Now you have a clear mental image of your King Consumer. If you completed the exercise from Chapter 2, you know a lot about the people who may actually want to buy the products you sell. Getting as specific as you can has allowed you to keep these individuals in the back of your mind as you move your social commerce plans forward. Now let’s take a look at the world your King Consumer occupies online, which has changed dramatically in the years since we all started shopping on the Internet. It is important for you to understand those changes if you are going to successfully reach your target consumers and turn them into customers. First let’s define the term “Me Commerce.”

Me Commerce is a term I’ve coined for the concept of millennial commerce. So what? Millennial commerce is the difference between where we were at the beginning of this journey through commerce—e-commerce—all the way until now. It’s being able to move beyond just the electronic part and back toward a more social interaction. Me Commerce is constantly running on top of the online social sphere, because the lines between gathering online and shopping have blurred significantly. A decade ago, people went online to shop. They had their favorite destinations, and transactions were conducted mostly between vendor and customer. There wasn’t nearly as much consumer-to-consumer socializing going on. Today that is all different.

Now people are getting together online in ways they were never able to gather before, and as they converge, they’re making transactions. It’s a more organic approach to online shopping. Living online through social media is very personalized, and that’s what Me Commerce is all about. We have an entire generation now that has grown up with social media as their primary platform for communication, and they will be the best minds and wage earners in our country for the foreseeable future. Young people today have grown up online with both e-commerce and social media. That fact is changing the way we reach these customers and the way we conduct business transactions in this millennial commerce environment.

LET’S TAKE A LOOK BACK TO THE FUTURE

You may have heard from many that when it comes to web-marketing success, “content is king.” In an e-commerce world where content was king, making your listings and product descriptions stand out with exact and complete information was the way to distinguish yourself from your competitors. Throw in great images and you were pretty much exactly where you wanted to be. But, as you know now, that was before people stopped searching and making purchasing decisions based strictly on facts. Now you’re going to have to find a better way to stand out from other online vendors. You still need to make a case for your customers needing or wanting your products, but now you’ll make that case and present it to your customers in their own environments and in their own way of speaking.

There’s got to be a better way to begin the conversation. There is and, lucky for you, I’m about to tell you how. But first, you’ll need to forget a lot of what you’ve been told is true. Social commerce requires that your marketing efforts be different from what they were even five years ago. We’ve left the world of “push marketing” behind us, and there’s no going back. Push marketing is when you use various marketing channels to get your message in front of your ideal client. The marketer is in control of what the message is, how it is seen, and when and where it appears. Pushing content out to your customers may still work on TV, and it may have once been a successful strategy for you, too, but not anymore.

Now You’re on a Two-Way Street

Social commerce is a dialogue between vendor and consumer. The key here is that first syllable, “di,” as in two. We humans are physiologically formed with faces, which should give us a hint about how to proceed with a non-spam campaign in social commerce. If you’ve noticed, we have two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and only one mouth. This suggests that we should be gathering information in quantities twice as large as the information we’re spouting out. If you’re searching for your customers on social media so that you can talk to them, you’re already missing the most important part of social commerce. You should be searching for your customers, first of all, to listen to them. When you find your King Consumers on social media, the very first thing you want to do is observe them.

Standard old marketing was all about the monologue. A clear definition of marketing is “the process of communicating the value of a product or service to your customer.” Of course you still want to communicate the value of your products to your consumers, but you’re going to have to reassess the old standard Five P’s of Marketing: product, price, promotion, place, and people. These P’s translated into knowing your product, setting your price, creating your promotion and locating it in the place your customers turned to for information, and understanding who those customers were.

The Five P’s of Social Commerce today are platform, perspective, participate, personal, and pure. Each social network is a separate and distinct platform. You won’t use the same language or expressions on LinkedIn that you will on Twitter, of course, but you also won’t approach Facebook the same way you use LinkedIn. It’s important for you to distinguish the platforms from one another, because your consumers do. You have to understand your consumers’ perspectives and what they use their social networks for. You have to understand the mind-set they bring to each platform—it’s different! Your messages have to be personal and at the same time, pure. We’ve all been so overloaded by spam online that unless your message has a personal approach and a level of purity, you won’t be any different from that blue-widget guy at the party. Finally, you’ll participate with your consumers, but not until you clearly understand the contextual relevancy, and you’ve honed your content to go along with that.

When you’ve successfully engaged the Five P’s of Social Commerce, you’re ready to rework your blog content, your sales copy, and your website to ensure that your online persona is as personal and pure as you can make it.

Once we find our consumers in conversation, what exactly are we listening for? We’re confirming those five old W’s of journalism we used as you created the persona of your King Consumer: who, what, where, when, and why. Let’s go a little deeper with those now.

Who is talking? Is it someone who is already a customer? Is it someone just gathering information about the products? Is this person joining in on the conversation without any interest in buying the item, just wanting to share opinions about it?

