This is an interesting point for entrepreneurs to consider, because for most of us, we are inclined to believe that asking a question about a customer’s behavior is going to give us meaningful information. To be sure, asking is often far easier and more affordable than watching — especially if we do not get the opportunity to sit in the same room with our customers and observe their behavior.

However, one need only look to several popular industries to be reminded that what people say they do and what people actually do are two different things: diet programs, organizing systems, time management programs, etc. are all large industries based on the fact that what the habits people want to have for themselves are different from the ones they actually have.

In brick and mortar businesses, many of these types of things can be readily witnessed simply by re-arranging physical space: move products around, change the layout of the menu, change the items closest to the cash register or watch how customers interact with your environment. This can be extremely telling, and a good way to know if your customers are likely to grab that Snickers bar as they stand in line to check out, or if they are more likely to order off the Specials Menu if it’s a separate menu than if it’s attached to the regular one.

But what about online businesses? Believe it or not, in the world of online analytics this may be even easier — assuming you know how to set up proper testing, and how to track the results.

A/B testing is a common method used for seeing what really grabs your customers and what doesn’t. The idea behind A/B testing is very scientific: take two virtually identical pieces of content, and then change a single element to differentiate one from the other. Whether it’s the subject line, the color scheme, the main graphic, an advertisement or the font size, this method is a common one to use on landing pages, email campaigns and other published online content. Monitoring the results is a great way to test what your customers are responding to. (Subject lines and graphics are often big factors, by the way.)

The trick to doing A/B testing, however, is being able to track the results. You can start with a free package, such as Google Analytics. You can quickly and easily set up your testing to show you how one option fared versus the other. (If you want to attempt A/B testing for email campaigns, all standard email campaign applications, including WorkingPoint’s partner, VerticalResponse, offer analytics to help you do the same thing.)

I do not entirely agree with the authors that asking your users a question is of no value at all, though. While I can concede their point when it comes to collecting very specific feedback about an individual product, the fact is that most small businesses and entrepreneurs will often find a great deal of value in asking open-ended questions of their customers as a first step.

One of the biggest perils that an entrepreneur can face is the assumption that he knows what his customers really want. While a good entrepreneur may have an idea, the only way to start planning how to iterate on your offering is to start by asking questions. Open-ended questions and on-going feedback are important to understand how to proceed next. I often recommend this to clients, before they start getting more scientific about monitoring results. Otherwise, how do they know what to test for?

Of course, there is another really important reason to start by asking your customers and creating a two-way conversation with them: it shows them that you care. And while that may not be the highest priority for large enterprises, that is a must for any small business to thrive.

How We Say What We Say

One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on the language we use. As with all emerging technologies, the language is new and it’s not compatible with standard, well-worn executive jargon — worse yet, it has the unfortunate tendency to be too “cutsie” to be taken seriously by business leaders.

In order to get past the knee-jerk language reactions, stop using tech-speak and start using business-speak. The business already has a language, so use it. Evangelists can’t expect that the population at large is going to adopt a new language for a technology for which they are not yet onboard. Technologists and evangelists need to remember to speak the language of business.

The value of using the business’ language is clear in everything from initiating change, to clarifying the value of social media, to measuring the impact. In and among all of the ROI debate on social media one key is often over-looked: businesses already measure their efforts. For social media to be understandable to that business, it needs to be measured using metrics those executives already understand, expect and are comfortable with.

The Push-Pull Between Entrepreneurism and Process

As companies grow, entrepreneurism gives way to process until people can sleep walk through their day. Unthinking action is unthinking business. If your business is being run by unthinking people, then your business isn’t innovating.

Innovation is key. Even more importantly, innovation is different. Improving on a competitor’s product is not innovation. To truly innovate you must create something new, you must do it first, and you must own the market space.

Innovation Is Not Just for Products

In order to have innovative products, organization’s can’t fall into the trap of doing things the way they have always done. Instead of highly-connected leaders, most organizations have a collection of independently run fiefdoms. Lawrence calls these “Un-Knights at the Round Table.” In order to have the internal organization necessary to support true innovation, internal silos must be broken down, and all players must re-engage with each other.

One example Lawrence gives of how internal organizational patterns can benefit from social media is in its ability to “shorten the ramp.” Getting new employees up to speed quickly on new roles, projects or teams can be radically improved in organizations that leverage social media. Instead of having to spend six months learning who’s who and where to find what, an organization with an internal social media eco-system (facilitated by robust search capabilities) can provide opportunities to catch up quickly and start contributing to the team’s value much faster than traditional on-boarding processes facilitate.

In Conclusion

Social media has transformative capabilities, but the true transformation is in the people using technology to facilitate change, not in the technology itself. Like so many other lessons learned in social media: no matter how sexy the technology may be, business transformation is driven by people.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices can really set the stage for the directions we take in life. As is often the case, many of the largest influences on our lives are not obvious until many years later. And while I am as likely as anyone to take them for granted, every once in a while something will happen to make me stop and consider the series of events that brought me to where I am now, and what the unintended consquences of seemingly small actions or events have ultimately provided.

There were three defining elements of my early career that I have been noodling on, because they had much larger impacts on me than I ever would have predicted at the time:

• Getting your start in a startup. What is the value to launching a career in a startup environment?
• Being in the ‘wild west’ of a new market space. What does it mean to be in a new space?
• Transforming a company from being “a services company” to “a product company.” What are the differences and why are they important?

Undoubtedly, the first two of those are a bit sexier than the third. However, all three ultimately shaped me in ways I never fully realized at the time. The lessons learned were a bit rough sometimes, but when I compare some of my experience to that of my peers, I realize that I had the opportunity to be involved in some things that have served me extremely well and that I wouldn’t trade in for anything.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll cover each of these topics in a separate post (each one is too long to combine them).