I rarely make a major purchasing decision anymore without first sourcing it in my social networks. Even minor decisions like where to eat sushi for lunch are made better when I first check with friends on Facebook. Social business sourcing helps me make better decisions, which saves me time and money.

What role did traditional marketing play in my decision to follow my friends’ advice and eat lunch at Hiroba Sushi last week? I think very little. The only reason people in my network recommended this place in response to my direct inquiry was they had eaten there themselves and knew the business was a winner. It was operational excellence, not saavy marketing, which led me to spend $48 for lunch that day.

When asked, my friends volunteered to publically put their brand on Hiroba’s brand and trusted that Hiroba would not disappoint. My social network connections did not put their faith in Hiroba, because faith is a belief in something you have not seen. Trust, on the other hand, is a prediction based on experience, and they all knew from personal experience that I too would probably enjoy Hiroba as much as they did.

They were right, and I was glad I asked.

People talk about your business, which is nothing new. What is new is the way they talk about you and your business, and the speed with which what they say about you can reach many more people than ever before and impact your revenue stream. For years I taught the marketing principle that a dissatisfied customer would likely tell around 20 people about the bad experience. Now, a pissed off customer can quickly and easily share their bad experience with thousands via their connected web of social networks.

The new realities of social business make the basics of business excellence more important than ever before. If you have not designed a system to consistently impress your employees and enable them to in turn consistently impress your customers, you are making a serious strategic mistake.

The most important social business metrics are not things like fans, followers, reach, likes or leads. The most important metrics for businesses that want to fully leverage the strategic potential of social business are employee and customer satisfaction. What they say about you in their increasingly connected social networks is shareable and trusted, and that makes it more important than anything you will ever say about yourself. If you’ve made their satisfaction merely an act of faith, you better be prepared for social business hell.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Encouraging Trust

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My new post at The Leader Lab is entitled “The importance of working with people you like.” In this post I describe new research that shows how co-worker satisfaction affects job satisfaction and ultimately life satisfaction. That’s right, if you work with people you don’t like it’s probably affecting your well-being outside of work.

Read the full text of the article by visiting the link above, or listen to me read the text of the post by clicking below. After you read the article or listen to my podcast, please share your thoughts with me in the comment section below.

Have you ever said to one of your employees “You have a bad attitude”?  If you have, I seriously doubt you knew what the hell you were talking about.  I see advice all the time about how to handle the employee with the “bad attitude,” and almost all of it is garbage.

Think back to the last time you shared this fantastic news with one of your employees.  What probably happened was the employee did something unexpected, unappreciated, or otherwise unacceptable to you.  That rubbed you the wrong way.  What people usually mean when they say “you have a bad attitude” is “I don’t LIKE you!” After you told the employee “you have a bad attitude,” what probably followed next was something like “and YOU better fix it.”  And whether you said it or not, what you clearly meant next was “or else!”

Congratulations, you just dumped on your employee.  Did you feel better? I hope so, because you accomplished NOTHING with that employee, and you taught every other employee that observed your display of decisive leadership that you are at least inept and probably an asshole.  Whatever your employee felt, I guarantee you that your diatribe left them with absolutely no clue how to change their behavior to improve.

Stay away from attitudes!  Focus instead on the bad behavior you observed in your employee. Explain clearly how the behavior did not meet expectations and then engage the employee in dialogue to find out why they behaved that way and what it would take from both of you to change that behavior.

If you insist on talking about attitudes, I strongly suggest limiting yourself to learning how to look for the specific attitudes job satisfaction and organizational commitment in your employees because there is a LOT of research that shows those two attitudes do significantly affect employee performance.  Once you focus on a specific attitude, you can take specific actions to try to change that attitude with the expectation of changing the specific behavior you think was associated with the attitude.

You need to stop talking about “bad attitudes” and for that matter “good attitudes”.  Both of those terms managerially useless because they are void of specificity and real understanding.

Related Posts:

Communicating Concerns About Performance: Focus on Behaviors

The Importance of Understanding Personalities and Attitudes

Do You Know What Drives Work Performance? Part 2