Social media has changed a lot of what we do in life, but maybe nowhere else has this change been as apparent as in business. Consumers today don’t shop the way they used to, before they had access to the opinions of billions of other people. They are far more dependent on their own social networks for advice and recommendations. In realms that change as quickly as social media and online commerce, it’s easy to assume your consumer is a whole different animal, and a powerfully equipped one at that. Or is he?

I don’t think the role of the customer or the consumer or the vendor has actually changed at all. Vendors and consumers and customers are eternal. There’s always been a place for these different characters in the world, and they’ve always interacted for money. So, in that sense, as always, the consumer is king. But the consumer reigns only in a very specific sense of the word. They are the ruler of the one thing we want: what’s inside his wallet. The consumers’ ability to spend makes them king, lord, master, ruler, judge, and jury of all things that have to do with their outward spending.

THE KING CONSUMER?

So, everyone says the consumer is king, but now you know that’s true only in one sense. The King controls the purse strings. We’ve also all heard that in the world of online marketing, content is king. Not true, either, content is not king. Content is the King’s queenie boyfriend. He’s still important, but no longer does he stand all alone as the ruler of a transaction. So if we rule out the consumer as king and we acknowledge that content is the queenie boyfriend, who is the King? Context is the King. If you put your content, your information, into the right context and put it in front of the right people at the right time, it transfers into commerce. They will buy.

So, with the combined power of knowing what content your consumers need and an understanding of how you place that content into the right context, you’ll be ready to see some real improvement in your sales. The content of what you say hasn’t changed. You still want to give your potential consumer the information necessary to make the decision to buy from you. The context dictates the manner in which you share that content, and the contact you are now able to have with your customer is the biggest and coolest thing we have going on right now.

Context + Contact = Relationship

Because we now have such powerful tools for reaching our consumers, we can begin to create a relationship with them that hasn’t been possible since the days of the neighborhood stores. In those days, your favorite baker may have baked your favorite pies on Monday, knowing you’d stop by to pick one up. On a particular Monday, something may have come up to keep you from stopping by the bakery. So, when you went on Tuesday to buy the bread you needed, you’d find that your baker had saved a pie for you. He knew, even if you didn’t stop by on Monday, you’d still want that pie. This kind of personal service is the result of years of transactions between vendor and customer. This type of relationship hasn’t been possible with e-commerce until the growth of social media. Now, we can try to develop relationships with the consumers of our products in ways that have been impossible until fairly recently.

As you saw in Chapter 1, since the web’s origins, it has been used primarily as a very social tool. The whole “you’ve got mail” thing was social, but the content on the web was static. The rapid way the web grew with its static content was incredible, especially with fewer people creating this content. What’s different now is social media, and its users are growing exponentially. Some of the web’s content is still static and some of it is old, but the majority of the content today is organic and in flux. We’re watching data change in real time.

Before the growth of social media, the only way to reach your consumers was through television, radio, or print, with messages somewhat directed toward the presumed King Consumers who bought your products. The messages may have pulled the heart-strings, nudging them a little toward making a purchase, but it was a scattershot approach to promoting products.

Think about the way we get commercials. Here we have two parents and a couple of kids hanging out in the family room together to watch TV. When the laundry detergent commercial comes on, it talks about how effectively it cleans our clothes, how good they smell, how much value the detergent offers. The dad may pitch in and toss a couple loads per week into the machines. The kids may be old enough to do their own wash, but the advertisers know it is most likely to be Mom who does the shopping, and she selects the laundry detergent for the family. That product and its marketing efforts are most likely directed toward Mom, and there is no way to make it any more personal than that. She may, at some point, switch from liquid to individual little pods of detergent to help encourage her family to be more independent with the chore, but she’s still the one most likely to make the decision.

Now, thanks to social media, vendors can get the content and the context of how consumers feel about a product or solution they need, and that’s our goal. You want to get their content, their context, so you can create a message that better resonates with that King Consumer. Once you make that contact, that connection, you’ve suddenly changed the dynamics. You are no longer just trying to sell something to someone. You are now having a conversation with your customer. You are now actually in the mix—a part of the equation. You are part of the conversation your customers are having about an issue or need or desire. Now you can prepare to fulfill those needs for them.

