What Tony Hsieh Didn’t Say About Social Media

by J.Blake Martin on 07/19/2010 at 7:16 am in Observations

Zappos is about culture. It is a company that is completely, totally, 100% invested in its culture. They want their people to want to be there. To be actively engaged. They even offer new employees $2,000 to quit during training.

Let that sink in. After you’ve made it through several rounds of interviews (half of them evaluating your resume, the other half evaluating your cultural fit), they offer $2,000 to give you one last chance to jump ship. They’ll even pay the full salary of the five week training period if you quit before it ends.

The people who work at Zappos WANT to be there. The Zappos you see is the genuine Zappos.

Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, is more comfortable talking “culture” than “social media” (he doesn’t even like the term “social media”). In the online marketing world, we love Zappos because it’s a social media darling – one of a handful of firms to run a blockbuster social campaign. We look at them for clues on how to run our own successful campaigns. In fact, that’s the primary reason I attended the DMNews Marketer of the Month interview with Tony this past Monday.

But Tony wasn’t there to share his social media marketing wisdom. He didn’t specifically point to the answer and say, “This is why Zappos is able Tweet effectively…” but he gave us a big clue.

The clue is culture.

Tony’s top three priorities for the company are:
1. Culture
2. Customer Service
3. Clothing

The product, or “what it does,” is third on the list. Can you say that about your company? Should everyone be able to say that about their companies? Is it a good business model? Is it a better business model?
It’s a model that works well for social marketing.

I feel like it’s becoming cliché to say it, but social media isn’t what you do, it’s who you are. Your company is a profile in the online world. Nobody wants to be friends with a company. Nobody wants to be a fan of a company. People gravitate to personality. They want to associate themselves with people and things on the internet that reflect their own values.

You can have that kind of relationship with Zappos. The clue is culture. That might not be the explanation for every successful social media campaign, but it sure works for Zappos.