There are four types of business behaviour at the moment in response to the social media revolution:

1. Talk to the hand – the ignorant and the arrogant.

2. Tolerant – but little acceptance so far. It’s a fly in their soup. Fearful of losing control is at the forefront of this behaviour.

3. Dipped toes – have tried it, quite liked it, the water’s warm, but don’t know what to do next to embrace it fully.

4. Riding the wave – hey they are way ahead of the game….

If you can admit to being in either 1 or 2, go look at this video. Clay identifies huge implications to the cross over to the business application of social media.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

If you’re not convinced after this, I give up, you are not listening!

Lets talk about something different, similarity! Groove Armada said it in their song ‘if everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other.’ Look around you, we do look the same. Coffee shops on the high street, marketing agencies, bottled water, training companies, banks, solicitors. Just go and compare these two sites; www.hellyhansen.com and www.musto.com and you’ll get a flavour of what I mean.

When your competitive advantages are the same, you have got to approach how you engage with your market place better, which is why I keep banging on about customer experience. Here’s a suggestion. Set up a new project team that meets on a regular basis. Make it cross functional and call it the ‘Disruptive Team.’ Their job, to disrupt the status quo, to discover what TRULY makes you different and to guide you swiftly away from similarity.

Undertaking something like this won’t destroy your brand, indeed, it might just be it’s saviour.

It’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of movement and we can all be forgiven for thinking that our business is changing, doing new stuff and improving results, when in fact, it’s not. You’re just going round in circles, embedded in what I call ‘revolving door’ syndrome.

Take a look at the new Bailey’s advert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjW4iFuO-WU They have added a ‘coffee’ alternative to their product range under the pretense that it’s product development but it just feels like a desperate attempt to compete with new entrants to the market. Its false, this isn’t change, it’s just messing about.

Many companies are guilty of ‘re arranging the deck chairs on the Titantic.’ Look carefully at you business, as each month and year passes, are you just revolving or are you truly evolving?

It really is okay to use certain words even if a number are overused and overhyped. A few people I was on a course with yesterday mentioned a few cliches they hate; innovative, unique and community to name but a few. These words including creative, ideas, engaging, diverse, vibrant, inspirational and social are great explanatory words.

Use these words but present them in context. The reason people get bored with them is because we haven’t done our job and made them tangible. There is nothing wrong with using the phrase cutting edge’ if you are. The problem occurs when you are not. Use the word landmark or the best only if you have independent testimony to back that up. If you took all of these fabulous words away, what would we have left? Mundane, flat, uninspiring words.

People will often say that your brand is like Marmite, they either love it or hate it. Your retort should always be, as long as people don’t find us indifferent. These ARE times for ‘sticking your head above the parapet’ and ‘sticking out like a sore thumb’ as long as it’s for something exceptional of course.

Being in an indifferent position is fundamentally a difficult place to be. Customers don’t see you and therefore ignore you. It becomes inherently difficult to build any traction on the customer loyalty front. Many companies initiate the worst action with poor consequences by trying to buy customers through traditional marketing tactics. That only gets you bad profits which you can’t sustain over the long term.

Better have a smaller list of customers who love what you do, promote what you do and buy more of what you do again and again. Rather than the ‘yeah whatever’ group that aren’t listening. Those that hate you…..well that’s just life!!!

I presented a seminar this week in Cornwall for www.mervynsmallwood.co.uk on customer loyalty and social media. It struck me that, like yesterday’s post, some new things are going to be challenging for business but we don’t need to panic about social media. Not just yet anyway. There is time to sit down, relax and just watch/observe.

My top five tips of what you need to be doing if you are looking at your marketing strategy in the next few months. Social media will be at the forefront of that so:

1. Read this book www.ducttapemarketing.com/socialmediaforbusiness.pdf

2. Research and play with social media, it’s meant to be fun.

3. Get yourself booked onto www.alikeminds.org in February 2010.

4. Find a social media ‘guru’ and pick their brains.

5. Read this blog and others www.thebrandbuilder.blogspot.com/

Don’t panic, social media is here to stay. You don’t need to jump on the bandwagon just yet. It’s more important to make sure you know what you’re doing and want to achieve. Spend 3 months getting your head round it. Play with www.twitter.com Start to engage with people. Follow people you like, follow people you hate. Understand the language, how it’s changing the way we do business, then launch yourself into it.

Social media is not a spectator sport so be prepared for that. You are not going to lose out by waiting a few months. In fact, you are going to be in a better position to manage the process and ensure your business makes the right decisions rather than hundreds of decisions.