Being a part of the conversation allows you to get closer to your customers than ever before. Now, we’re no longer trying to throw stuff out there, spray it, and pray that it works. You don’t need to spend your time and money that way anymore because, since you’ve joined the conversation, you have a much clearer idea of what King Consumers really want. They’ve given you the keys to the kingdom! Now you can use their language and their issues to make a real connection with them, not the generic kind of connection that was the only one TV or radio or print allowed you to make. Now you’ve made a simple, genuine connection with all their needs, which you can fulfill. And all of those other things your King Consumers are talking about, well, you won’t even pay attention to those. What matters most is that you can really lock it down and deal with the needs you can fulfill, enabling you to create messaging that is both very specific and very effective.

HOW DOES THE KING SHOP?

Although it’s clear that the nature of the King Consumer hasn’t essentially changed, the manner by which consumers go about shopping certainly has. For most of the history of this relationship between vendor and consumer, information has been the key to making purchasing decisions. Internet shopping has made gathering that information easier and quicker, but we’re still talking about static information. Your job as a vendor has always been to provide robust content that tells your customers all about the benefits of your products. That’s why content has long held such a vital place in the world of online commerce.

Even with the most robust and well-planned content you can provide, Internet shopping has long had certain disadvantages that keep the King Consumer relatively skeptical. There are trust issues. At first, it seemed complicated. Nothing has been able to completely eliminate the consumers’ need to touch and feel the product, experiencing it as completely as is possible outside the virtual marketplace. Until the growth of social media, all we could gain from Internet shopping was information. Experience was simply not an option.

Social media now gives us all the experience of shopping, and that has made a difference in the way online consumers shop. If you want to know the experience of buying, owning, or using a product, the information is still easy to find. That’s the label, and it contains all the content the online vendor shares to make the King want to select a particular item. But social media goes way beyond that label. If a consumer wants to open the package, lift off the top, and see what’s inside the bottle, she is able to do that through social media. When you can get to that level of understanding, a whole different world opens up.

Now consumers can ask questions within their own social spheres. When they ask a question on social media, they don’t just get the static information available on the label, but something more. Social media gives perspectives about the organic experiences of the people who answer questions there. We’re no longer getting just the facts. We’re also sharing in the experience by getting opinions and informed advice. Do your customers’ organic experiences with your products or services represent information that is more accurate or true than the information you were previously getting from a conscientious vendor? Of course not, but you can already get all that information and more with just a few keystrokes. As a business owner, the answers you receive on social media are information that has been filtered through the process of experience, which makes it a whole different platform. Consumers think about your responses in a completely different way. And that’s why you have to talk to your consumers completely differently as well. The consumer who grew up looking for information is not the same consumer we have now in an environment of experience.

Opinion Versus Fact

Today’s online consumer is looking for opinions instead of facts. The facts are just so easy to get, they don’t even need to worry about how they’re going to find them. There’s so much information available now that it’s actually harder not to find out the details of a particular product than it is to find them. People online are using social media to gather opinions, and the crazy thing about this is that people will default to opinions even when they are disproved by facts! Is opinion greater than fact? I don’t know. Let’s look at a long-standing disagreement among online sellers, free shipping versus paid shipping.

Clearly, many online sellers are reluctant to offer free shipping. From their perspective it will increase their overall costs and diminish their profits. The opinion is that free shipping doesn’t work. The actual data shows that free shipping does increase sales, but some online sellers will listen still to those idiots talking about not offering free shipping. Show them the facts, and that still won’t change their opinion that free shipping doesn’t work.

King Consumers also operate within this realm where opinion matters more than fact, and they’ve been trained to take the opinions they hear to heart. Since your consumers now operate within the realm of opinion, you, the merchant, will have to offer more opinion and less fact. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to place yourself in the role of opinion leader. Your job now is to research and learn the opinions consumers are sharing.

The Kings Are Finding, Not Searching

The most natural outcome of this switch from data to opinion is that your consumers are more likely to find their purchases rather than search for them. Rather than spend time online researching the facts about which item will best suit their needs, they directly ask their social networks about it instead. For example, “Which phone should I buy?” is posted on a few networks and within hours, if not minutes, this shopper will have recommendations from people she has already vetted and included in her social sphere. Once enough friends have responded with their recommendations, including the reasons why one phone is preferred over another one, our shopper will have a small list of potential phones and her research can now begin. As you can see in Figure 2-2, it’s quick and easy.

