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Make your business socially, behaviorally, emotionally intelligent

Chip Conley

When analyzing consumer buying behavior, folks down at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival found themselves at the crossroad of psychology and business, with Chip Conley acting as the crossing guard.
Chip Conley is the CEO and Chief Emotions Officer at Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a company he founded two dozen years ago. Chip’s years of experience and best-selling books helped him to create his talk, “Emotional Equations to Connect With Your Customers,” which aimed to help business leaders understand how to be more emotionally intelligent in the workplace.

Unpack your emotional baggage

  • Despair = suffering minus meaning. Suffering is a constant, meaning is a variable. Meaning lessens suffering.
  • Fear is used systematically to control, suppress and get people to do “something.”
  • When going through bad times, a company is a sweatbox.
  • Study: Women who had teen depression vs those who did not – the former were much better able to handle being a widow later.
  • Stress early in life builds long-term courage and resilience, builds emotional muscles.
  • Anxiety resolution: Chart what do I know/don’t know, what can I influence/can’t.
  • Disappointment = Expectations minus reality.
  • Disappointment is usually the result of poorly managed expectations.

Happiness and business practice

  • Happiness = wanting what you have/having what you want
  • Happiness = practice gratitude/pursue gratification.
  • Happiness = wanting what you have divided by having what you want.
  • Solace and comfort comes from consumption, replacing religion?
  • Bhutan – forget GNP – try gross national happiness.
  • Hedonic treadmill, whatever we get is what we want, we want more, which yields unhappiness.

Our basic needs to survive, succeed, and transform

  • Meet expectations, meet desires, meet unrecognized needs, but unrecognized needs will become expectations.
  • Transformational companies focus on the unrecognized needs of their customers.
  • Between stimulus and response is a space to choose our response.
  • We all aspire to self-actualization, but how do you make it for a company? Many great companies used it.

Buying behavior

  • Buying behavior is driven by unconscious thoughts. 95% of thought, emotion & learning happen w/o consciousness.
  • Identity affirmations play a huge role in consumer behavior. What does the product say about me, self-actualization.
  • People identify with things they aspire to be. Shopping is buying identity.
  • The more options we have, the more opportunity for regret.
  • What does a self-actualized customer looks like?

4 ways to succeed

  • Help meet goals
  • Allow expression
  • Feel part of bigger cause
  • Offer real value that they hadn’t imagined
 Want to learn more about Emotional Equations? Check out Chip Conley’s Prezi presentation for free.

Small Organizations Can Create a Big Social Media Presence

Aimee Roundtree

When time, money, and help are hard to come across, it’s time for organizations to incorporate strong social media strategies. Many small brands are seeing big success with social media, whether for outreach, education, PR, or promotion. South by Southwest Interactive provided tips on how to create a strong social media presence.

If you want to do big things with social media at your small organization, you have to be creative and flexible, use what works, and know thyself to create a campaign that’s effective and works for you (and most importantly, your audience), according to Aimee Kendall Roundtree, University of Houston-Downtown Associate Professor in the Professional Writing Program. Highlights from Big Social Media Results for Small Organizations:

Social media for small organizations: Best Practices

  • Invite participation
  • Set and know your metrics and perform sentiment analysis
  • Know you purpose and set policies and training programs invite participation
  • Set smaller goals and achieve them
  • It’s good for small organizations to be talking about news, events, and partnerships with other organizations
  • Track interactive patterns, build metrics and tools as you need them.
  • Do what works for your organization, which may be unique to your audience and brand
  • Being adaptive is a best practice because money and time are the biggest barriers
  • Hashtags build community structure, be sure to put your mission first
  • When establishing strategies, small organizations should use messages for content, not memories
  • Small organizations can often do well by amplifying user-generated content

Make the voice of your organization heard through social media

  • 73% of small orgs using social media. Of those not using, 81% plan to start
  • For small organizations, often the best social media posts don’t support the strategic plan or goal
  • Use social media to embody the organization. Share daily goings-on and be intimate in a brand-appropriate way
  • Film events, share anecdotes and other clips to help feed social content. This helps a small organization to show activity
  • Be aware: Despite organizations’ goals/purpose, users can change direction through contributed content

 Be brave when branding your organization through social media

  • It’s OK for small organizations to wing it! Just use your intuition
  • When it comes to social media, intuition can be more effective than best practices
  • Don’t be afraid to say what you need to say, provide real content about what’s happening. Be concise and consistent
  • Consider the ant: How is it that ants accomplish so much without someone telling them what to do?

Thanks to @akroundtree, @ACDunbeck, @inthekisser, @mirandaLwilson for your insights!