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In the old days we only heard customers when we chose to.
We had to decide to listen, and even when we did, to really hear them we had to listen hard.
We heard them when we held expensive, small scale and very tame focus groups.
We heard them when we allowed the call centre operatives to eventually escalate something they and the customer base had known about for weeks or months or years or decades.
We filtered, selected, and avoided.
As organisations we suffered from selective deafness, like that old grandmother in the corner, deaf to everything but the bits she wanted to hear. Smart with it. Deaf to the bad. But noisy.
Inbound, it was all optional.
Our input mechanism was mainly a dumb terminal, a slave to the beast, feedback filtered at every stage on the way to the top: 'everything is fine', the most default finding.
Yet our output was non-optional: we broadcast and blared out. Interruption.
Importantly, they - consumers, clients, buyers - were loyal because it was hard to find alternatives.
That was The Age of 'Control' (in inverted commas).
[It felt like control. And it probably was, of sorts. Consumers were isolated and media channels were intermediated and finite. But real total absolute control never existed. See Ceauşescu, non?]
Flip forward not one but two steps from here, The Age of Control, and we find that in the new world we will have neat, simple, usable tools that flow feedback between supplier and client like stock price data in a live marketplace.
In this happy sunshiney world:
Listening will be a minute-by-minute task, not a daily check, not a monthly clippings report or quarterly customer service review.
Like it is already at the major news organisations websites, where live analytics on what's hot and what's not drive the news agenda and business behaviour.
Like it is already at smart online retailers where merchandising decisions are truly dynamic and flow in realtime.
Like it is already at the fewest of the few digital PR agencies, where the finger really is on the binary pulse.
Blurred organisational edges will permit and even welcome the effortless osmosis of information betwixt and between. Solutions, ideas and innovations marketplaces will be the norm - Dell Ideastorm will look like the simple early prototype it probably is.
APIs, affiliate programmes, widgets and other shades of distributed goodness will be givens, seeding a thousand minnows and cuttlefish around the core service/site, distributing life beyond the original source: the reef, the brand, the site, the centre of that ecosystem.
Importantly, loyalty will return because time poor clients will be happier with mature service-led organisations that truly walk the customer-centred talk.
This will be The Age of Dialogue...
But right now we are somewhere betwixt the two.
Not yet in the dreamlike sunny paradise of Dialogue, yet not any more in the similarly comfortable Age of 'Control', instead we are in the turbulent transitory rolling seas of a different age.
A temporary age, thank god.
A painful, confusing changed ocean away from this Utopian destination where instead we are caught with rudimentary and dated Age of Control ways of working, processes, tools, people and expectations from our publics, but where the feedback we receive is entirely different, entirely unmanaged and unmanageable by our current systems, entirely uncontrollable.
Today is pain and confusion, fear and loathing.
Today's business is badly equipped for the world today...
So welcome, friends, to The Age of Snark.
Like boiling bilious lava, white-hot furious consumers vent wherever they find an outlet - spraying burning fluorescent looping lances of aggregated, unified rage.
Customers like me and you are disloyal and resent having to be so for the time and hassle it costs them.
At conferences with an internet savvy gamut, audiences pour into public and private online spaces to poll one another and quickly establish consensus before the speaker has finished, long before she has left the platform, and an age before the tired organiser has collected the lies and gladhanding half-truths scrawled on yellow paper questionnaires.
See Innovation Edge, Future of Web Design or Chinwag Measuring Social Media. All well respected events produced by well loved people. All now exposed to the ruthlessness of public, immediate feedback.
Worse still, our inner cowards prevail in such circumstances: it's easier to leave a nasty review than ask for the manager; to snark at the back of the conference rather than find the organiser and feedback face-to-face.
What will change and when?
My view is that right now we're in a unique point in this transition, at the very fulcrum of change, where the consumer conversations have flooded online but the organisations don't yet have the infrastructure and time to tap into and address those conversations.
Only 10% (at most) of the people in groups I work with at major brands have even Google Alerts set up. Online monitoring, umm, hmmm, ahem, yeahhh.
Very few major brands have yet invested in proper buzz monitoring solutions so they simply don't yet even have an ear to the networked chatter. Or a regular, known presence on places of online congregation (such as consumer forums).
And until they do, they won't think about how to respond, who should respond, and what to do with that new incoming knowledge within the business.
This is The Age of Snark (complete with capital letters).
As those things (the listening devices, the community engagements, the processes and skills, and so on) change my expectation and hope is that we will enter a more harmonious time where the flow of dialogue between the players in every marketplace will be frictionless, will be immediate, will be transparent and open and available.
The truth will out.
And consumers will act more respectfully and more maturely, because service providers will be listening to them (really) and responding to them, often publicly, transparently, and rapidly.
How long will this take? I have no idea. When you look at mature disciplines or principles in online such as usability, accessibility or even search engine optimisation, it is normal to find very patchy awareness let alone regular and consistent use of these core services amongst leading brands. So I must temper my natural optimism with the practical experience gained and guess that this will be years. Years and years, for the laggards.
In the interim, don't expect too much level-headedness, maturity and decency from the great unwashed masses (that's me and you, as consumers) online.
Do expect big-talking anonymous cowards, raging frustrated unheard ex-customers, playground social dynamics with polarised opinions and cosy cliques and gangs, and lots of Godwin's Law.
The Age of Snark is fatiguing, depressing, polluting, childish, unreasonable, bitter, cowardly, and in the main, absolutely deserved.