Figure 2-2

Consumers used to start their buying decisions by researching features, materials, construction, and warranties. Now they’re just asking their friends. A friend responds with, “I just bought phone XYZ.” Your consumer is now a lot more likely to click through and take a look at this recommended item, but this is not searching. It’s more like finding. Your consumer began just by wondering about which phone she might want, but then she was influenced to “want” the one her trusted friend likes. Our consumer didn’t set out to research all possible phones, only to begin a conversation. As online influence becomes more the norm for shopping online, social networks will adapt to reflect this. Pinterest is the perfect example. Pinterest is the composite of what people “find” as they wander around online. Consumers do not search for a particular thing so they can build a Pinterest board. They organically create these collections of images as they find things that appeal to them.

The King Is Mobile

It’s impossible to miss the impact that mobile devices have had on the world in this part of the twenty-first century. Spend an hour waiting at the gate in any airport in the United States, and you’ll see mostly the tops of the heads of your fellow travelers. No one is watching the action on the tarmac as planes come and go, and people-watching has fallen off as a pastime. Nearly all travelers are focused on the devices in the palms of their hands. Wherever humans decide to spend time, they ultimately end up making purchases, and your King Consumer is no different. This device is filled with ads and their phones are full of purchased content like games, apps, music, movies, etc.

According to comScore, the leader in analytic measuring of all things digital, mobile commerce is on the upswing. In a report published in September 2012, the company stated that four out of every five smartphone users, a whopping 85.9 million of us in the third quarter of that year, visited retail sites with their mobile devices. As you might guess, the giant in mobile commerce is currently Amazon, with reportedly 49.6 million unique visitors in the same period. eBay also scored 32.6 million visitors to its website. Many of these same shoppers are just waiting for you to court them, too. Using comScore’s data, you can see more clearly who among your potential consumers will most likely be placing orders through their phones.

•  Seventy percent of phone shoppers are under the age of forty-five.

•  Women shoppers spend more than men do on mobile.

•  Women spend more time on retail sites then men do.

•  Unique views on mobile are about 50/50 based on gender.

Mobile commerce offers you the opportunity to cash in on impulse shopping. With a device always in hand, your consumers can see someone using a product, decide they like the mirror image that person reflects, and, within seconds, have one of their very own on its way to their own homes. Tapjoy.com, a mobile advertising and mobilization platform, reported to the website BizReport in October 2012 that by 2015 mobile commerce will have expanded by 300 percent! Reported by the website Daily Deal Media in November 2012, some parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, have already begun to see this dramatic growth. So, as you consider who your King Consumer might be, don’t forget that it’s almost a guarantee he or she will be a mobile shopper.

WHO IS YOUR KING CONSUMER?

Now that you understand how social media has changed the nature and behavior of the King Consumer, it’s time to turn your focus more directly to the consumers who represent your own particular royalty. No matter what you’re selling, there is a particular person who will shop for and buy your products. It’s a very universal principle, but each vendor has to figure out who that is for him- or herself.

I hear it all the time. Businesspeople will say, “We sell to everybody and anybody.” I’d love to sell to everybody, but I don’t want to sell to just anyone. I want a particular person to buy from me, a person who wants to buy the products I sell. What you’re going to do now is create your ideal business scenario and populate it with the type of person you know will want your product. To do this, you have to use a bit of imagination, and it’s here that you can have some fun. Use technology to help you find the fun, or crayons or markers—whatever tools will let your imagination roam. When you’re all finished, you’ll have a specific customer in mind. Next, you’ll create your content in a way that lets you speak specifically to this manufactured customer in the language he or she will respond to. Now you can include that language in your social media, e-mails, and keyword searches. Repeat this exercise so that you have one sample customer for each gender.

SUMO LESSON

When I started to sell doo rags, my assumption was to add this item to my inventory of urban accessories. I figured the city kids would want to buy from me, and so I proceeded with that assumption. It wasn’t long before I came to see that I was very wrong about this. Most of my customers were coming, not from urban centers on the East or West Coast, but from rural places in the Midwest. My customers were largely white farm kids! They didn’t use doo rags for the same purposes that urban guys did.

An African-American teen will comb his hair out as straight as possible and put a doo rag on to create waves instead of curls. Of course, he can go around the corner to the local store and find an abundant supply of doo rags in his own neighborhood. He views it as a tool as much as a fashion statement. The white kid in Oklahoma loves hip-hop and rap and wants to wear a doo rag to feel cool. He wants to mirror the culture that he thinks makes him cool. I was using the language of the urban kids, and the rural kids were still buying. I also learned a lot of cyclists wear doo rags under their helmets.

By studying the analytics of who my customers really were, I gained insights into how to craft different product descriptions for the different types of customers I was actually serving, not the customers I thought I’d be serving. Now I have three different approaches for selling the same product, and my messages effectively target the three different categories of my King Consumer.