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Some might say we’re a self-centered lot, trying to carve ourselves a slice of old-school Atari Labs heaven.

Naturally, we care about us, as Maslow indicates you’ve got to take care of yourself first, but we also care a lot about Them. In fact, one of my main concerns at Go flight! is making sure things are good for Them.

The Mysterious Them

Some call them users, customers, clients, guests, visitors, eye-balls, click-throughs, hapless suckers, or droplets in the market share bucket – but all these conceptions leave something to be desired, either because they are needlessly distant, too focused on the monetary exchange portion of the relationship, exploitative, disingenuous, or just plain mean.

All of them are off the mark if you want to feel good about what you do and you want Them to feel good about how you do it. Ask yourself this question, do you want to be called any of these labels at any web site, box store, or popsicle stand you visit? We all tolerate them, but to me they always come off sounding funny. We’re doing this for the customers, visitors, or eye-balls doesn’t sound very inspiring either.

A World Without Pop-ups

All good sales folks know you’re continually cultivating a friendship with the people you want to do business with and all the people who help you in that process. It’s no different for anyone else in an organization.

In a world of friends and neighbors the pop-up ad doesn’t happen. It’s quickly shunned out of existence by the community. In a world of users, the pop-up ad exists because the offending party doesn’t know the person directly – you would not likely force a pop-up on someone you know. The majority of us like the people we deal with closely – at least enough to pass the pop-up test.

Hopping Off the Train and onto the Couch

The Clue Train Manifesto evolved this idea, their 95 theses are a good place to start, but they don’t go far enough. [For those not familiar with the Cluetrain, Incisive.nu has a good analysis of its lasting value as well as its follies]

The point is anyone who gives money, time, or positive attention to your business is your friend. Treat them as such.

Why? Because the Internet puts everyone on your block. It is your neighborhood. Anyone can say anything to everyone – and people love to talk about bad experiences they’ve had.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t do business on the web or even have a website. It’s a small planet; so it goes.

Grandpa Moses

Everything you do in your business should cultivate friendship, even with people you don’t think would use your service (more on that in another post).

For example, in building a service (which consists of many hardware and software components), we at Go Flight! are imagining how the real people we know will interact with us and the service. There are no “users” to be seen.

The question is always “would Grandpa Moses get it?” Grandpa Moses is there in the documentation.

Furthermore, you have to hang out with your friends to know what matters to them, to know how to speak to them.

You can call it market research, but it’s much closer to shooting the breeze on the couch.

A User by Any Other Name

Does it really matter what we call them? User is an expedient term, we’re all aware, at least peripherally, a real person lies under those four little letters.

However, I would guess when you think about your mom, sister in second grade, boyfriend, best friend, elderly next door neighbor, or dentist trying to use the voice mail on a cell phone you get a very different set of pictures in your mind than when asked to imagine a “user.” I’ve never seen a user, have you?

Things go mysteriously smooth when thinking about users (or customers, visitors, etc), but the gloriously complex mess, and the fun, is only revealed when real people come into play.

If it works for your friends and neighbors, it has the approval of actual, and not merely theoretical, people. But this goes well beyond just imaging them.

In coming posts, we’ll discuss how to make friends not customers, deal with bad friends, and where to put all the sterile vocabulary we’ve inherited from an unimaginative bunch. It’s really not just business.