One of the things that the world blogging social media is different is that I am old ... to at least old enough to remember how it was before we were digitally tracked, slices, spreading out, prices dipped, consumed and tied to these social platforms.
I worked for sales and marketing before Facebook ... before email … even before computers. And you know that it wasn't so long ago business relationships have been built by the firm handshake, trusting friendship, mutually share the experience and confidence.
And then, sometimes at the end of the 1990s, your company probably took all its order forms, sales brochures, and customer service policies to an unknown man called web developer and he said, "this feature in a Web page."
They could hardly realized it at the time but we were creating a layer of digital distance between us and our customers, which would be more complicated as layer after layer of technologies he was wedged between us. And it was a one-way ticket.
I'm sure it was effective. And administrative costs and customers have the convenience of ordering through our new machines at any time, day or night.
And yet something is missing. The soul of the business was reduced to computer keystrokes.
Robert CialdiniWe've been thinking about it, when I wrote my upcoming book. How it works, I had an opportunity to ask Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the influence of
His answer was simple.
"Be more human."
Isn't that ironic?
To be human, simply yourself, you can create a competitive advantage!
"One of the things to deal with advice in enterprise environments is dedicated to the specific functions which can be considered attractive and include them in personal bios – about us categories, and so on," said Dr. Cialdini. "We should be including hobbies and how many children we have, whether we hockey fans, or the runner, and so on, so people can register connection that would necessarily online, but it is typical for the contact. Why not put those online contacts with the type of information to multiple humanizes and leads to the cooperation and rapport? "
Dr. Cialdini showed research at Stanford, which revealed the importance of human connections:
"The participants were told to act through the problem as part of the exercises, but said that if it could reach agreement, both parties would lose, and neither side will receive credit for, and exercises. When the participants should only act through e-mail, 30 percent of the negotiations have remained locked and people leave empty-handed.
"However, in cases where the Parties shall exchange any personal information about themselves via e-mail prior to the negotiation of the dead locks decreased to 6%. General human tendency, therefore, to respond positively, if we know something about them when we do something similar with us, when we saw that features available to us, this person persona. These things still work – even over the Internet or e-mail – but we have to do something to implement these technologies with the same kind of information that we could interact face to face. "
For Avatars Twitter and Facebook updates, text messages and Skype conferences are the same. Still to be confirmed. They want to be heard. They want to through digital distance and get to know you as a person.
Personally, I often struggle with the harvest a lot of personal things to my content, but realize how much it. How are you? Any ideas or recommended to share?
A reference to Dr. Cialdini book is an affiliate link.
