. It will also, undoubtedly, cover identifying what type of audience an individual is part of and what that means in terms of directing the conversation you have with them.

Conversation coaching will often include preparation materials for one-on-one conversations. When possible, it’s always best to know as much as you can about the person you’re going to meet with, so you can make the conversation personable. This is particularly important in influencer relations. At the very least you want to know as much as you can about the influencers work focus, the outlets for their work, their audience, their specialty/focus, what they feel about your company/competitors and any possible connections between you/your company and the influencer. Come prepared to have a conversation on a topic of mutual interest, not give a pitch. Share how your product/company approach might be shaping the industry/mutual interest and inquire on their opinion. See where this is going? (I digress.)

Who In the Company Needs Conversation Coaching?

Everyone. Certainly the company executives and management teams and anyone with an outward-facing role in the company such as the sales and marketing teams, but in today’s business climate, everyone in the company should have some level of conversation coaching because everyone in the company represents your company.

This post is about writing communications that help people feel as if your engaging them in conversation. For sure, you need to be understood–the lessons from Eats, Shoots & Leaves shouldn’t be forgotten–but nothing says you have to sound like an automated phone tree system in everything you communicate. By now, most people on earth know that the first thing you do when you reach an automated voice is to press “0″ if you’d rather talk to a person. What do you suppose people do with written communications that sound that way? What do you do with them? Uh, delete? File under important in the trash can?

Let’s say you just signed up for some online service and you’re getting the auto email with important details about your account. Which of these statements would more likely keep you reading long enough to realize you should keep track of this information rather than quickly clicking delete?

1. Dear Ms. ‘Whomever’,
   Thank you for registering at ‘Company Whatever’. We are very pleased to have you as a customer. Our services are meeting the needs of companies all over the world, with more features and options being added regularly. Please make note of the following account information in your records so that our customer support team can better assist you should you have any questions.
2. Hello Jennifer,
   Your registration is complete–thanks for joining! Your account details for ‘Product Whatever’ are listed here, they’ll help you save time if you need assistance from us or our global community of users.

I’m sure you get the point I’m trying to make here. Of course, you want to be respectful of your audience, so this exact example may not be appropriate depending on what type of product you offer. But… food for thought–try considering all your communications and how they might be edited for easier reading, to make your company more approachable, to engage your audience, to illustrate that you care about them, etc.

Your communication pieces have a goal/purpose, right? (If they don’t, why are you sending them?) So, start by reviewing the goal and determine if a conversational approach would help you reach that goal. Staying with the example above, check to see how often customer support encounters people who don’t know their account details. Change the wording on the account details message and see if that number improves.

With the explosion of social media use, companies been moving toward a conversational tone, often by accident. The nature of social media is being “social”. Sounding like a dictionary or grammar book is far from being social. We don’t speak that way, so we don’t always need to write that way. Again, you can be understood, even if you’re writing is informal or doesn’t meet every grammatical rule.