(This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. )
Let's take 30 seconds to dissect the title of this book.
The social customer is the type of customer brands have essentially been dealing with since consumer-generated media began. You can trace this lineage back to the punk rock 'zines of the 1970s (when cheap photocopiers made it possible for consumers to make their own content), right through the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s (where you didn't even need to have a 'zine or a copier). Slowly but surely, since around the mid-'90s, the customer took control of the conversation about brands, and has begun talking to other customers.
When I worked in Palo Alto's famous Peninsula Creamery, in high school, if a customer was dissatisfied with the way I made their milk shake, all they could do was complain to the manager, and statistically speaking, an absolutely irate customer might tell 11 friends about this negative experience. These days all an angry customer would need to do is take 60 seconds to write a bad Yelp.com review on their iPhone, on the spot, and potentially millions of people could read it.
If you don't believe me about the rise of the social customer, go to blog search engine Google Blog Search and type your company's name into the search box. Brands are standing on a precipice, trying to dance with the social customer. Sometimes the "dance" works out wonderfully. Sometimes it sends the brand into out-and-out disaster.
On the social Internet, some consumer brands have fallen flat on their faces in recent years (Wal-Mart), some have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams (Carnival Cruises, Jack in the Box, Marriott), and some have emerged loudly flailing, with no clear results either way (Skittles, Snickers). The infrastructure that served consumer brands to communicate with their constituents for the better part of the last eight decades has pretty much fallen away. Young people are abandoning television and radio for the Internet at an incredible rate, and regardless of radio analysts' manipulation of the numbers, the number of young adults and teens flocking to radio is still less than 93 percent, proving that radio has barely rebounded from its all time low in September 2005, declining 22 percent from its 1989 peak in 155 top markets. And then there's the assessment piece: most brands don't know how to quantitatively measure their success on the social web, or track and monetize social customer data. They just don't know which metrics matter around the social customer.