What are they talking about? Where are they talking about it? When are they talking about it? Was it before an online shopping transaction occurred or after.

Finally, we’ll ask why they are talking about it. We’re looking for the sentiment here. Is it positive or negative about your brand or product?

Me Commerce Is Largely About Vanity

Living life on social networks allows each of us to feed our own vanity. The whole system is built with the understanding that humans are vain. Why would we think our online networks care about the minutiae of our daily lives if it weren’t for vanity? We can make an announcement on Facebook, telling our online cohorts that we’ve participated in a charity, for example, and we can expect many “Likes” in return. It feeds something within each of us to believe so many people actually care about how we spent our Saturday morning this week. From the very beginning, when humans first started gathering on those dinosaurs we called “online services,” vanity played a key role.

Behind the keyboard you can be whoever it is you want to be. If you think you’re too short, you can make yourself appear taller. If you think you’re too large, you can trim the pictures to appear slimmer. Too old? Not anymore! At the time of this writing, this phenomenon is being played out on a very popular MTV show, Catfish. This show, based on a movie of the same name, takes an online relationship and moves it into physical reality. The two twenty-something male hosts lead the weekly adventure by choosing an individual, and then work to unite that person with the online lover he or she has been pursuing. It’s a fascinating study in vanity.

Not only does the object of the lovelorn get to be whoever he or she claims to be, but the poor lovesick sucker actually believes it. In some instances, these two “lovers” have been communicating for years. The party wishing to take the relationship to the next step is so eager for this love to be everything he’s come to believe it is, that he’s willing to deny all reality and accept that for the past two or three years, his lover has been “too busy” to meet him in person. Something always seems to come up every time they plan a get-together—even if they live only fifteen minutes apart! What makes an adult, even a young one, so willing to suspend all logic and disbelief? The main reason is vanity.

Usually the reluctant parties have posted pictures of themselves online that are hugely desirable, according to our current standards. The people who fall for this are so eager to feed their own vanity—their belief that they are attractive and desirable enough to warrant this attention from someone so hot—that although something may not smell right, they are still willing to take the next step and commit to the face-to-face meeting. The reluctant partners, in every single case so far, were clearly not who they claimed to be, but the lovelorn still pursued the relationships in the vague hope that their good sense will be proven wrong.

This is so important for you to understand, because you are an individual, too. We all have some of these different ways of expressing ourselves on social media that we wish we could use in the real world. We can be far bigger on social networks than we could be otherwise, and this is a real boon to you as you express your passion for your products and what they can do for your customers. While discussing your products, you can offer to friend your customers on Facebook and follow them on Twitter, which feeds their vanity and desire to belong to a larger group, and it helps you share information about your products, too; as long as you’re doing it with purity and in a personal manner. It’s vanity that allows you to tailor your messages, content, and communications to a variety of your consumers and do it in a genuine and appealing way.

Everything Old Is New Again

That old saying, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” doesn’t take social commerce into account. You’ve already seen this is a new means and opportunity to relate to your consumers in new and exciting ways. You have new tools for gaining insights, vocabulary, entry, and access to your consumers that you didn’t have just a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean you have to invent whole new ways to relate to your consumers. You just have to learn how to apply some of the old sales and marketing techniques to this newer genre of sales. Let’s compare the old door-to-door vacuum salesman to the new world of Me Commerce. Knocking on individual doors is not something anyone wants to do in 2014, but the theory behind this technique is still a valid one. You need only to relate these principles to the new world of social commerce.

Step One: Knock on the door. This is joining the network and creating your profile. We’re preparing ourselves to engage in what’s going on. Here’s where the home owner, in this case Mom, opens the door to see who is on the porch. The salesman there has on his best and most sincere face. Your online profile will do the same.

Step Two: Greet your customer. The salesman might tip his hat and say good morning but, in your case, you’ll just say hello: “Hi, I’m here. I’m John.” Mom would respond with a greeting and so will many of the people occupying the platform you’ve just joined. They will welcome you, because that’s what people in social networks do.

Step Three: Engage in a brief conversation. The salesman might compliment the porch flowers or notice the kids’ sports equipment in the yard. Mom might offer a cup of coffee. With a little conversation, the two may find out that their kids go to the same school or play on the same teams. You’ll engage your consumers in similar small talk. You’re prepping them for a sales pitch, but you’re not yet selling anything.

Step Four: Demo your product and give something away. The salesman might notice the hallway or even the living room could use a vacuuming. He will offer Mom a little break by doing that small chore for her with his wonderful new vacuum. He doesn’t ask for anything in return yet; it’s a freebie. You will do the same thing. You’ll offer your new friends a report you prepared or a nice coupon. Once you’ve given something away, people innately feel the need to return the favor.

