Review: The Thank You Economy — Vaynerchuk’s Advice on Giving & Receiving in the New Economy
Author: Gary Vaynerchuk
“Social media works best when you evoke an emotion in the people to whom you’re reaching out. It pulls.”
Intro
Published in 2011, The Thank You Economy is a book about recent changes in how our economy works and particularly social media’s role to show care and gratitude in directly engage with customers.
Ratings
- Likelihood of recommending a friend to read? 📚📚📚
- Likelihood of recommending a friend to purchase? 💰💰
- Positive Influence: ⭐⭐⭐
- Time to read (more is more time): 🗿🗿
- How related to business? 🕴️🕴️🕴️🕴️🕴️
Two or Three Favorite Things
A couple of topics in the book I liked quite a bit. The first one is about the need to recognize our employees who truly care about our customers and take risks to take care of them.
Any person willing to put him- or herself on the line…is one of the most valuable in your company. Do not let such employees get so frustrated by your refusal to listen to new ideas that they decide to leave. Too many leaders invest insufficiently in their employees for fear of losing out when those employees leave. Any investment you make in your employees will be safe if they believe that you really care about them and their future. Create a culture that rewards people who show that they care. Seek the input of people who have shown a tendency to take risks and share big ideas. Prove that you value your employees above all else by giving them the freedom to ask for what they want, to experiment, and to be themselves.
It’s okay if you put this effort into employees and they still choose to leave for bigger and better positions at other companies. You want ambitious people on staff, and it’s inevitable that ambitious people will be on the lookout for new opportunities. Even if they leave, your efforts will not have been wasted, for you will be developing your company’s reputation that attracts the best and the brightest, which is exactly who you want working with you. Besides, if you’ve really built a company that values its staff, many employees will try to return, bringing with them more experience, stronger skills, and a broader perspective, because they miss their old work environment so much.
When people are happy, they want to make other people happy. Therefore, if success in the Thank You Economy is contingent on making your customers so happy they could cry, you have to do the same for your employees.
I appreciated him addressing the fear of investing money in employees and then losing them to other companies.
It’s not a bad thing!
They carry with them on their resume that the previously worked for you and that helps your reputation as well of having hired good people.
It helps you to continue to attract similar people.
Those that leave will provide recommendations to others if they had a good experience.
They will provide many referrals if you were good to them.
Also, they can come back if they loved it and will be able to contribute more than before.
I love how he expresses that the Thank You Economy is about thanking and caring for employees just as much as your customers. Some leaders would argue that you should treat them even better since they the ones who interact with customers on a daily basis.
Another item I liked is the discussion of the attribute that may be most important in your company’s ability to set itself apart from the competition:
In Crush It!, I talked a lot about my belief that embracing your DNA, zeroing on your passion, and living that passion day in and day out were the keys to creating a fulfilling, happy personal and professional life. Since then, I’ve realized there’s something else that counts. In fact, it may be the single biggest differentiator in this new economy: good intent. I strongly believe that if your intentions are good, it shows, and it draws people to you. Now, you can probably think of many examples of individuals who were able to fake good intentions to get what they wanted. But I think that the Thank You Economy, which has brought us platforms like Facebook and Twitter that emphasize transparency and immediacy, has given consumers better tools to spot and expose a company’s or brand’s hidden agendas and bad intentions, as well as tools to recognize, and reward, good ones.
If you’ve ever considered embarking on a social media campaign, or even tried an initiative or two, what was your intent? Was your goal to get someone to click through or click the “Like” button? Or was it to build your online identity and foster a connection between yourself and the consumer? If you answer is the former, you’ve just hit upon the reason why most campaigns fail to meet their potential.
I liked this a lot. I’ve had times where I’ve tried to come up with a clever way to get likes or more connections, but a contact is not a real connection.
What matters is the quality of those connections. People that care enough about you to be your advocate.
This is an example of where quality actually does matter more than quantity but quantity matters once the quality is there.
One last thing is that social media makes B2B transactions more like B2C transactions:
(R)emember…that behind every B2B transaction, there’s a C.
