It is all about Micro interactions and embracing change.

I recently saw a great slide show by David Armano called Micro interactions in a 2.0 world. After looking at his presentation it hit me that currently today we struggle to get into the Web 2.0 world and we have to figure out how to get there.

Think about what we still do. We still advertise in news papers, we have meetings to talk about how we are going to divide up add space in a newspaper, we still have agents that want to have their pictures on their business cards, or buy banners that talk all about how great the agent is. We use acronyms that even today the customer still does not have a clue what they mean.

I say all this because we have to be open to change and understand that the way we did business 5 years ago isn’t going to continue to work. David makes some powerful statements in his presentation such as. ” The consumer is changing form a passive consumption to active participation.”  This means that they want to be apart of our business and contribute so I ask you, should we have to allow that to happen? Unfortunately the consumer experience varies so much from deal to deal that we would say “no we can’t let them talk about us and make that viewable to the public.” I ask why not? Remember “A brand is not what you say it is, it is what they say it is.” according to David.

We have to start looking at how we interact in small micro interactions in many different places. Social networking, websites that currently attrack large amounts of eyeballs to real estate information. How do we make sure in these environments we show up consistently, professionally, and with integrity. As there are more and more places to interact on line it allows for further fragmentation of our brand and creates even more confusion for our customer.

It is important that we think like business people and make sure that we understand our customer better. We also have to be aware of all our touch points with the customer and remember that all of them add up. David says this..

I do believe that we are at a crossroad and we have to begin to think differently about how we interact with our customers. We need to embrace social networking, we need to understand blogging and begin to engage the customer not as a transaction but as a person that can help  to enrich our consumer experience by allowing them to give us useful feedback that will enhance our processes.  David has a slide that really shows what this shift should look like.

to see all his slide refer to the link at the top of this post.