Introduction

Sociologists will still be arguing into the next century about why invasive and assertive advertising worked, for a while at least, in the late twentieth century, but things have definitely changed. Websites, social media, mobile, and all of the digital technologies that are rapidly integrating deeper into our lives point to one central thing—consumers have choice.

Consumers aren’t beholden to their television sets, or magazines, or radio to find out what product to buy and with whom to do business. Choice surrounds them every second of every day. The barriers to finding and engaging with competitors have been destroyed by the ease of clicking a mouse button or tapping on a screen, which makes what this book talks about even more important.

The choice that consumers have today reflects another important change—businesses can’t compete solely on product anymore. Technology enables competitors to spring up overnight. To consumers, product features are all the same.

Thankfully, all this change has left one aspect of the business world untouched, the one aspect that, we’ll argue, is the crux of creating a truly successful, memorable organization that people want to love. To share. To recommend.

Relationships.

The problem, though, is that digital makes forming, cultivating, and taking advantage of relationships difficult.

The concepts, arguments, and examples that follow will help you understand the fundamental components of relationships—what makes them good; what makes them memorable; and what makes them so powerful that people want to recommend them to friends, family, and complete strangers. But we also make the argument that everything a business does online, every engagement through a website or status post through Facebook, builds on the foundation of relationships. When we strip away every brand message and every product feature, we are left with the one thing that truly differentiates an organization—its relationships with customers, prospects, employees, competitors, investors, and any other stakeholders.

In addition to providing a proven method for engaging and building relationships online, the book also provides a powerful framework to help measure and manage the “opportunity energy” of the relationships in a network.

Relationships Matter

What is at the heart of every business transaction? A relationship.

Whether it’s a transaction closed with a handshake (or a hug) or one that is entirely electronic, it involves a relationship. It might have begun with catching someone’s eye at a trade show, or stepping up to the counter in a department store. Maybe it was an email or social media exchange. Regardless of the form, when we interact, work together, form partnerships, or decide to buy something (or not to buy something), a relationship is at the foundation. Relationships are the means to prosperity, success, achievement, failure, peace, and war.

Organizations have long understood the value and need for relationships. Every organization must develop and manage relationships with its stakeholders—spouses, children, customers, voters, congregants, donors, players, fans, rivals, enemies. To be successful, an organization must have objectives and goals for those relationships. Maybe the goal is to attract, to exclude, to liberate, to control, to defeat, or to uplift; it doesn’t matter. Without clear objectives, the value of those relationships goes unrealized (or at least unexploited).

All goals must be measurable, which makes relationship measurement so important as well—transactions, profits, dues, votes, donations, readers, likes, friends, and followers. Without the ability to determine whether objectives are successful, and to reset objectives as needed, relationship development and management fall to chaos.

Ultimately, these relationship targets and goals must drive every organization’s strategy, actions, and outcomes. Is the goal of building long-term customer relationships more or less important than growing revenue and profit? Are they mutually exclusive? Can a business succeed long term without long-term customers? Our natural reaction is to say, “Of course not!” However, how much time and resources does the business focus on acquiring new customers versus building on existing relationships? Without measurable goals and executable strategies, the urgencies of the day will overtake even our best intentions for relationship development.

This brings into sharp relief the world embodied and articulated by AMC’s hit television show Mad Men. Does Don Draper and his crew care about relationships? If those heavy-handed marketing practices were in full force today (and we would argue that many marketers and organizations do still practice them), would audiences really pay attention? Does a bigger marketing hammer really make a long-term impact on the company’s success?a

We are in a state of relationship transition. Relationships are, and have always been, hugely important to us as human beings. They drive economic success or failure. Relationships depend on communication. As the world evolves because of digital technology, organizations must adapt to a new set of rules and approaches for developing relationships using the technologies we are all adapting so readily.

Are Digital Relationships Really Different?

As we mentioned just a few pages or so ago, the answer is “No.”

Relationships are so fundamentally human that our need for them—whether online or at a local coffee shop—may never change.

With that said, the world we live in today has a completely new set of rules thanks to digital technology. Those old methods of building relationships, things like face-to-face communication, and having a personal history with a customer, may not seem to translate to the way we interact and engage in the digital world.b

Which brings us back to the purpose of this book.

Sure, we want to convince you that the single, most important aspect of an organization’s success in today’s (and tomorrow’s) world is relationships, but we also want to give you something practical to help you make online relationships work. That’s why we’ve focused a huge part of this book on translating the principles of building relationships learned from the real world into the digital world. You will find helpful hints and takeaways with actions you can take that embody and leverage our advice. We have also engaged the help of many well-known practitioners whose advice is interspersed throughout the book.

Our goal is to help organizations operating in the digital world build the same kinds of relationships they might have if their audiences could interact with them in person every day—the same kind of relationships, honestly, that have worked for hundreds, even thousands, of years, to enable us to connect with one another, whether as neighbor, friend, proprietor, or customer.

However, this new shift to a digital world has not transformed the basic mechanisms within us that help form relationships, nor has it completely transformed the processes, tools, and structures that have served humanity for an eternity of relationship building. Since Peter1 scratched charcoal drawings on a cave wall, we have formed relationships through a cycle of attention gathering and trust building.

Today, when our kids are texting each other at the dinner table, or they’re snap-chatting their friends on the other side of the couch, they remind us that the lines between “digital” and “physical” are blurred when it comes to relationships.

