Putting the customer back in focus

We all know that social media is a hot topic. I started out carefully on Linkedin a few years ago, added Facebook, Twitter… and for a while I got into this frenzy of collecting people in my network, friends and followers.

Some people I meet take pride in having several thousands of followers on Twitter. Sure, that is an achievement, but what does it mean? You reach several thousand people with one tweet, but those several thousand people get several thousand tweets a day. Do they all read them? No. They screen them and might not even get to yours.

I remember when I launched my first website and I was disappointed to only have had a daily average of 22 visitors on my site that month. But I missed the reality of it. Imagine if they came home to me. What would 22 people sitting in my living room be like. Sitting, standing around, drinking coffee, browsing my blogs. A different bunch arriving every day of the week. That would be a lot of people, a lot of noise and it would make a deep impression.

Let alone thousands of people. Do we really still understand these numbers? Have we gone crazy in the counting game, are we gathering names and faces in the same way that we used to as kids with football cards? Where will it stop? How can we ever service these networks?

I see some companies falling into the same trap – their many customers have stopped being humans, organisations to them, they have become numbers, statistics and it shows in their service.

It seems to be a side effect of our exponential growth in cyberspace.

The challenge now is to know when we are ‘collecting numbers’ for a reason and when we are doing it for the thrill, reputation or status.

Only the right mix of the two will deliver optimal results for us as individuals or commercial entities.