Social media is not about follows or likes

Last night I was at the Enterprise Ireland networking event at the Irish Embassy. The headline speaker, Matt Rhodes from Fresh Networks, told a fascinating story about social media which struck me as being particularly relevant to retailers.

He told how his grandfather, who was running a village shop in Yorkshire, would keep a shoebox full of cards – each one covered in notes about their shopping habits and what they did in their spare time. He knew not only each of his customers but how they interacted with one another. When an elderly customer of his fell ill he was able to send her all her usual products, delivered by a customer he knew to be a friend of hers from the church choir. His Grandfather, although he didn’t realise it at the time, was building a social graph.

Social media used as a broadcast tool can be great, it’s easy to set up and easy enough to manage. But if retailers harness the power of the social graph they can do much more than that.

Matt gave a great example of this, citing Amazon in the US. There the site is integrated with Facebook so a user’s homepage will show them the next five upcoming friend’s birthdays and suggest products that they might like.

The lesson for retailers here is clear. Retailers should shift their focus away from follower numbers and on to customer intimacy; knowing who people are, what they like and how they relate to each other.