My getting involved with social media was sparked by an idea of developing the perfect marketing solution. To me that is an intimate relationship with your customer. INTIMACY is feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else.

If the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, then I reasoned that to do that you would need a relationship with that customer and the best relationship would be an intimate one. Intimacy is the ultimate relationship between two people.

So drawing onto my introspection about relationships since my divorce I thought of how do you get to intimacy in relationships and I concluded that it was simple in theory. All intimate relationships have three components TRUST, TRANSPARENCY and TALKING.

Between two people that is difficult enough so what do organisations need to do to achieve that state between an organisation and a mass of customers. The answer is simple treat them like people, people do business with people not organisations. Customers are people not demographics.

We need therefore to have ENGAGED customers and EMPOWERED employees and how do we do that?

with TALKING which is TRANSPARENT and so develops TRUST.

The tools we use are Social Media, because it connects people both within and outside organisations on a personal level.

There is a lot more to it but essentially that’s the driving philosophy behind PiKE’s Thinking and the PiKE Branding and consulting approach.

Photo credit tahoesunsets on Flickr