In my teaching, I have often emphasized the need for businesses to use social media to humanize and build an emotional connection with their customers. This is extremely critical for small businesses that don’t have a lot of money for expensive promotions. Of course, when using social media, promotions are generally not as successful as emotional engagement but some businesses that have money prefer promotions to building emotional engagement.

The importance of emotional engagement was reinforced by a recent Harvard Business Review article. The author of the article, who is the CEO of Rakuten, the world’s 3rd largest e-commerce site after Amazon and eBay, describes how he established the site in the late 1990s to enable small businesses to set up small stores — something that Amazon has popularized more recently. What is unique about the sellers on Rakuten is that they try to set up a boutique or a small store feeling. The sellers become curators of the merchandise that they sell and interact personally with their customers. Instead of turning to their family and friends for recommendations, customers at Rakuten turn to the store owners for recommendations because they become like friends to them. Merchants who tell personal stories and make connections with customers do very well.

The author tells the story of a farmer who wanted to sell eggs on the site. The author was not convinced that selling eggs on the site was a good idea, given that one could buy eggs easily at the supermarket. The farmer thought otherwise, because his eggs were organic and were from chickens that were fed a special diet. Additionally, since he planned to ship the eggs overnight, they would be fresher than the supermarket eggs, which were at least a week old. After he set up his store on Rakuten, he started a daily chick diary to let his customers know the status of his birds. He devised a toothpick test to check the quality of his eggs — if the toothpick held firm when stuck into the yolk of an egg from a new batch, it showed that the eggs in that batch were of superior quality — and posted photos of the test. He told interesting stories that encouraged people to try his eggs. Though he sold his eggs at a premium, once people tried his eggs, they continued to buy from him.

Conversations and stories, it seems, are the way to engage customers emotionally. Social media, by itself, will not engage your customers. But it affords you the opportunities to have conversations and tell stories.