Like It or Not It's All About Like

We started this year saying that someday your customer’s preference would dictate your company’s search engine relevance. That someday has come. The new Bing Facebook alliance makes “like” the new relevancy factor for search. So, what is "like"?

"Like" or not is the grade your business earned as determined by "the customer experience".

Your company and mine must be fully aware of the experience we create for our clients. We can’t cleverly weave our way through search engine formulas and hope to find some unsuspecting prospect who would become a customer. In the Participation Age your customers don’t care about some arcane search algorithm that revolves around keywords, referring links, dynamic content and other inane attributes. They care about what their friends think. Their friends are your recent and next customer.

Instead of “referring links” think “quality interactions”. Make each one count. Your customers will relate each of their experiences to their friends (your future prospects and customers) with a simple thumbs-up or down.

Perhaps, like Bigfish, you’re not in the gadget business. You don’t cook pizzas. You don’t rent cars. You don’t iron shirts. So what is there to like? Well, every day you and your employees make impressions. You create an experience. Your company and mine are in the customer experience business. It’s the quality of that experience as seen from the customer’s point-of-view that will determine the “like” count on our Facebook business pages long after our personal social acquaintances have tuned out of our news feeds.

My colleagues will attest that I am highly sensitized to the customer experience factor. It’s in our name. If I walk into the development room kicking over waste baskets and spilling coffee, it’s not because my folks have performed poorly. It’s because I’ve been enraged to the point of disgust having just witnessed a so-called collaborating engineer or developer use fear, uncertainty, doubt and downright arrogance to bluff a client into submission. Thankfully, Bigfish Developers are sincere in their efforts to deliver a “treat them like the big fish” level of service but we all have our moments and I may have seen a tiny bit of our worst selves in the other guy. It had to be kicked and spilled on. It wasn't a like-able experience.

We’re a service business. Whether we’re developing words to convey our client’s message, drawing pictures to illustrate their ideas, building websites to enable their objectives, or connecting them to prospects and customers through social media – each interaction with them is the experience.

For every gift card or thank you note from a client there are five others we might not hear from. What was their experience? Did they “like” us or not? Guess we’ll have to Bing and decide.

Let's talk about it. I'm on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timbigfish