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.

(Excerpt from my new book, The Recommendation Age)

For a long time there has been a deserved suspicion about the dulling affect that over-consumption of entertainment media can have on mental skills. Television addicts can become mind numbed couch potatoes, etc. and never again have an original thought. Similar concern arose from teachers and parents of children who seemed addicted to hand-held gaming devices.  So in turn one might judge too quickly that the tsunamic spread of social media across the face of social culture will quickly dull overall social awareness and weaken social skills to the admittedly shallow levels one typical reads in social media posts.  It is more likely that social media participants are merely enjoying greater opportunity to sharpen the social awareness and skills they have. Granted the content of a majority of social media postings are brief and often meaningless to all but a few intended readers.  Most of the connections made are shallower than the more romantic days of hand written letters. Tweets are never likely to compare in richness with Sonnets From the Portuguese. And perhaps the high and still growing dependence on communications technology makes familiarity with finer verse less likely. But rather than dulling users, social media is actually making users more socially sensitive. A different kind of social sophistication is emerging, which we must understand is the true source of social media’s power to influence buyers and sellers. What is becoming sharper is grassroots attentiveness to the minds and lives of others. Under the shear culture changing pressure of growing social media proficiency and the long nurtured hunger to connect we are beginning to relearn to let others into areas of our lives we closed off before. This most intimate aspect is happening more slowly. But I can say that now I know more about the daily lives, struggles, likes and dislikes, hopes, and health of people I haven’t seen in many years than I used to know about my immediate family. I frequently hear this same general sentiment expressed by others. This is happening because people are eager to share their lives. This impulse to share is the core energy of the Recommendation Age. Everything is personal now and people are loving it.

Without being particularly computer savvy or, for that matter, over the age of 10, we can today:

• Tell Pizza Hut how quickly our order got to the door – and how it tasted once it got there
• Tweet about that convertible we just rented, before the top is even down
• Review a movie, during the movie
• Tweet a picture of an actual fast food burger side-by-side with how the same meal looks in the ad
• Share hilarious photos of folks we just saw shopping at Wal-mart
• Become “friends” with our favorite author, TV or movie star, musician or sparkly vampire on Facebook

What started as a few simple comment, feedback or review forms on the Web’s most popular website soon grew into an online obsession. This culture of feedback has spawned the Recommendation Age, and it’s here to stay.

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.

This is understandable. As businesspeople, we work hard to capture our message; it’s valuable work that can only be done by internal employees who know our culture, our co-workers and our CEO. But the very insider nature of our mission statements and corporate copy can sound exclusive and clique-y to our customers.
They often don’t get the inside jokes, the clever language, the puns, metaphors or similes that we worked so hard on – for so long. If customers don’t get your copy, if it doesn’t speak in their language, you might as well not write it. And copy that only works for you simply doesn’t work!

The trick is to seek comfort where you’re not comfortable, which is usually in your target audience’s shoes. Let’s say you’ve never knitted a day in your life, secretly make fun of knitters behind their backs, talk down to them in their presence and generally just “don’t get this whole knitting thing,” but are suddenly put in charge of producing a new line of do-it-yourself manuals for, of all things, knitters.

Well, unless you get out of your knitter-doubting comfort zone but quick, your future customers will pick up on your thin knitter knowledge – but quick. The best way to do this is to switch off the comfort and welcome the uncomfortable. Immerse yourself in the world of knitting to the point that you are absolutely obnoxious about it. But you can’t just fake it; you have to open yourself up to it.

This is literally the biggest step one can take in measuring the distance between you and your audience. This is your straight line to the audience you’re targeting – and if you can’t feel comfortable in this niche, they’ll never feel comfortable buying it.

There is no doubt that we all yearn for more “stickiness” in our messages. But sticky to whom? Our audience? Or ourselves? In the last section we talked about speaking our audience’s language, so that should be a good indicator; what sticks to us may not necessarily stick to them.

Companies frequently get so internal that they forget the external. We get so excited about our ad copy, our product design, our packaging, our message, our website, our concept and our ideas that we forget what others think of us is what matters most when it comes to actually clicking on our site and making a purchase.

Part of that struggle for stickiness is in speaking the language of our audience; another part is in predicting what our audience will want before they even know it. This is where trends come in – and if there’s anything stickier on this planet than a hardcore trend, I’d like to know about it.

But, too often, we are content to sit back and spot a trend rather than digging more deeply to predict a trend. Following a trend is a guaranteed way NOT to hit the bull’s eye; at best, you might get lucky and land on one of the peripheral spots on the dartboard – at worst, you will miss the board, and your opportunity, altogether.

I’ll never forget the year John Grisham first published his breakthrough bestseller, The Firm. That’s because a friend of mine worked in a bookstore at the time and would report back – daily, ad nauseam, at a high pitch – about the book’s seemingly inexhaustible success. It wasn’t so much admiration that inspired these daily updates, but rather wonder and awe; he’d never quite seen anything like it.

Customer after customer, browser after browser, rushed into the store looking for The Firm. More often than not, the book would be completely sold out and my friend would recommend an equally strong substitute. For instance, Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow had been published several years earlier and was available in paperback – a substantial savings off The Firm’s current hardback edition.

No dice. Customers wanted The Firm and would accept no substitutions. But John Grisham had done more than start a trend; he single-handedly primed the pump for a whole new literary genre: the legal thriller. My friend often commented, “If only we’d seen this trend coming, we could have really cashed in.”

I would often comment to my friend, with a wry kind of smile and a knowing wink, that he should have spotted the need for such a trend long before Grisham did. After all, he worked in the ultimate reference section: a bookstore.

He could have simply wandered up and down the aisles during any one of his shifts and spotted the gaps where legal thrillers would one day dominate. But like so many of us, my Firm-envious friend was content to follow trends rather than predict them.

See the opportunities before they become a trend. Don’t sit back and wait; follow up and act. Stay on the cusp; do not sit back and follow – get out there and lead. Tweak trends, try new things, research effectively and get to know what your audience knows before they even know it.

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