Principia Mensurae The Principles of Measurement: Passion Matters September 27, 2011 by Chuck Kirkpatrick Chapter 2, in

Transcription

1 Principia Mensurae The Principles of Measurement: Passion Matters September 27, 2011 by Chuck Kirkpatrick Chapter 2, in Winning Big: Social Media IN Business

2 Do you love your customers passionately? Do you want to? Do you listen to your customers patiently? Do you care to? Do you want to build lifetime relationships with your customers? Would that make a difference to your business bottom line? How about to the bottom line of the your standing and value for the community? Do you want to have deep, meaningful relationships with people or do you want to be viewed as a number? I don t know what a gold standard looks like to you, but to me it seems that if customers felt truly loved, then they might not ever want to walk away. If your customers know deep down that they really matter. If they know that you are crazy in love with them, then you would have the seeds of a powerful, wonderful life-long valuable business relationship. In Song of Songs it says, place my like a seal upon your heart, for love is more powerful than the grave. What is a seal upon the heart? If you showed the power of love to customers -- and if they, in turn, felt and returned it -- what rich dividends would we all experience? People seek connection and love. One place where they do that these days is online, on the web, through , and in social media spaces. One new set of relationships in people s lives are their relationships with businesses and brands. When people feel listened to, heard, and have had their needs met, they feel the stirrings of powerful relationships. In life and in business, passion really matters. In your heart, do you have an all-surpassing passion for your customers? Or are you just selling products? In your business dealings, would your customers know that you love them? How could you let them know? If you had that passion once, but don t know, what happened? In Isaac Newton's Scholium on Time, Space, Place and Motion, (Scholium to the Definitions in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), Newton says: But because the parts of space cannot be seen, or distinguished from one another by our senses, therefore in their stead we use sensible measures of them. The human heart is a lot like space. It might be the true, final frontier. Many things in space and in the heart cannot be seen. Still we want to go on a voyage of discovery so that we can connect hearts, passions, and our business activities to something that matters. As business people we must consider measurement. It has been said that there is no management where you cannot measure. Our businesses fall short without a sense of the positives or negatives. Our senses are of little use in distinguishing the motivations and desires of the heart, so we must discover other measures that will help us learn the truth. We want to make reasonable inferences about the actions of customers, associates, and business partners.

3 In business sensible measures of buying might seem incongruent with measures of passion. An evaluation of data in social media, though, can give us many indicators about customer behavior, inclinations, and the strength of their preferences. What people say they want and the things that the actually may be different. Their actions speak loudly, though. Their comments and points of discussion in social media tell us something important too. Previous online activity or shopping behaviors give us one picture of possible outcomes. Where click, what they pay attention to, and the patterns of their traffic give us other pictures of what they may do next. We measure, like Newton, through inexact systems. The data points that guide good business judgments may well come from our insights about measurement. For many successful businesses, campaigns, web site tools, or social media strategies are optimized through trial and errors. Data, theories of human behavior, and our best judgment of what seems to work influence positive outcomes. We may not be able to predict what one particular customer will do, but we expect that in the aggregate, the law of averages will work in our favor. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military philosopher, expresses the importance of knowledge about the other and our selves. Knowing the other, knowing the self -- a hundred battles without danger. Not knowing the other, but knowing the self -- one win, one loss. Not knowing the other, not knowing the self -- every battle must be lost. We must know, the other, and, the self, as people who want to lead in organizations. Well-formed strategies in business and in war come from wisdom about the other and that includes customers. Proper measurement has its place. With insight we can influence particular outcomes or behaviors. In short, attention to measurement matters for how we shape the next right steps for our businesses. Most media or web activities that will impact the business bottom line can be measured. Positively or negatively web and social media tools have a powerful impact. If you do not know what could happen with a poor campaign or website tool, just ask Sony. Their web activities were insufficiently protected, and poorly responded to when hackers started attacking them in the spring of As a result of that online fiasco Sony faces billions in losses. For good and bad, the web is not something to take lightly. Sony s experience was complex and multi-faceted, but they suggest that online measurement,

