The Best Aren’t 10% Better, They Are 300% Better. Find Out Why.

Our last post talked about how you can spend 15 minutes per day to listen to your customers online, and how that can benefit your business. Today, I want to talk about using that same 15 minutes to learn what how savvy business people and companies are using the web to get closer to their customers and extend engagement with their brand. I’ll share two examples:

• How Twitter Can Bring Value to Your Business
  Perhaps your company became active on Twitter 4 months ago, and you have a junior-level person maintaining the brand account, and one of your manager also Tweets on their own. Where can you go from here?

  Why not simply watch how Zappos uses Twitter for 15 minutes a day? Take a peak at the Tweets in their Customer Service account, directly connecting with their customers. See how the Zappos CEO uses Twitter in an entirely different way on his account.  Or maybe you want to follow a few of the dozens of Zappos employees who Tweet. To make it easier, the CEO actually selected the best Zappos employees to check out.

  What are you hoping to learn by doing this? That there is no single best way to use Twitter, just a way that stands out with your customers and serves their needs; That an entire organization can embrace the service in different ways; That it can serve core business needs, and yet also deliver personal and random connections as well.

• How LinkedIn Can Bring Value to Your Business
  What is interesting about LinkedIn is that it doesn’t just give you a vague sense of sentiment, but you can see the complete details of those who you are connecting with. So, if you go to their amazing Answers service, click on a category on the right (I’ll pick Finance & Accounting) and then pick a subcategory (I’ll pick Risk Management), you are now shown two things: open questions and experts.

  Open questions gives you a sense of what people want to know and how people answer those questions. Many of the discussions are fascinating, sharing a variety of viewpoints on an issue.  Use the search box up top to find specific questions/answers for your business. See which discussions have a lot of commentary.

  Now, going back to Experts section – take a gander at who is answering a lot of questions, their background and what their answers consist of.

At the very least, you are seeing how an online business community can operate, and how individuals can deliver value. Use this to shape your efforts online.

I think you’ll find that the best users aren’t doing things 10% better than the average user, but doing things 100 or 300 times better. They seem more engaged, more authentic, more passionate, more helpful. This is not to say that you need to be doing things 300 times better than you are. But don’t be satisfied with doing things 3% better, especially when talking about anything that connects directly with customers.

Find ways to enable customers, to amaze them. Use tactics that make you stand out from the competition in ways that make your employees proud. Find a new way to matter to your customers.