• Do the Right Thing

    Posted on August 19th, 2009 by and currently 7 commenting.

    I had the great opportunity to go hang out in Minneapolis last week and attend BlogWell at General Mills HQ. It was a great day filled with fantastic talks and good people. Good times. Good times.

    One of the highlights of the day was Scott Monty from Ford. His slides were beautiful, his content was great and he does a helluva Bill Cosby impression. He also gets the award for best quote of the day:

    “We’re not measuring social media on sales. It’s not a 1-to-1 kind of thing.”

    I think I just heard a few folks fall out of their chairs.

    You don’t have to do advertising, social media, branding – whatever – because your competitors are doing it or everybody else is doing it or because you think you should. You know what all the “winners” of our You Don’t Need Us Awards have in common? They are companies that keep “Do the Right Thing” as number one on the list. Patagonia. Chick-fil-A. USAA. Purpose-driven companies do the right thing and sales is a byproduct of that mission.

    You shouldn’t get into social media to make more money. You should get into it only if you can do right by your customers. Your fans. Your employees.

    Doing the right thing isn’t always the most popular. Or what everyone wants to hear. And it’s definitely not always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes, it’s the hardest thing to do. But if it’s truly the right thing, it’ll come back around. As Greg Cordell always says (it’s in our Tequila Shots book as well), “Love is a circular transaction.”

    Do the right thing. Don’t get caught up in the social media echo chamber. You’re not trying to make your marketing peers happy, you’re trying to create customer evangelists. And by doing the right thing, you’ll see byproducts in spades – new ideas for R&D, customers creating their own marketing messages, customers standing up for you and doing PR – oh yeah, and sales increases. Nice, isn’t it? I thought so, too.