Chapter 6

Bridging Digital

Corporations that build real relationships between people who discover a common connection through their product will thrive in a healthy way.

—Leon Lazurus

Right now, many organizations are lost in translation. They understand the physical world (even if just conceptually, especially for B2B organizations that don’t have retail locations). By now we hope that you understand that relationships drive success and have a value to your organization. As we’ve illustrated (perhaps ad nauseam), digital has a different set of rules, which require you to rethink how to form and cultivate relationships.

In Chapter 1, we introduced nine time-tested principles for engaging customers, exemplified by a small hardware store in Massachusetts. We also made the claim that those nine principles could be applied to the digital world. At the heart of all commerce is one fundamental element—human relationships. In the online world, digital experiences (i.e., websites, apps, games, and social profiles) take on the role of salespeople, clerks, customer service agents, accounting staff, and every other human interaction of the business with its market.a

Of course, there is a slight difference. Digital interactions can move at the speed of light, answer a million questions a second, and handle inquiries from around the world. While they cannot yet smile and shake hands, with some effort, digital interfaces can now be taught to recognize regular customers, talk to people about their cats, suggest products, and make comparisons, or even share stories about how others have solved similar problems in the past.

Let’s recap those principles again:

• Need: Something is not only driving the consumer to engage with you (reading your content, posting on Facebook, etc.) but is also driving how they want to connect with you.
• History: The consumer’s backstory, both as a person (who are they, where have they come from) and their engagement with you (what have they read, what have they said, what have they purchased).
• Curation: Bringing things together that the consumer will find useful, like all of the different kinds of screwdrivers or all the articles on how to fix the washing machine.
• Faces: We are wired to key off of faces making expressions and body language. They are critical to the way we build trust and connect with each other.
• Stories: We respond and engage with stories more than anything, especially those that feature a traditional narrative arc (again, we are biologically wired for this).
• Authenticity: The feeling that the person with whom you are doing business with is real. They want to know that you aren’t trying to “pull a fast one” on them.
• Consistency: The experience a person has with you during engagement is the same regardless of where the engagement happens. In the digital world, your website isn’t vastly different (except in content perhaps) between desktop and mobile.
• Credibility: The feeling that you know what you are talking about. The basis for trust.
• Helpfulness: You are committed to helping people solve their challenges, regardless if it leads to a sale or not.

The chapters that follow are each dedicated to exploring one of these principles in depth and to translating the intuitive techniques practiced daily in real world interactions, such as at that small hardware store, to the digital world. We try to answer questions like, “How can I put these principles into practice in the digital world? Where should I start?” To help clarify these questions, we have enlisted the helpful advice and best practices of digital relationship experts from around the world. The remaining chapters give you the how-to answers that will transform your organization, helping you build lasting real-world relationships with digital audiences.

aIn Chapter 16, we introduce what we believe is the digital equivalent of the physical storefront. And don’t cheat by reading ahead. . . .