The following is a guest blog post from Peter Shankman, world-renowned speaker, author and consultant. His latest book, Zombie Loyalists, is available now.
So let’s cut to the chase: When you think of zombies, you usually think of the undead, bad television and the occasional weird guy you see on the subway, right? I mean, it’s not often we face real-life zombies in the real world. You go about your lives and, other than the occasional “zombie apocalypse” message you see on Facebook, the chance of meeting an actual zombie is pretty rare.
Except, what if you’re looking at them the wrong way? What if there are zombies among us every day? What if they come into our stores and shop on our websites? What if they’re in our Facebook and Twitter feeds and we email them several times a day? Heck, what if they exist in our very families? What if they’re a part of us?
What if zombies are truly amongst us, but we’re too stupid to notice it?
My name is Peter Shankman and I believe that zombies exist amongst us daily. The cool part is they are key to making our corporate profits soar, turning customers into huge fans of our business and are directly responsible for bring us new business over and over again!
How’s that possible? Well, these zombies are actually Zombie Loyalists and they’re your own customers – so unbelievably devoted to your brand that they want to tell the world how amazing you are. In fact, they’ll jump at the opportunity to do all of your PR for you if you simply let them!
“Madness,” you’re saying. Well, perhaps you’re not using the actual word “madness,” but you’re thinking it. And I hear you. It sounds crazy. “Your own customers going out of their way to tell the world how awesome you are? And for free? Who would do that? What kind of crazy, undead zombie…. Oh, wait a second…” Now you get it.
See, here’s the deal – I wrote a best-selling book called Zombie Loyalists and it talks about how the next fifty years of the economy are going to be run entirely by customer service and customer experience. In other words, if you’re working with customers (and let’s face it, we all work with customers) then you don’t have a choice but to understand that the social networks of today are quickly turning into the entire world of tomorrow. When a customer has a good experience, it’s no longer about Yelp, Trip Advisor, leaving a review, or even checking in. It’s automatic.
This is what happens nowadays: a customer has a great experience with your business, their network will know and pass that experience on, in real time, when it matters.
For example:
“Honey, where should we eat near our hotel?”
“Oh, look, our friend Mike was here last month and really enjoyed his dinner, here are some photos he took.”
This comes automatically, without help, without even asking – and especially without anyone having to waste his time on any review sites. His sentiment, his actions, how long he stays at the restaurant, heck, even his photos of a rare steak will all be used to calculate whether Mike liked his experience and if it’s automatically shown when people in Mike’s network are looking for a similar place.
Before we start thinking “well, how big are our networks anyway?,” let’s remember that every person and business we meet, engage with, or sell to – they’ll automatically be in our network. How they interact with us and how we choose to interact with them determines our relevance to each other. However, if you’re a business, you especially want to be as relevant as possible to your Zombies.
So join me at ASCEND to see how we dive through this stuff, from how we go about infecting our customers, turning them into Zombie Loyalists and how they turn their friends into the same. It’s going to be quite a fun time.
Register for ASCEND Digital Marketing Summit.
Interested in hearing more from Peter Shankman? Watch his session from ASCEND 2014 on The Entrepreneur Story here:
PLUS, enter to win the complete ASCEND 2014 video package, featuring inspiring talks from Justine Jordan, Marcus Sheridan, Wil Reynolds, Andy Crestodina and more. Click here to enter.
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