If you read any self-help books on how to be productive, efficient and excel in the last 50 years there are always three main themes within such books. They go like this:
- Plan where you want to go. Because if you don’t have a plan you can’t excel against your competition which these books assume has no plans of their own.
- Create repetitive habits that help you get to these plateaus. You do this by creating key performance indicators. Of course, these indicators are whatever you imagine with no real benchmarks.
- See through these planned habits to excel at the highest levels via repetition and practice. The old “10,000-hour rule,” because more practice leads to more perfection.
While I’ll save why I find these rules outdated for another article in the future, what I want to call your attention to is the one thing many of these books never do is tell you, “Never tell anyone else how to do any of this.” Because in a printed format, distributed for anyone to read, that is impossible when these recommendations are of the public record.
While many probably note what to do when they read a book or an article in terms of actionable tactics, what is never told is to “share this with everyone you know and share it now.” That is inherent. It is a biological trait that has existed long before social media. You will share because humans are collaborative and social by design. We feel if sharing helps, we will do it, not out of self-interest, but for the benefit of the group. Social media now allows companies to scale sharing. If we look and diagnose prehistoric civilizations, they shared information because they had to to survive. You shared how you built fire because you needed others to build fire so they wouldn’t freeze to death. You didn’t want them to freeze to death because groups can get more done than any individual being. Everything was centered around the civilization or the group. The evolution of society was important through openness and sharing of information.
But in our world starting somewhere during post-World War II based on new systems of engagement, people and companies went rogue. It was better to not tell anyone what you were doing or how you did it. Much of this had to do with intellectual property laws, but much of it also dealt with brand facades and economics. If the public could see under the microscope what was really going on at many of these companies, they would be horrified and possibly never support them again.
In addition, scarcity became the big way to drive value. And when things are scarce, walls are built and information is neither leaked out or allowed in. The value one derived for much of this time was transactional. “If you want this information, well, you have to pay me for it.”
Now this behavior has been pivoting for the last two decades back to one grouped around society once again. Mainly due to openness demanded of a more “open source” communicative culture based on social networks and digital media. People want to know why companies make the decisions that they do, they want to know what they are doing in terms of innovation, they want to know where they donate their money to in terms of philanthropy. Also customers don’t simply buy what brands offer, they want to act as consultants. If you doubt this, look at any comment section on Facebook for a brand post.
It makes sense, we are coming full circle once again where society is just as important as the self.
What this means for brands is if you want to go beyond simply advertising in a newsfeed or on television to build that societal configuration with others you cannot do this by simply offering coupons or incentives. While people will always be self-motivated that won’t win the hearts of non-loyal customers who want to know what culture they are buying into by supporting you. They can’t understand what your culture is if you aren’t transparent. If you aren’t open. If you aren’t trustworthy and admit mistakes, failures, wins and innovations that benefit all and not simply some.
So how do brands do this? Follow these three rules:
1. If you demand customers to be open with you, you better be just as open with those customers. Customers give you their data in so many ways now. The least you can do is be open with how you’re using it, how you plan to use it and what you plan to do as a company within regulatory limitations. Relationships that are open and honest are highly sustainable, yet business relationships we treat as transactional. It’s no wonder there is so much brand divorce™.
2. Be so honest that when you make mistakes, admit it and when you do great things, be humble. Nobody likes humblebrags. I see it all the time by so many brands on Twitter or in their terrible television ads. “We’re so great, everyone loves us, our competitors stink.” You are asking for a karmic payback.
3. Beyond what can be told publicly from regulatory standpoints, be so open that what you tell your staff shouldn’t require “internal only” disclaimers. If you really want to operate like an open source company and build trust, then build trust by being open and honest and transparent with your working staff. And note to them that what you share they should share with customers. When you have internal vs. external politics, nobody wins and ultimately the managed systems internally leak out to the external world and shows how inauthentic you really are.
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