Business and honesty.

I certainly hope this is a growing trend.  I’m encouraged to see some more and more examples of companies who are respecting their customers by simply being honest and human with them.  Here are two recent examples that came my way.

Domino’s Pizza Turnaround. After 50 years of building a successful pizza business, Domino’s started to hear many complaints about the quality of their product.  Rather than letting these complaints be edited out of the data by a worried manager who cuts the data to eliminate the bad-sounding data, Domino’s had the courage to listen — and to disclose publicly that they listened.  In response, they have redesigned their products and have launched the pizzaturnaround site to share their progress with you.

ThoughtFarmer blog. ThoughtFarmer provides organizations with Intranet platforms that happen to be Enterprise 2.0 platforms.  Their product is impressive and it has some features not found in any other E2.0 intranet platform.  However they don’t really focus their time and energy on product marketing.  So they are not as well known as some of their competitors.  In a recent blog post, Chris McGrath, the cofounder of ThoughtFarmer candidly shares his thoughts about what they are doing that is working and what is not working so well.  It’s not an appeal to pity, it’s simply an honest expression.  And personally I like reading this kind of honesty and self-awareness.  It raises my sense of trust in them.  I know they have a great product, and I know that they are not sugar-coating.

As it turns out, there are many worthy E2.0 vendors out there.  I frequently get briefed by smaller E2.0 startups.  Some pour all their money into engineering and they create a fantastic product that no one knows about.  Others invest in plenty of PR and when you look under the hood of the product, well, it’s OK, but not that impressive.  Sometimes I just want to pair them up with their competitors.

I’m glad to see that consumer-facing companies (like Domino’s) and niche-market companies (like ThoughtFarmer) and leveraging their use of Social Media — both to listen to and to speak with their “community” of customers and interested parties.  They are examples of the trend that Chris Brogan and Julien Smith described in their book Trust Agents.  BTW, the book is a pretty good read and it makes for a nice gift for someone who wants to learn more about living publicly on the internet.  There’s a lot of great content in the book, but (to be frank) I think it needed another round of editing before I’d consider it a great book.  Nevertheless, it’s worth reading because you’ll learn something from it.

I’ll avoid “predicting” for 2010 (since I don’t have a boss making me publish any this year).  But I’ll express a hope that we’ll see more of this corporate humanity in the media.  And even more importantly, that we reward the companies who treat us with the dignity of listening to us by listening to them too — and making this turn profitable for both.

Tagged as: behaviors, brand, culture, social media, success story, tip, vendor