Be Human

POSTED IN Blog | TAGS : business, marketing, social media
15.06.2009

I was reading a post on Mark Olson’s blog about authenticity and authority. In the post, Chris Brogan comments on this topic and provides a very good (and much better) explanation of what I was trying to explain in my last post:

Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs:

Authenticity and Authority in the Age of Trust
From around 1950 until maybe as late as 2006, organizations have been able to get away with mass communication and one-sided blurting. No longer. We are ALL the media. We all have networks. We all have cameras and video and newspapers at our disposal. We have the memory of Google on our side. How do companies succeed in this environment? They do what probably should have always been done: be human. It’s not a vast reworking. It’s not throwing out all that’s come before. It’s doing what we know in our guts to be right. How do you build authority? By being human. Be fallible. Be apologetic. And communicate in both directions. Listen, and build trust by responding and interacting. You’re still the leader, but you’re now a responsible leader who cares about your constituency. Try it. You’ll like it.

As he say’s, this is not a vast reworking but it’s no longer “mass communication and one-sided blurting.” As I was saying in my last post, social media doesn’t really change how you do business.  You have to do what you should have been doing all along, be human, form a relationship with you customer.