They remind us that the past several years of digital innovation have utterly transformed the human race’s ability to communicate and, more importantly, have transformed our ability to form relationships with each other and organizations of all types all the time. While we tend to text and email a relatively small group of close acquaintances, we share Facebook updates with an often larger and more public group of online “handles” we refer to as friends, we may exchange opinions semi-autonomously with strangers on community sites, or even Tweet to a universe of millions.

Getting Attention

At the core of relationship development is the need for attention. In the physical world, it might be a glance from across the room, a firm handshake, or an irritating phone call. In the digital world, it might be a comment on a Facebook status update. Ultimately, regardless of physical or digital, if no attention is paid, no relationship is formed.

If this issue of gaining attention only applied between two people, we could probably stop this book right now (or at least relocate it to the self-help section of the bookstore). Only it doesn’t. The same rules apply to organizations. They are participating within the conversation as our friends do—through their Facebook pages they are donning a persona that is easily mistaken for a regular person.c But unlike us, they are actively out looking for “friends,” which makes garnering attention even harder. In the digital world, you don’t make friends by blasting out marketing messages about your product! Audiences only have a set amount of attention available, and they will spend it in ways that maximize their perceived benefit. Just as digital makes it easy for organizations to reach more people, digital makes it just as easy for people to ignore.

The level and length of an audience’s willingness to spend attention on a particular subject, object, person, or organization is dependent on a vast set of factors:

• The relevancy and urgency of the message—if Peter is waving a spear and pointing at a stalking lion, the tribe is likely to pay close attention.
• The credibility and trustworthiness of the attention seeker—no one pays much attention, though, if they know Peter has been chewing the red poppy seeds. Again.
• The quality and intelligibility of message—if Peter yells at them in a foreign tongue, the tribe’s attention will quickly wander.

Just as it makes sense to think of audiences spending attention, it is best to think of organizations earning attention by providing a transaction of value. In traditional advertising, the audience received compensation for their attention through access to content—the TV or radio program, the newspaper article, or the website. This form of “attention hijacking” works when the audience has limited content options. However, the audience is not necessarily a willing participant, so this approach loses effectiveness as soon as there is a choice.

When attention is earned and spent, a transaction occurs between audience and organization. Whether for a split second before grabbing a spear and running for the hills, or for hours at a time learning new hunting tricks by listening to stories around the campfire, Peter and his audience engage and share information, energy, and a moment in time together that adds to their historical bonds.

And when that transaction occurs, or especially when it repeats, relationships develop. Positive transaction after positive transaction leads to a relationship with positive value. However, as we know, relationships are not always positive. If a chest-pumping Peter takes credit for another hunter’s kill, he loses credibility. . . and might even lose his head!

The key to achieving the organization’s relationship goal is translating the audience’s investment of attention into positive engagement by using it effectively to provide value, build trust, and earn the right to further investment of attention. All this happens with an eye toward building long-term positive relationships.

Why Are We Struggling with Digital?

The key to effectively engaging online audiences is to understand and leverage the fundamental nature of human connections. Why do we connect? How do we connect? What works and what does not in attracting attention, earning repetitive investment, and layering connections to building long-term habitual relationships?

According to Jay Baer, the author of Youtility and an accomplished speaker, the real reason organizations struggle is because they don’t know how to behave in the digital world.

“Businesses now have to use the same online venues that we use for personal and social interactions. That’s the digital equivalent of selling in church. They have to be very careful,” says Jay. “They must behave. They must act like humans online. But companies are tone-deaf. We are past the ‘hey, should we do this’ stage and now we’re in the ‘how do we do this well’ phase, which is also known as the awkward teenage years.”3

This book is about connecting the real world with the digital world through methods that organizations can use online to re-create the connections we make in the real world . . . and finding ways to expand on them.

It’s about helping you through those “awkward teenage years.”

We designed it to help you unleash the awesome power of building relationships, engaging online audiences, and fostering raving fans so that your customers aren’t just fanatics of your company. They love you.

Enough to put their personal stamp on your organization.

Enough to recommend you.

Notes

1. Peter is a character in the popular syndicated comic, B.C., that was first published in 1958 and still continues today. You can read more about Peter and B.C., whom we use only as a funny anecdote, on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.C._(comic_strip)

2. We reference Robert Scoble in a number of chapters throughout this book. These references are from an interview conducted with Ann on October 9, 2013. You can learn more about Robert at www.scobleizer.com.

3. We reference Jay Baer in a number of chapters throughout this book. These references are from an interview conducted with Jay on September 16, 2013. You can find more information about Jay at www.jaybaer.com.

aTo encourage our audiences today to take action—we will use the term audience when we mean the target groups of people we are interacting with to achieve our goals—we must engage them in relationships. We can no longer lecture, cajole, fool, or demand that audiences do as we wish. We must interact, discuss, educate, argue, listen, and most of all help our audiences in achieving their objectives. Only when we do that can we hope to achieve our objectives.

bWe will use the terms real world and digital world throughout the book. We get that the real world is really the digital world now, but we needed a terminology structure to differentiate online interactions, engagement, and relationships from those we have face-to-face.

cJay Baer, author of Youtility, points out that aside from the presence of “applications,” there is little differentiation between business Facebook pages and personal pages.