In the Recommendation Age, quality rises to the surface. Consumers more proficiently recognize and reward quality products and service with positive, enthusiastic, and in some cases, relentless feedback. The bad news is that even your quality product or service could be destined to obscurity if you don’t soon understand the language and culture of social media users and master the Laws of the Recommendation Age.

At the heart of doing business in the Recommendation Age are some hard realities we’ll be discussing in future chapters, such as:

· Transparency is key: Recommendations live online forever. A good one can generate new customers indefinitely; a bad one can linger in customers’ minds like a bad aftertaste. A bad recommendation is different from a bad review. A bad review is recoverable with proper care. A bad recommendation usually results from a customer concluding you don’t care. You must learn to operate in a transparent world without secrets that may come back later to bite you. Interaction with people about your brand must be real, authentic, and transparent.

· Play well with others: This goes for your relationships with consumers as well as competitors. Consumers enjoy a good, fair tennis match between competitors. It highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each. But most don’t like seeing it turn into a brawl with misrepresentations and cheap shots. As for relationships with consumers, brands and marketers can no longer shout through a bullhorn to a crowd that can’t respond back (as was the case with traditional, Information Age models). Today, everyone is at a party interacting. In the Recommendation Age we need to learn how to sit down and interact. If we try to use the bullhorn, we will either be ignored or be asked to leave.

· Quality counts: Having a quality product is still the most important factor in winning over customers. That will always remain near the bottom line. But to generate wide spread consumer confidence in your brand it has now become equally important to have good social media reviews and ratings for your product quality.

· Feedback runs the show: A good product—even the best—can be killed by bad recommendations and negative feedback. This can happen from the snowball effect of disgruntled customers if you don’t engage early on and be open and transparent.

· Face the fear—and the negativity: Companies have to get over their fear of people saying negative things about them and turn such feedback into opportunities. They must learn to be comfortable letting people speak their mind in an open forum and then they must respond honestly and helpfully.

· Turn pans into raves: One of the benefits of the Recommendation Age is hearing unvarnished reviews of your product, straight from the customer’s mouth. If you really care about quality and service, and after the shock of a bad reviews wears off, you can improve your product so it earns not only rave reviews for improved quality—but customer praise for your responsiveness.

· Be personal and authentic: Gone are the days of transaction simply meaning an exchange of goods for cash. Organizations must learn how to connect more deeply with customers and understand them better as individuals with wants and needs and less as sources of revenue.

The Recommendation Age is not necessarily about restructuring your entire company, tweaking your production line, or writing better ad copy or more SEO articles for your blog. It is about learning how to communicate with consumers more effectively, more simply, more realistically, and more often. If that sounds like a lot of new work it may well be for a while. But it will pay dividends in the form of better streamlining your customer service, greatly improving customer retention, and reducing lost revenues through returns and unresolved product failures. The problem is the old ways have created energy and resource waste for which the Recommendation Age is now providing an intelligent, long-term remedy.

As a culture we have become distracted by information sources, queries, and commercial suitors that have little or no personal connections with us. The more information we are confronted with the more faceless and impersonal most of our daily lives seem. Apart from any value judgment about this state of things, it is revealing that a very human movement like social media would react to it and reclaim a little community spirit. Connecting on social media is providing an outlet to consumers for a building urge to have more than just information sources occupying their minds. Millions of people have flocked to social media to share something primal and basic to human need even when the content posted may be shallow or mundane. Most often social media content is quite meaningful to those posting it and usually to those following it. But the true value of social media at the present stage is its effect on the social conscience. Anonymity is disappearing. Lonely people are finding friends and community. A fragmented society is slowly reconnecting and grassroots people are unwittingly preparing to reclaim their role as the major force for change in society.

Change takes place when one person recommends to another a company’s service, not because of the high style of the company’s advertisement but because a service rep went out of his way to be helpful. A consumer responding to good service is nothing new, of course. What is new in the Recommendation Age is that one recommendation from one person can result in thousands or even millions of impressions. This is not theory. It’s happening right now and it is changing society and, very quickly, the way companies do business.

