John has a short snippet from my interview with him for his book Spark. It’s a really interesting book, and well worth a read.
Check out the snippet here, or read below:
In Chapter 13 of Spark, Build a Community , I interviewed Jake McKee from LEGO. Jake’s ideas about building a realtionship are important:
What we really have here – when I talk about the relationship that I have with the fan groups (customers) and they have with me – is a dating relationship. If you show up on a date and you’re absolutely perfect, the person doesn’t think, ‘Wow, this is so great – he’s perfect!’
They think, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ Their defenses immediately go up and they assume you’re hiding something. When companies do that same thing you immediately think they’re just spinning it, that it’s just marketing crap and you don’t need to pay attention to it. But when you actually start to have an interaction with them, that back and forth, then you have a relationship.
Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but at the end of the day, as long as it’s more positive than negative, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what people really believe; that you’re not just messing with them, trying to get them to buy something.
I’ll be blogging more about this dating relationship concept more in the coming months. Stay tuned.
