Retailers: We’re worried about our jobs, give us a warm feeling please

A few weeks ago, the current Mrs Ryan finally wore me down on yet another of agenda priorities. We started planning and procuring a replacement for the dark and dingy chip board panels that represent our kitchen.

As excited as I am about the prospect of having a nice new kitchen, like over half of full time employees in the UK, and an even higher percentage in financial services I would wager, I have concerns about my medium term job prospects. I have held back on all large purchases quite simply due to fear of redundancy.

So parting with my rainy day funds meant I needed a supplier that could assure me I was getting the best deal, could show me a durable product and above all would give me a warm feeling from their service.

So as soon as the credits began to roll on Saturday’s Glee rerun I reached for the phone to call the safest pair of hands of all, John Lewis Partnership. Sadly, there kitchen team were too busy to take my call, so the switchboard operator took my details and promised me a call that day. I am still waiting.

Next to Homebase, a large DIY retailer with a reputation for discounting. But they were too busy to even answer the phone, not once, but twice.

So to the market leader DIY retailer, B and Q, who according to the newspaper had a sale on. The guy answering the phone affirmed he could help us with our enquiry and there was no need for me to speak to a kitchen specialist. I thought we had hit gold. However, he wouldn’t arrange a site visit for measurements to be taken and a plan to be drawn up.

“Why would we do that when you haven’t been into the store to choose a style?” he quizzed.

“Why would I drive to your store to choose a style when you don’t even have my measurements?” I retorted.

“Well go online then.” He suggested. So I moved on.

And to Wickes. The builder’s pal and the first port of call for my seriously DIY capable family and friends. And what a surprise; the young lady that took the call new exactly what to do and what to ask. Within minutes she had booked and confirmed an appointment for a trained consultant to visit to measure up after the school run on Monday and a provisional visit the store to discuss the design.

John from our local store came to visit and over the past few weeks walked us through the precarious road f domestic compromise to select our new kitchen. But above all, he did what his competitors failed to do; give me a warm feeling.

My wife is the typical Facebook user

Social media is about community, and not the platform. A social media platform or app accelerates a community coming together with a self interest based on mutual benefit.

Yet from my experience, everyone perceives this evolution towards forming online communities differently according to who they perceive to be the typical user of Facebook.

The current social media generation gap among my colleagues generally looks something like this:

• Those that conjure a picture of their teenage children tend to see Facebook as no more relevant to their daily lives as a Playstation.

• Those with older children (post or at university) while not appreciating that social media is becoming ubiquitous, at least see some value in sharing content such as updates and photos.

• Those with children under high school age are most likely to be already users of social media in their own personal, albeit passively.

• Those without children are probably the only people to actually have time to use it and cross multiple channels, probably including gaming and dating.

My typical Facebook user is my wife. Not just because women make up more active users than men, but because she is the best example of using social media to speak with and listen to her community that avidly checks in wherever we go.

The best example of this is using one of her iPhone nappy apps. (Nappies are diapers for my North American chums). When we recently had dinner with another family at the Pizza Express in Rochester, (again for my friends on the west side of the Atlantic, that’s Kent, not up state New York) I was so impressed with the baby changing facilities that she mandated me to post an entry for every other parent visiting the Medway towns and stranded for somewhere to change their baby.

This is community at its best. Sharing something that is good, not simply for our own benefit, but for the community to prosper. We all belong to different communities and therefore find different uses for the medium.

My communities include people I train with, friends I drink with, friends that live too far away to drink with, people I meet to talk about local politics, the people I speak to when I walk the dog (and a further subset that don’t just look at me strange and speak to me back).

It may seem to my colleagues that all this Facebook stuff is just for teenagers to gossip and parents to share photos, however, over the next ten years these tools will become central to how we live and do business, just as email and mobile telephones have.

Whether they are on Facebook or a iPhone apps, the typical social media user by 2020 will be however we percieve ourselves.

Cheap social media makes marketers lazy

Just as I entered a meeting with a colleague and one of the founders of The Social Media Leadership Forum I happened up this article on the daily enews bulletin from Marketing Week.

Let me paraphrase the premise, junior marketers are over using social media because it is perceived as low cost and that finance managers care more about return on investment than cost and are by default encouraging this. We kicked it around and although we had some sympathy for the sentiment, I don’t buy any of it.

So as the charge came from with our profession here is my response. The basis of successful marketing stands, and indeed underpins all successful campaigns. I.e. target messages of a well researched proposition at a target audience you understand and will perceive the value they can extract from your proposition - that it is greater than any alternative.

The channel we choose to use to deliver the messages is informed more by our knowledge of the customer not just the cost of delivering the message. Social, and digital media more generally, are just some of the possible channels. A practicing marketer that ignores all possible ways of effectively engaging their client is lazy full stop. Not just lazy because they are using social media at the expense of the alternatives/compliments.Just an aside to this, one of the largest growth areas for use of social media is a s a second screen to TV activity.

No longer do we have to wait until the next day to have a conversation beside the water cooler about what was on the box – we can share it with our network through Facebook and Twitter as it happens. Link this new trend of dual screens (the TV and your social media device) and we could see a major resurgence in big ticket above the line TV advertising. The pursuit of which is anything but lazy.

Just because it's difficult, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it

A friend told me about an online industry community she had invested her firm's money and time in over the past year. She has worked hard to cajole her colleagues into producing blogs on their areas of expertise, take part in discussion threads and even post videos from conferences and C level executives.

In spite of this effort, she just couldn’t seem to get her business behind the channel. In particular, her firm consistently failed to input to the topics the community were most engaged about as effectively as her competitors.

Despite the success of her company’s competitors had shown in increased engagement and sales, despite the investment already made and the apparent opportunity the growing community presented; A committee of recently appointed managers cancelled the initiative's budget, because changing the way her organisation operated was seen to be 'just too hard.'

I learned early in my career as a marketing manager at one of the largest organisations in the world that just because something was hard to do, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. This wasn’t the mantra of the business, but my line manager. A man in his late thirties that had risen rapidly to run a pan European US$200 million turnover division and was perceived by his peers to have the alchemist's touch. How had he done this, he changed the businesses he ran to be responsive to whatever clients valued. Even if that meant finding new ways of working.

So often in marketing we look to external solutions to achieve our commercial objectives. A different place to advertise, a new event, a bigger or better web site to push our products and services. When in fact, we should simply address the hardest challenge of them all first; Create an effective business that engages in and responds to what our communities are really interested in.