 Hi, this is Gerhard Leonhard, media futurist in Basel, Switzerland. Welcome to another edition of Gertube. Today I want to talk about the future of selling. I get a lot of requests for this topic because obviously e-commerce and retailing is becoming a really prominent thing on the internet, especially in developing countries, but on a global level. And something that's been happening for the last, you know, five years is that lots of people are getting into this context of what's called social shopping or social commerce, which basically means that most brands are really good at engaging with people. If you're looking, for example, at eBay or Audi, the car company, or Zappos or Amazon or of course Apple, which is a certain kind of engagement that's quite different. It turns out that actually people like to interact with other people and with brands before they buy. And this is really not new, word of mouth has always been a big selling factor. But on the internet it's becoming really apparent that many brands don't sell anything until there's a conversation about the product. I mean, if you go to Twitter, Twitter.com, all you have to do is go to search.twitter.com, put in the name of your brand. If you're, for example, a train line in the UK or if you're Sony Music or wherever you are, if you're offering something, you will find people talking about what you do and whether they like it or not, live in real time on Twitter. I mean, now you have this huge business called social monitoring where you have these dashboards that count how many people talk about your brand and what the conversation is, right? Conversation-based marketing. So people are really interested, for example, airlines are monitoring all of the conversation on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube about the brand. So if you write a tweet or you put up a post that says, you know, I really didn't like the boarding process of EasyJet, then they will see it and they monitor it and they will try to have a conversation with you. Dell computers, for example, got out of the Dell hell whole, you know, years ago because they took the conversation inside. Very important point, interaction before transaction. As you can see on this slide, quite clearly now it's much more important for brands, most brands, maybe not so much in the B2B space yet but sooner or later there as well, to have a fan before you have a customer. So what we have to remember is that we probably won't have customers without having fans and Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg there. Because basically what that means is that people don't pay attention to us, they won't buy from us. All you have to do is look at the car companies, Audi, Mercedes, BMW and many other brands, I think Audi is the most forward on this one. But Audi has lots and lots of ways of downloading apps, for example, about test driving the new A1. And that means when I download this app, it's of course a free app. I engage, I take a look at the car, I go inside of the car, I actually try it and that gets me engaged and then I post a comment and somebody from Audi can come back to me and start a conversation. You can go to Audi.com and you can customize, I think you can do that on every car website now, completely customize your car. You can make it pink with blue bubbles on the bumper and you can change the engine, you can do all these things. And then Mercedes has a community of over 1 million people who are developing new components for the car, interacting with Mercedes themselves. So interaction clearly comes before transaction. As you can see on this slide, which I borrowed from the TBWA from SlideShare, is that the consumer is no longer just this dumb person sitting on a couch buying stuff or clicking or going to the shop. Now the consumer has like five pieces. We have consumers, we have producers, we have participants, we have multipliers and we have communities. And the consumer fits in all these different levels at different times. So when I buy a book, I'm a producer, of course I make books. But I'm also a community member, I'm talking about books on Amazon. And that's the reason why I buy them. So if you're selling stuff online, whether it's electronic parts or cars or books or music, you have to look at the fact that interaction now comes before transaction. Amazon is the best example. Amazon is always my favorite example for some reason or the other, they do a lot of really great stuff. But the official mantra of Amazon is simple. It says nurture extreme customer satisfaction. They want every customer to be extremely satisfied. And if you're not, you can give it back and they will jump through hoops. This is why they bought Zappos, the most customer friendly company in the world, years ago in the US. And Amazon is doing a great job, for example, now, as you can see on this slide, giving every single premium customer access to 5,000 free movies. Unfortunately, we can't get it over here in Europe because the movie companies have not licensed all the good stuff like they have in the US. Same goes for Netflix, kind of a pain but different topic. So the topic here is, again, going back to the idea of transactions coming out of interactions. That's what Amazon has learned and see how successful Amazon is selling all kinds of things, not just books. In fact, I think 40% of the revenue of Amazon does not come from retailing books, but from other things like the cloud services and so on. So that shows us that interaction comes before transaction and we have to consider this in the future. And there may be many aberrations, as you can see in the global village. As you can see on this slide, people are having scales that Twitter your weight and all these kind of things. So we have aberrations in this interaction. We have chaos, we have noise. We have all these things that we sometimes don't like. But that's what it comes down to. If you're a marketer, think engagement, think interaction, and then think transaction. Don't think selling, and then engaging. It's the wrong way around. Thanks very much for listening. Go to mediafuturists.com to see more of what I do. And twitter.com is actually Leonhardt. And all over the web, you can find me, just Google Gird Leonhardt. Thanks very much for listening. Bye.