Social Media Makes it Necessary to Consistently Deliver your Value Proposition

Picture this. It's Friday night and you are waiting for a table at a restaurant you've been wanting to try. The 45 minute wait time to be seated seems to validate everything you've read and heard. This place has great food and exceptional service to complement the incredible ambiance.

However, the lineup suddenly disappears as all those waiting for a table suddenly file out of the restaurant in unison. What just happened? Well, five of the last guests who left this restaurant "Tweeted" that tonight was not the night you want to have dinner there. Two guests waited an hour for their entrees to arrive, two others received cold food, and one guest received the wrong meal completely. . . and to top it off the server was rude when the guest so much as mentioned the issue.

Clearly every business has a bad day, but social media tools are having an immediate and far sweeping affect on those businesses that are otherwise great but have even ONE bad day. Armed with nothing more than a mobile device and a Twitter account, customers can now vote and clear an entire lineup at an otherwise busy restaurant. This is not futurama - this is reality and it is here now.

And, what about those businesses who rarely, if ever, deliver their value proposition consistently or don't have it well defined? I believe mobile technology and the interconnectedness of social media tools will expose them at blazing speed and with devastating reach - they simply won't survive.

So how can you win? The winners will not be those with only the best strategy. It will be those who can consistently execute what their strategy promises their customers. And, this is what is keeping the executives I speak with awake at night more than anything else. When asked, they don't know for fact if their people are ready to deliver their value proposition . This is a position they are not comfortable being in considering the investments they are making on other elements of their value proposition.

So, are your people ready to deliver your value proposition? How do you know for sure?

Perhaps we can discuss it over a coffee.

Michael