Step Five: Close the deal. This is the call to action. For the vacuum salesman this is where he’d explain the easy payment plan and the bonus tool kit if the sale is sealed today. For you it could be “click this link,” “sign up for this list,” or whatever you might want these consumers to do. Just remember, this is the last step, and it has to happen only after you’ve carefully completed all the other steps. This way, your call to action comes from a member, in good standing, of the community you’ve joined. Since you’re already a contributor to the community, your sales call comes across more as a way for you to solve a problem and less as a way to earn some money.

MAKING YOUR CASE IN A ME COMMERCE WORLD

Now the vacuum salesman in our previous example didn’t knock on the door to make friends with the housewife. He knocked on her door to sell her a vacuum. You may care about the issues your consumers are discussing about your products, but you’re not joining social networks to make new friends across cyberspace. Friendship may not matter to you any more than it mattered to the guy carrying the vacuum door to door. You can take all this Me Commerce vanity, all you’ve learned about transforming your consumers into customers, and use it to your best advantage. Using the Five P’s of Social Commerce, you can identify the platform your customers use. Through careful observation you can gain insight into the perspectives they share about many things, including your products and the needs they fulfill. You can then participate in the conversation, making that participation personal and pure. You can make sure that your content is strong in the context where your consumers reside, and that will result in transactions.

So, in a world occupied by people telling only partial truths about who they are and what they’re doing, why do you need to be personal and pure? Because you’re joining these social spaces with the intent to sell, not befriend. You can use the vanity of social media to sell, but you have to do it in a way that seems genuine to avoid the online spamming that everyone hates. I want my brand to represent a persona in social commerce, and I’m going to use the media to create however many personas I’m going to need to sell my products. I want the people I interact with online to envision the lifestyle my products and services will bring to their lives, and I’m going to create my content to support and represent that lifestyle.

Consider the Progressive insurance lady, Flo. She doesn’t really sell Progressive insurance. She doesn’t really offer advice for insurance consumers. Insider tip: She probably doesn’t care that much about your insurance troubles and it’s not like she really answers the phone! Flo is the face of her company. She’s a person who people can relate to, and so is that Gecko from GEICO. They both participate in the conversation about insurance. They’re both perfectly well suited to their platforms. They’re both personal, and they’re both pure. It’s much easier to believe that Flo cares about your insurance needs than it is to believe a faceless insurance company does. And so, every time that Progressive wants to sell you insurance, they bring out dear, sweet Flo.

As you create your personas online, you have the same freedom to be whoever you wish to be. You can create multiple personas, depending on the different ways people use your products, and actually you should. If you have employees handling your social commerce efforts, let them be real pure people online. Let them create their personas so that the information they put out in your name will still be personal and pure. Let’s look at how this might work with a specific product. Consider the folding chair.

People buy folding chairs for many different reasons, such as for attending sporting events and outdoor concerts, and for picnicking, going to the beach, and about a million other things. The person who buys a folding chair to go to her child’s soccer games may be different from the person who is going to a picnic, and that person may be different from the beachgoer or concert attendee. This gives you the tremendous opportunity to engage each type of your King Consumer with targeted and specific copy that speaks personally and purely to their needs. At the outset, you’ll have to create and tweak your messages for each group, but the more groups you can target with the right content in the right context, the more folding chairs you’ll sell, and the more you’ll seem to be a trusted persona who can solve the problems of the people on the social networks where you now reside with your customers. In this way, you’ll bring your products to life and lay them at the feet of people who are likely to want them. Potential customers may not even realize what you’ve done, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll still be willing to give you money for the product your persona represents.

SUMO LESSON

And now it’s time for a quiz.

I was relaxing by the pool in my backyard when I noticed the grass needed to be mowed, because there were all these little white flowers that appear when the grass gets too high. My yard looked like an open field. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of bumblebees were scurrying about from flower to flower. I thought to myself, What is it these bees are doing? I have flown around the world and spoken at dozens of conferences in dozens of countries, and I’ve asked this same question to every audience, so I’ll ask you: What were these bees doing?

If you’re like my audiences you’re eager to jump in with the answer. They’re pollinating. Every single time I get that answer and every single time that answer is wrong. Maybe once, someone had the right answer, but his voice was drowned out by everyone else, in the crowd, calling out “pollinating.” The bee is not consciously pollinating. The flower is pollinating. The bee is collecting nectar so it can go back to the hive and make honey. The flower has evolved in such a way as to get the bee to do the pollinating! It just sits there and lets the bees do all the work (see Figure 3-1).

Figure 3-1

What nectar do you need to create to attract your “bees” so they will then collect your message and deposit it to the next place they visit online? Apple makes its customers feel cool. Owning its products therefore makes me cool. The cool factor is Apple’s nectar. You are so enthralled by the coolness, you’re willing to pay way more simply to have the Apple brand product. Use this lesson to begin to optimize your message for human consumption. Write not for the Google bots that will pick up your keywords, but for the human bee who will take your message and fly all over the web with it.