"A digital marketer is someone who understands that, to engage someone digitally, it must be done in a meaningful, personalized and contextually + culturally relevant manner."
- Brian Solis, Digital Sense, Kindle Locations 421-422
"Organizations that align their total focus around optimizing their departments to provide the most seamless experience at each touch point in the journey will take home the lion's share of all rewards in the coming decade."- Digital Sense, Kindle Locations 1030-1032
Attention and trust are the currency which is the most difficult to attain and retain, yet the most valuable assets to an organization.
While some organizations still grapple with this in the traditional marketing capacity, adding the digital DNA into the mix makes it seem nearly impossible. To overcome this exponential explosion of changes, marketers and leaders must begin with a much deeper understanding of their customers and engagement with the brand.
Within your own organization, the authors discuss the four generic archetypes to better understand motivations and how to, if possible, unlock the potential of greater digital sense:
Understanding your organization’s people is just as important as their engagement with the marketplace. Culture is a commonly and slightly overused word in business today. Yet data and customer-driven culture still serves as the most accurate focuses needed to improve attention and trust in the market. Gaining and understanding of what types of people make up your team will help you identify people who can drive and support change, as you adopt a more digital mindset.
"Customer Experience is the battleground we all compete on in a digital world, and where customer service historically takes a well-honed ‘common sense,’ customer experience requires a well-honed digital sense."- Digital Sense, Kindle Locations 1290-1292
As the authors take us deeper into the EMF (Experience Marketing Framework), we learn that social strategies are not simply limited to marketing any more. It is a cohesive organizational effort.
Social Business for ______ (fill in the blank with one of the areas below):
Specifically, sales can benefit by transitioning to the digital conversation by extending the relationship via social media. “Social selling” allows salespeople to better construct more relevant dialogue through leveraging the wealth of information about prospects, companies’ activities, and trends in social media. Also, by listening, sharing, and sales can engage sooner where the buyers are researching. The author describes some basic steps:
"It's all about who you know, what you know, and who knows that you know what you know."- Digital Sense, Kindle Locations 4676-4677
Social connectivity provides a unique and rapid fire way to develop relationships outside of traditional circles. Wright dives into a story where he recognized that personal and professional growth meant sharing wisdom and knowledge on a larger scale. Business Relationship Optimization (BRO), as he has coined the term, relates to building a personal and business brand which hones in on a more methodical approach toward expanding and deepening relationships.
Wright shares an epiphany: “It’s all about who you know, what you know, and who knows that you know what you know.” In this journey of building his network, he begins the BRO process by determining to to get to know and list ways to add value to them. As relationships are likened to bank accounts, begin by making deposits with your network: engage on social media, share, help make connections/introductions, and offer solutions. On occasion, you would make a withdrawal, and like a FICO score, good credit(-ability) builds over time. However, be careful not to end up severely overdrawn, as then the relationship is over. Building more good credit opens more opportunities.
Return on investment is dictated by your engagement at the right time with the right information to generate a return on influence.
What results is a greater sense of purpose which turns into an energy that resonates both in-person and digitally.
According to the authors, 70% of learning happens at work, 20% via mentoring, and 10% in classroom settings. This means that learning equals doing and the status quo will remain if you don’t change the conditions. Travis and Chris want to remind us that even in a digital capacity, we are still humans interacting with humans (H2H). Acting with this kind of digital sense, customers will reward organizations who engage with them over social media by spending 20-40% more money with those companies than other customers. That’s material enough to start making a change today.
Chris J Snook is managing partner at Launch Haus. A digital agency and tech startup veteran, he is a brand humanizer at large consulting several digital agencies and some of today’s leading consumer brands and B2B enterprises. He mentors entrepreneurs with Founders Institute globally and ASU Project Humanities. He is the coauthor of three other books including the international bestseller Wealth Matters Makeover Edition (its 3rd edition releasing Q1 2017).
