David – Your approach and insight in this area is unique and important. In a more rigid world we are able to simply and box in relationships such that we could throw leads over a fence and call them prospects and then throw them over another fence once they were customers. That’s simply no longer the case and it makes the environment much more organic and less ‘manageable’ in the traditional sense. It is a really important mental and process shift in the way we think about business operations.

Many successful businesses obviously understand and use the ‘customer’ mindset to drive everything they do. The business, in that case, is focused solely on what the customer wants and needs and it drives the decision-making. However, over the years this thinking has meant that everyone who’s not a customer gets a different approach. Marketing has gradually moved their focus off of the ‘customer’ mindset and on to the ‘audience’ mindset. And with the availability of mass media the approach of blasting one way messages to this ‘audience’ to try to convert them to ‘customers’ has been the predominant mode. On the public relations side, we have the ‘media’ mindset and an approach to target them and so on.

In a non-interconnected world (or at least a manually connected one) all of these approaches seemed to work well enough. But with the advent of social media the world began to change. The ‘audience’ became aware of itself and everyone in it. Customers became mixed in with the audience. Media mixed with customers and the audience. Everyone was conversing and learning from each other. The walls came tumbling down. Communities formed around subjects people were passionate about – including products, and including brands.

For me, this is the new world we live in. Companies that continue to operate using the old mindsets are probably wondering why things just don’t seem to work like they used to. It’s because they don’t.

And remember the new community principles where everyone communicates, learns, and shares with each other? Well, companies need to adopt that approach as well. This means living in the communities they serve, not visiting them when they want to or trying to buy their favor. Companies need to adopt a ‘community’ mindset in how they approach everything they do. It’s how the new world works and the old ways of doing things just don’t cut the mustard any longer.

Thanks for enduring my long-winded comment

@davidalston
Radian6