Attention Companies: Meet Me Half Way!

It shouldn’t be a revolutionary concept, but somehow businesses are just now truly realizing the importance of ‘meeting’ their customers!

Businesses have launched accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, FourSquare, Tumblr, Reddit, Vevo, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Google+ just to name a few. This surge of social activity serves many purposes but mainly to connect with you.

As consumers we discuss our preferences a lot– with one another. If you get your hair styled at a salon and love it, you’re likely to thank and tip the hair stylist(s) before you walk out. However, when you leave you’ll call your best friend and tell them in immense detail: how much you love your hair, why, how you’ll wear it for your upcoming event, and that they should consider joining you at the salon next time. If you go out to eat and order your favorite meal at a new restaurant, naturally you’d consider yourself a patron as opposed to a food reviewer.

The truth is, your opinion matters because you can singlehandedly be responsible for a surge of business far beyond anyone’s expectations. If this particular restaurant serves the best burger you’ve ever had, what follows will be immensely important. Your Instagram post, Twitter/Facebook share, texts, and the conversations you’ll have within the best few days about this burger may do wonders for that business!

Businesses in every industry have realized that consumers love to share, so they decided to meet us halfway. Consumers often chat on social media so businesses had no choice but to join and develop their voice/culture across multiple platforms. I believe a company that capitalized on this idea of ‘meeting the customer right where they are’ is: Uber. They observed that a huge majority of the world spends hours glued to their phones. They developed a system that allows people to merely do what they’d normally be doing anyway (browsing online and interacting with apps), but Uber simultaneously offers service.

To use Uber, you download the app on your iPhone, iPod, iPad. Then you create an account in a matter of seconds, choose a car for service, compare rates while browsing the selection, watch your car arrive on the app’s map in a quick time span and link the app to your credit card for added convenience. Finally, they email you a receipt. This is just one example of a company meeting the public right where they are.

If businesses and entrepreneurs continue to find ways to bring their services to people in a way that fits into their daily habits, they’ll potentially see remarkable results. There’s power in associating your brand with habits that people already have. Technology is huge today, as many of us have no choice but to be connected in some way– even if it’s just 9am-5pm at work.

Let us meet our market halfway instead of struggling to entice them to come all the way to us. They’ll thank us for it and be pleasantly surprised by the convenience and customer service.