The social behavior expectation comes with the introduction of business to the social spaces created by the web. When on an off-line social space business speeches seemed like spam and made us run away or just ignore them, but they were very limited to friends or strangers trying to sell us something at a dinner party. Strangely enough the first business spammers that appeared online where humans that had lost their human values to the corporate values they’ve been taught all their life. Yes, I’m talking about the corporate and affiliate marketing spammers that seemed to be everywhere. This was followed by businesses trying to sell products with their official channels. I blame this on the lack of preparation marketers receive at school on the new expectations of the “social customer”(it’s a term I don’t like but find useful). Even Philip Kotler updated his 4 Cs theory adding the C of Community, but schools still teach the old 4P, comapny centric, theory.   

So what do I mean when I say companies need to be more human. It’s all about letting people define the culture of the company instead of imposing a culture created following business books that promotes values that no one even remembers. I’m sure that if your company has values like efficiency, risk reduction and being the best in the industry, no one is following them. The truth is people are being driven by other values like generosity, compassion, love and personal growth and businesses are forcing them to hide them in order to try and remember the corporate ones. My take on making a business more human comes with a reconstruction of company culture. This should be a process that takes every single member of the organization, even the ones that work inside our office but are employees of another firm because as humans that culture affects them too. I think that’s why Zappos shares so much of their culture with everybody, so we can understand it, spread it and give them feedback on it.

Company culture can’t be build right from the beginning but the guidelines can be set and followed as the company grows and evolves. In the case of a already established and big business there should be an investigation of what values matter to our employees and customers in order to adopt them as company values. This process won’t be painless it should make a lot of people unhappy and get lot’s of people out of their jobs because of not fitting with the broader culture, but finally it will bring stability and sustainability to the company.

In order to leverage the humanity of talent a business needs to focus on the values that make long term relationships possible. They need to think of themselves as candidates to be friends with their customers, employees and stakeholders. But above all they need to let people be themselves. Rather than tailoring messages and forms of speech they need to let people talk as they will talk to anyone and treat customers as humans rather than a number. This is easier to say than to implement, first of all there needs to be a change in values and in expectations. Also the possible short term financial impact needs to be taken in consideration. Fixing the relationships with customers may take a lot of money. Take for example the amount of money telcos will need to spend in order to make us trust them again. 

The first thing that needs to be learned is that social capital and social currencies (like trust) will not be used to make more money, at least not directly. So instead of focusing in making more money we should focus on making meaning. One of the first steps a business can take is to make happiness their business model (as Tara Hunt says). 

To leverage humanity we need to make a business seek profits, passion and purpose as the Delivering Happiness Book by Tony Hsieh says. Promoting human values will make the relationships between humans become deeper and although companies will still need to keep some of the old values and processes to manage growth, human values will make the difference in the customer/company relationship.