4 good web business principles, and an understanding of how the web works can have a billiondollar impact on the bottom line. Sound theories of measurement matter. What about passion? Knowing the other online involves measurement of behavior, messages, marketing investment, and sales approaches. Knowing your self can also involve knowing the capabilities of your organization, teams, and systems. It can involve evaluating your strategy, tactics, and position vis-a-vis competitors. It can mean developing a better understanding of the public relations, legal, and security risks of your web presence. The online journey requires an examination of your orientation to it. Do you care about your customers? How much? Do you care what your customers are saying about your company? How much? Do you have a strong enough relationship with non-pr employees that you trust them to represent your brand online? What are you saying with your approach to web and social media ties in strongly to your messages within your organization as a whole. The web offers a lot of power to organizations that are willing to trust and listen to their people. It also offers power to the authoritarians among us. Balance is needed. Business teams need more than a mandate to monetize value or track behavior. We can spend as much time as we want measuring, if we do not care about our customers, it will not make much difference. People who believe that their customers and their teams are dignified human beings will act differently. A seasoned executive may have risen to power with an understanding of numbers, cost centers, and creating share-holder value, but the connective power of the web may elude them. Caring about customers is quite different then caring about creating value for an aggregrate representation of customer behaviors and statistically derived interpretations of buying activity. Measures of performance have their place. Having a love for the business has its place. Loving customers is also critical but seems so foreign from most business conversations we have. If there is no clue at the top about the love, value, and worth of people, your executive teams gives up so much in potential revenue from sales, marketing, or lead generation.

5 The most important principle of the connective, social web is what are you willing to give to understand your customers behavior? What are you willing to do to show love for people? A simple cost-benefit calculation suggests great gain from loving and showing empathy. A consideration of what is right, true, beautiful, and good about our humanity requires it. A good measurement approach will give you a strong sense of, the other. It is what image you hold of your customer in your heart that will help you grasp the need and the obligation for doing business better. The size of your online customer pool, the things that are being said, and the the tools to measure customer activity are all available. Can you engage in messaging, marketing, and selling, effectively without caring deeply about your customers? A George W. Bush kind of problem In certain respects, one of the challenges of our stratified world is that those who are, at the top, may be far removed from those who are their customers. The more you lose touch with those customers, the less you have to say about how to reach them with your services. It reminds me of a George Bush problem that I encountered in graduate school. I went to Indiana University to study public policy and international communications during the time of a famously contested American election. In 2000, during the long wait to find out whether George W. Bush or Al Gore had won the U.S. presidency, there were many people asking questions about what had happened. One leading professor of American Politics said words that I will never forget. Speaking to a classroom of my graduate peers and professors, he said, A lot of people ask me why so many Americans voted for George W. Bush. I tell them, I don t know. None of my friends did. I learned several things that day. First, I was not among this man s friends. I did vote for President Bush. Second, I was left with the question, how could someone live in Indiana, a state whose voters reliably vote Republican in most elections, and he doesn t know what Republicans think? With whom was this professor of American Politics talking? Why wasn t he listening to the majority of people in his own state? The that professor studied American politics may be like many executives study their businesses. Not personally talking with or listening to customers, how can an executive make good decisions about what their customers need? In developing expertise in business do you know less and less of, the other, who are also known as your customers? I conclude with an observation about popular music. I have yet to hear a truly great song that celebrates a business. But I know many that celebrate the universal truths of our connected selves. One song that stirs my soul offers a very different approach to relationships. It is about passionate love and loss in a time of transition. It s not unlike what we are going through in the ups and downs of our crazy economic times. Gavin Degraw sings... Dreams, that s where I have to go to see your beautiful face anymore No matter what they say, I m not over you

6 Not over you... Gavin Degraw -- Not over you Are you over your customers? Have you ever been heartbroken to think about losing them? Do you have passion for the people you serve in business? How can you bring it into your business relationships? Would you get more from your life if your customers knew you really cared? Next time we will talk about... How to think about thinking about measuring. How to measure passion, principles, and motivation online. We will look at a new framework for understanding Principia Mensurae, the principles of measurement. The right measurements will keep you Winning Big in business with the effective use of social media.

7 Be bold like a lion Be rooted like an oak tree Be soaring like an eagle Be nourished today -Chuck Kirkpatrick Telling more passionate stories about business with elbow grease, e-commerce, and innovation. ckirkmedia@gmail.com on Twitter Indiana Social Media Network group on Facebook