The Recommendation Age phenomenon is expanding mostly through hundreds of online social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, YouTube, LinkedIn, and thousands of smart phone apps that allow anyone to log in and comment or enter a rating about anything. For instance, there is a smart phone app called My Net Diary through which you can find specific nutrient, calorie, and additive information about, not just food types, but many of even the most obscure name brand products from actual consumers who have inputted that information along with a scan of the bar code. Fellow users can then scan the bar code of a product they are considering or the name of a specific variety of raw produce and instantly see more information about the product posted by other users. My Net Diary users are just everyday consumers who are only interested in tapping into resources they feel they can trust more than advertisers and to which they themselves can contribute. That last aspect is the important part that pulls people in. I will discuss examples in Part Three of companies tapping into the consumer urge to be interactive participants in commercial dialog. But you can begin to understand the power of this aspect of social media by understanding one principle: People will be more devoted to that which they help to build.

The information age and the Internet have overwhelmed people to the point that we are now more interested in connecting and making real interactions with peers, family, friends, and people with similar tastes and interests than we are in being “told” what’s hot, what’s not – and why. Where we used to search the Internet, now we listen to it; constantly seeking the advice, support and unvarnished – often unedited – views of others to help counsel our most basic decision-making processes.

This shift has also heavily influenced how people shop, research and find information about various topics. For the first time ever, Facebook now refers more traffic than Google. We are now most interested in what others are saying about the product, service, or place than we are what the source of those products are saying.

In other words, we don’t trust big corporations or, for that matter, their advertisements, product placement or paid testimonials to sway us one way or another. We’ll decide for ourselves if Domino’s crust is actually any better now than it was 10 years ago, thanks very much. We’ll go see your movie based on the recommendations of friends or our favorite bloggers, regardless of how many five-star reviews the movie poster features. And if we decide your latest bestseller isn’t up to snuff, it probably won’t remain a bestseller for very much longer.
We can read an excerpt of a book online – posted by a rabid fan – and download it instantly, without waiting for shipping or going to the store. We can pick and choose our own album tracks, downloading our favorite songs based on personal preference or the recommendation of a “dream playlist” from our favorite blog, versus the 10 that are prepackaged in album form.

In short, the days of the media’s power over unwary, unsuspecting and unsophisticated consumers are drawing to a close. Traditional media is fading fast, witnessed by the “death” of many print magazines and the decimation of hundreds of print newspaper positions, and the new “social” media is making “recommenders” of us all.

A market that I am well familiar with, Christian bookstores are dying off left and right because the major retailers are funneling customers off and providing both “convenience and Christianity.” Instead of crossing town to buy one product at a Christian bookstore, say a CD by Amy Grant or the new book by Max Lucado, today we buy our Christian CDs and bestsellers at Target, while we’re picking up oil and cat litter. To stand apart from this centralization, to focus on the message and not the mass, we have to center on the niche, that bull’s eye.

In case you haven’t noticed, TV viewers are going the way of Christian bookstore customers. According to Aaron Barnhart writing on behalf of McClatchy Newspapers, “Some 2.5 million people have suddenly stopped watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, according to David Bauder in a much-discussed Associated Press story, who called it ‘TV’s worst spring in recent memory.’ An average of 37.6 million people watched prime-time network TV in March and early April, down from 40 million viewers a year earlier. With very few exceptions… ratings for nearly every top show are down.”

Much of the falloff can be blamed on the use of digital video recorders, or DVRs, which aren’t counted in Nielsen responses. But just as important are the specialized tastes of cable programming that precisely follow the Bull’s Eye Effect: build a group of people and market to those people.

In recent years upstart “specialty channels” like Court TV, the Food Network, and HGTV cater to very special audiences with focused content that rarely strays from the niche audience that embraces them. And, while all three channels have branched out into programming that is evolving from its original programming – crime, food and home improvement, respectively, are still the bread and butter that draw viewers away from mass TV channels like NBC, CBS and ABC.

In many ways, the Food Network accomplished this in starting a channel that just focused on exploring, preparing, and eating every type of food imaginable, with non-stop programming that whet the appetite of millions of captivated food lovers.