The C in a B2B exchange — usually a purchasing manager, a purchasing agent, or a buyer — wants the same thing as any other consumer when making buying decisions: outstanding products and service, and the reassurance that someone is thinking about how to best meet the person’s business needs. When deciding whether to try a new brand, purchasers usually talk to friends and colleagues they trust. Before, they might have made a couple phone calls or sent out a few emails…Today, though, they can get feedback and advice a lot faster and from a greater number of sources by simply posting their thoughts on Facebook or Twitter. More and more of the individuals who make important B2B decisions, or any consumer decisions, are using those platforms to get the advice and feedback they need. For example, the social media department caught an opportunity to provide some basic support to a frustrated client. The client was so impressed with the service he received that he became a vocal advocate. To thank him, the company decided to send him some Avaya swag. When they contacted him for his mailing address, they discovered he was the CIO of a major investment bank in New York. Every interaction matters. Every relationship has value.
Personal Impact
The impact of this book was a little more than I expected.
The main message I got out of it is that we should take advantage of every opportunity we have to show we care, be it happy customers, angry customer, potential customers or competitors.
The transparency and opportunity of social media and new technologies give us a chance to do more and to also benefit from doing good.
Below are what Gary terms just the basic “rules of engagement:
What if you’re actually doing a good job of caring people’s socks off? You’ve got the rules of engagement down pat so to speak. You’re responding to comments, tweets, and reviews wherever you spot them, and inviting people to share their thoughts and ideas with you. you’re seeking opportunities to join or create conversations around topics and niches that are well within the general scope of your product or service, as well as those that may be only tangential to it. You’re solving people’s problems and thanking them when they acknowledge that you’ve done something right. You’re even thanking them when they tell you that you’ve done something wrong. You’re initiating smart, thoughtful, creative tactics that have good short-term payoff, and this will also pay off in the long run because their intent is to strengthen the emotional connection already in play thanks to all your other efforts. Always you’re being yourself, minding your manners, speaking from the heart, and thinking creatively. What more could you possibly do?
A lot.
First of all, I think for most of us this already seems like doing a lot! Most companies don’t go to this much effort.
More interesting still is his suggestion of using shock and awe to do even more.
What does a big thing look like?…
…What if Hershey’s, for example, randomly chose a few people it regularly engaged with on Facebook or Twitter, and invited them and their immediate family for an all-expense-paid visit to Hershey Park? The tickets wouldn’t be connected to a contest or any call to action — they would simply be gifts. Maybe that doesn’t sound like very good ROI — several thousand in airline tickets, park attractions, food, and hotel expenses, all to make a very small number of customers happy. But that’s a very nearsighted view. The long view is in the earned media opportunities, such as when the Philadelphia Enquirer gets wind of what Hershey’s did because of all the blogging and tweeting the customers do when they share their excitement. It also doesn’t take into account what I call the RCV — relationship context value — of the initiative. A few one-time expenses can pay off in a lifetime of loyalty from the people who are touched by the company’s generosity. First off, Hershey’s has just provided its customers with one heck of a dinner story. Second, many of those customers — certainly the original fans who were online often enough that Hershey regularly engaged with them — are going to tweet and post pictures and stories even as they’re walking through the park…
It’s hard for some execs to wrap their heads around the idea of spoiling customers like this, because a large number of people who run companies are salespeople at heart, not marketers; if they can’t immediately close the deal, see a unit sold or an uptick in profit, or if they don’t believe the scale of the initiative is powerful enough to move the needle, it doesn’t feel worthwhile. But we don’t do shock and awe because we’re saints. While the best thing about shock and awe is how great it can make customers feel, not to mention the pleasure we get from spreading some happiness, we do it because there is always a win. It has tremendous value and can create more business because of the additional clicks, opinions, reviews, tweets, and status updates that ensue as a result. The advantages of that kind of data collection should make sense to any business leader.
I thought this view was fascinating. I am not much of a ‘shock and awe’ person.
I work hard to be kind and always have good intent, but I rarely do the big things to help out.
But Gary makes some good points. There can be some big wins. And it really can be viewed as a giant “thank you” to a few of your loyal customers. They will certainly appreciate it the most. But anyone can be wowed by it if it’s big enough. And as Gary says, the ROI can be quite a bit better than traditional media ads like TV that are quite expensive.
Final Thoughts
I thought this book made some excellent points about how businesses of any size need to take advantage of the tools the digital world has brought to us.
It allows us to increase connectivity and word-of-mouth marketing to engage with our customers more closely and showing that we care about them.
Doing so will bring many benefits beyond just feeling good for doing good.
“Success in social media, and business in general, in the Thank You Economy will always have to be measured with an eye toward both quality and quantity. You can throw meaningless tactics around to increase your numbers, but even if they work and your online numbers look impressive, you won’t have gained anything of true value because you didn’t put anything of true value out there. All the numbers prove is that you’ve made contacts, not connections.”
