Sharing Your Process With Customers Is Your Product
Process Is Product
In 2009 I wrote:
An eye of our collective Digital Marketing Storm settled briefly today. It is the day before Thanksgiving. Our web site is speeding up even as staff and friends hit the road. During a mid afternoon lull a thought settled in too. Process is product I thought.
What does that mean? What are you doing right now? Whatever you are doing, no matter how seemingly insubstantial, your actions are product. Pema Chodron in her book The Wisdom of No Escape explains we are complete just as we are. Think of this idea and apply it to work. Work is a series of tasks leading to some polished result. Polishing is product too. Expose what you do every minute no matter how unpolished because process is product.
Exposing process increases transparency. People know you warts and all. Confidence required to expose warts helps customers see companies as humans – people not machines. Lifting the curtain allows customers into the back room. They see how tricks are done and so don’t see them as tricks. They understand you and your company are honest and hard working.
Yeah, not so much as it turns out. We’ve tried to share as much process as possible creating CrowdFunde. Turns out you can’t create and share simultaneously. Creating and sharing requires two teams. Either idea, creating or sharing, is a full time job. Our staff is small. Allocating time to share process slows creation and vice versa. Process is difficult to turn into product.
Process Is Social
We’ve had more success sharing process on social media. Twitter (@CrowdFunde) is great for what is happening now. G+ is great for conversations and YouTube works great with video. Video is our biggest surprise. Video is easier to create than written content. Sharing process forms an easy script. The challenge with video content is talking heads and white boards become boring fast.
You can have a fascinating breakthrough meeting and the video retelling that meeting is flat and boring. Blogging supported by social media is our best “process is product” channel. Blogging doesn’t require much time, can be well supported by videos (they are easy to embed) and blogging forms a hub for social media. One mistake we would fix faster is create a dedicated YouTube channel early. YouTube doesn’t have a way to copy video shared on one channel to another so create your new YoutTube channel early.
Out most successful video was interviewing Heather King from Vestique women’s clothing, one of CrowdFunde’s beta partners:
When creating something DO share as much as you can. The more you realize the promise of my 2009 “Process Is Product” Scenttrail Marketing post. The more tribe you build the faster the better. Realize that, unless you dedicate a team to talking about what you creating as you create it, process is product will be difficult.
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