The one thing a business must have is customers.  And today’s customer is a lot like today’s citizen journalist.  Your customer:

• Cares. The Customer cared enough to give you money for your service or product.
• Has a voice.  The Customer can spread stories about the great or poor experience.
• Can amplify the story. Here’s where Social Media changes the traditional interaction between buyer and sell — and the outcome. Customers have always had a voice, but now Customers can easily form spontaneous organizations with others anywhere. Instead of just talking to a neighbor or coworkers, your Customer today can Twitter, launch a blog, publish ratings and build a Facebook community about the experience, etc.

So what?

Here’s a great example from November: The Motrin ad.

It ticked off some blogging moms who wrote about it — here’s the original post.  Next a Twitter army spontaneously formed and quickly spiraled into a movement, including a campaign on Facebook to boycott Motrin.  It spawned parodies and hit mainstream media and generated lots of angry customers for Motrin.  Motrin responded but even a big company with all its resources and smarts didn’t get it exactly right.

Need more examples? How about SciFi — er, SyFy? Or Tropicana’s new labeling?

Being a Customer today is a participatory experience — another example of mass collaboration. As a business, you can listen and engage, even empower your customers and employees to speak for you. After all, they are already.

Why not participate?

Sure, for a business, it’s a change and it can be disruptive — but probably more disruptive if you don’t.

To be successful, you’ll also have to balance top-down hierarchy with participatory technology, and maybe rethink your perspectives on control vs. freedom.  You’ll want to relinquish any belief that you know where the good ideas come from or that you know all the good ideas, and replace that with a willingness to listen, learn and respect the individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Sure, it can be messy (remember Motrin?) — but also authentic and powerful and rewarding to the business.

There are other, more tangible and practical things you’ll want to do too.

• Do an audit — what’s the marketplace really saying about you right now? What’s happening with your competitors here, too? (Although, again, this one  starts with the soft skill of listening.)
• Define your strategy. Know what you want to accomplish.
• You might need policies on the changes and on managing risk. (Like email, you have some ownership in tracking, auditing, defining what’s unacceptable, storage, privacy, etc.) Don’t lose sight of the collaborative nature of social media, use the culture to help with self-policing and honest engagement.
• Engage slowly.  Don’t lose sight of the need for authenticity — don’t let corporate-speak take over.  Be real.
• Over time, engage in full.  Your employees speak for you, so do your customers. You initiate conversations, invite feedback and give something back to those individuals who care enough to engage with you.  Build relationships.
• Over time, build this process into your standards and culture.

It’s your community, and it’s already there. It’s up to you to join in.

UPDATE:  Here’s a nice summary from the LA Times, incorporating some other incidents (Amazon, CNN, Dominos) and describing the need for rapid response.

Hard to miss all the chatter about the pending demise of newspapers and the first to fall — Rocky Mountain News, then Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Next …?

It’s true that we are in the midst of a social transformation, driven by: the availability of information on the Internet at all times; the declining relevance of newsprint; Web 2.0 technology and new social media;  an embrace of open-source culture and mass collaboration, democracy in action, citizen journalism, the rise of blogging — add your drivers here.

These changes touch newspapers, but also are transforming public relations, marketing, branding, broadcast media (television, radio, cable), books and all publishing … maybe all relationships?

Yet most visibly, it’s the newspaper industry that’s struggling to maintain relevance.  It is time for reinvention — a news organization rather than a newsPAPER. I’m not the first with this, although I started thinking about and working on online, interactive, two-way, participatory journalism in the early 1990s. See the brilliant commentary by Tom Foremski’s Silicon Valley Watch “25 ideas: creating an open-source business model for newspapers.”

I think he’s 100 percent on target, and he hit some of my favorite hot buttons, too. News organizations have got to understand their communities, and that means being part of the community — not above it.  News organizations should be the valued, trusted source of information in their communities — deep in the neighborhoods, visible, authentic and real people, not some institution with blurry or dueling motivations.

It won’t be easy to drive change; critics are quick to bemoan the rise of “amateurs” and the lowering standards of reporting.  You won’t need proof beyond David Simon’s dead-on commentary — even news organizations and journalists aren’t as skilled / knowledgeable /aggressive as they should be.  But that doesn’t mean that a concerted transformational effort isn’t worth a shot. Let’s welcome disparate voices from all corners of the community and rather than bemoan the lower standards that “citizen journalism” implies, let’s teach the principles of the trade.

Maybe there are new ways to help “grow” the next generation of journalists … I’m thinking of organizations like the ACLU, grassroots activists, watchdogs, the schools. I love the example here from Jeff Jarvis — let the Journalism schools lead the change to drive collaboration as the valued skillset, instead of the institutional arrogance that I witnessed in J school.

Start with deep local news. Recruit the people who care about the topic, whatever it is.  Help train the next generation of newshounds — and recognize that they (we?) might well be pre-teens, retirees or the out-of-work population.

Count me in. Again.

Update:

Can’t help but add this insightful compilation on the topic, from PressThink by Jay Rosen at NYU. He’s helpfully pulled together a dozen of the best commentaries on the state of the newspaper industry: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News