The Thank You Economy
By Gary Vaynerchuk
Hardcover, 256 pages
HarperBusiness
List Price $24.99
For business, our Internet love affair was a gift from the gods.
Online startups exploded and the target markets for existing companies dramatically expanded. Businesses could now point proudly to their websites and assure their customers that the lines of communication would never close. In theory, the website made them available 24/7. In reality, with a few exceptions, these corporate websites merely made it that much easier to truly pander to the idea of service without actually providing any. In fact, it made it possible for them to virtually avoid dealing with customers altogether. Now people could waste even more time clicking around on websites in a fruitless effort to find a phone number or the name of someone to speak with. When all that was available was an email address, they could send out a question, complaint, or comment into the ether and wait God knows how long until receiving a totally bland, formulaic, and useless reply. In the event they could dig up a phone number, they wasted millions, maybe even billions of hours per year on hold, or being transferred from one helpless or hapless rep to another. As companies outsourced their customer service, customers struggled to make themselves understood by script-reading foreigners. They seethed, but as usual, there was nothing they could do.
Corporations had nothing to fear. Their customer base was no longer in the local zip codes within a five- or even fifteen-mile radius ? it was the entire country, and in some cases, the whole world. So what if one person got her panties in a bunch? Or a hundred? How many people, realistically, were going to take the time to find sites like Paypalsucks.com, read them, post on them, and tell their friends? How many friends could they possibly tell, anyway? It just wasn't worth the time, money, or effort to handle each customer, whether satisfied or disgruntled, with anything other than a token bit of goodwill. The ROI didn't justify doing things any other way.
Small-Town Living Moves Online
Then, around 2003, in the midst of this high-tech, digital, impersonal world, a new train started bulleting across the online landscape. It was nothing like the trains our great-grandparents might have ridden, but for all its shiny digital modernity, in essence it closed the vast distances created over a near-century of car culture, cheap land, and technology. Many of us still lived far apart from one another, but we were about to be connected in a totally small-town way.
The train was Web 2.0, now known as social media. It rode along the rails of the Web at breathtaking speed, every one of its cars a powerful platform designed with the express purpose of getting people to talk to one another again. The silent, anonymous, private Internet suddenly turned extremely chatty, personal, and revealing. Small-town living moved online as people eagerly sought out each other's latest news. Our morning social media browse to check in on what everyone has been up to became the equivalent of the old-timers' early morning stroll to the diner for pancakes and coffee. We check Facebook and comment on a friend's photo of her new shoes (which we know without asking are Kate Spades and were bought at Nordstrom's because she said so in her status update) the same way we once would have remarked, "You look lovely in that hat, Margie," as we passed by our neighbor. We click "like" upon seeing our friend's status update announcing his kid's college graduation the same way we'd have nodded approvingly upon seeing that little Timmy had finally gotten the hang of his Radio Flyer scooter. We tweet an article and accompany it with some curses for the city management clowns bungling up yet another public works project with the same energy we'd use to rattle our newspaper and vent our frustration to all the other folks lined up next to us at the diner counter reading their paper, sipping their coffee ? plain, black ? and chewing on a doughnut.
Social media allowed us to become more aware of the minutiae in each other's lives, of what was going on, of what people were thinking and doing, than ever before. In the 1940s, we'd have found out about the progress of our neighbor's new wallpapering project or model ship during run-ins at the bus stop or the Piggly Wiggly. In 1990 we might not have known about these projects at all. And in 2010, we can not only know about them, we can see pictures and video chronicling their progress and get information about the retailers and service providers involved. In the beginning, a lot of people saw the banality of the topics flying around and wondered who could possibly care that Jeff in Boulder had found a half-eaten bag of Snickers in the pantry, or that Liz in Miami was heading out to the beach for a run in her new Pumas. But people did care. Society jumped on the chance to re-create the regular exchanges of personal news and thoughts that used to be a staple of those smaller, relationship based communities.
Excerpted from The Thank You Economy by Gary Veynerchuk. Copyright 2011by Gary Veynerchuk. Excerpted by permission of HarperBusiness.
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