According to www.foodnetwork.com, “Distributed to more than 85 million U.S. households and five million website users, Food Network ranks first among ad-supported cable networks on year-to-year subscriber growth and first among food websites.”

Without sit-coms, celebrities, talk shows, or sex and violence, the little network that could became the network to beat. And yet it’s still about food – all about food – 24/7. In a way, this focused self-reliance on an audience of one and working hard to embrace that audience of one without leaving him her behind created a host of celebrities that are now household names.
Say them with me:
• Rachael Ray
• Emeril Lagasse
• Paula Deen
• Giada De Laurentiis
• Bobby Flay

Cookbooks, TV specials, talk shows, cookware lines, DVDs, commercial endorsements – Rachael Ray even had a Christmas CD last year – and the list goes on and on. This is truly an audience of one blossoming into an audience of 1,000,001 x 85! Not because cooking shows appeal to everyone, but because they appealed to someone.

And by embracing that ONE someone with quality content, staying true to the basics, and giving that audience of one exactly what he or she wanted, the relationship between Food Network and its audience grew; from a community of a few foodies to a nation that makes its credentials hard to beat – and its bull’s eye marketing platform without compare.

TRY THIS …
Make a mental note next time you’re flipping channels on tv or satellite radio. Pick five shows and identify the intended audience. What types of products should be advertised there? (And no fair using the ones that are already airing on that show!)

Like any other high-rise growing toward the heavens, a good marketing campaign needs a solid foundation. As you start to implement some basic steps in your very own personal action plan, don’t start at the top only to overlook the bottom.
So let our first key be to “build” one for you:

• Build a great website for your organization. Every marketing campaign, even the most cutting edge, begins with the universal foundation of ALL online marketing efforts – a really great website. To achieve this really great website, you need to first understand the mind of the person using your site. Never forget that the Internet is primarily used for research. When we do buy things or avail ourselves of a service, it is in the interest of research. Reexamine your site to make sure it is research-friendly. Don’t make the site about how great you are or all about you – make it all about the user. How can they use it? What can you offer them? How can you make their lives easier?
• Think in terms of research: While it certainly doesn’t have to look like a textbook, make sure that your website at least has plenty of “quality guts” to recommend it to avid researchers. Even our young skateboarding fans — they of the short-attention spans and faddish trends — want information. It may be the latest news in plastics that make their boards go faster, gossip about their skater heroes, or the top-ten tunes downloaded over the weekend. By carefully tracking and measuring what features of your website are being used most often, you can keep up to date and cutting-edge with what to keep and what to dismantle.
• Follow the PBS Principle: In other words, keep it “Professional, But Simple.” Go easy on the flash; they’ll watch it once and never again. Too many slow-to-load graphics or gizmos can become a nuisance and have the opposite effect of that which was intended. Rather than sticking around to gaze in wonder at your creative process, visitors to your site will simply want to get to the information. Remember my “first principle of flash”: most people aren’t as wowed by it as YOU are.
• Follow the five-second rule: If it doesn’t load quickly, if they can’t figure out what it’s about, if it’s not relevant – your visitors are gone. We’ve all visited websites that ignored the five-second rule at their own peril. Many are littered with the latest pageantry that is meaningless and useless information that is even more so. Very few Internet users are loyal beyond a mere five seconds; thus the five-second rule. There is so much to see and so little time to see it all that if you can’t keep my attention in seconds one through four, well, you’re not going to have it through seconds five and beyond. Ignore the five-second rule, and you do so at your own peril!

Hopefully you can see how important it is to build a website that is as appealing to end-users as it is to your creative team. The goal is to make it as creative as possible without creating art for art’s sake. Make it usable, keep it fresh and frequently updated, and above all, make it suitable for research. Information first, eye-candy second – that’s the key to building a user-friendly website that actually gets used.

TRY THIS …
Visit and analyze your competitors’ websites and rate them according to these rules. How simple is each one? Does it load quickly? How much Flash and how much substance do you see? Can you quickly identify what this site is about?