Book summary “Likeable social media”: summary

Introduction

To succeed in social media and business, you must listen, be transparent, respond quickly, and act likeable rather than broadcasting self-absorbed advertisements.

Traditional mass media is broken. You face a world where consumers ignore traditional advertising and trust peer recommendations instead. Social networks have fundamentally transformed how people communicate, share, and make purchasing decisions. Every day, millions of people express preferences through simple actions like clicking the Like button on Facebook. You can think of social media as the world's largest cocktail party. At this party, shouting about how great your products are will quickly drive people away. Instead, you must act like a good guest by listening, telling interesting stories, and building genuine relationships.

Dave Kerpen demonstrates how you can harness social media to grow your business by applying basic principles of human psychology and likeability. This book provides a complete roadmap for navigating digital platforms effectively. You will learn how to shift from self-promotion to authentic engagement.

• How do you listen to what customers say about you online?
• What strategies help you find and target the right audience?
• How can you handle complaints and admit mistakes without losing face?
• What steps make buying easy for your social media followers?

1. Listen First, and Never Stop Listening

Effective communication requires fifty percent listening, and social media provides the first scalable platform to monitor customer chatter and uncover sales leads.

Effective communication requires fifty percent listening and fifty percent talking, and social media provides the first platform for listening at scale. Companies have historically spent disproportionate marketing budgets on broadcasting messages rather than listening. Social media serves as an engagement media and listening network that grants a front row seat to spontaneous customer chatter, competitor mentions, and prospect needs.

A car insurance customer facing a 700 dollar out-of-pocket car repair cost experiences a 30 minute hold time on the phone. Frustrated by a denied claim, they vent on Twitter and receive a prompt public response from the company, immediately easing their frustration.

Listening Versus Monitoring

Listening is a positive human process that builds relationships, whereas monitoring feels impersonal and surveillance-oriented. Monitoring carries a creepy connotation akin to the FBI, surveillance cameras, or tracking a medical cough. Listening is a natural human engagement process that makes individuals feel heard and valued.

Tools for Social Listening

Organizations can utilize a variety of free search tools and advanced enterprise listening software to track conversations across the social web. Beginners can leverage free search functions and alert tools to track keywords, brand names, competitor names, and customer intent phrases. Advanced brands use paid enterprise systems to systematically gather sentiment and routing data across all user-generated content. Social listening operates as a focus group tool 24/7/365.

Real estate brokers search for phrases like wanting to buy a house instead of just their agency name to locate active prospects.

• Use Google Alerts
• Use Technorati blog search
• Use Twitter search
• Use Facebook search
• Use YouTube search
• Use TweetBeep

Enterprise and Regulated Listening

Because prescription and skincare brands like Neutrogena skinID must have licensed experts answer medical questions, direct engagement is legally restricted. However, dedicated teams can monitor thousands of comments, bring customer sentiment to brand teams, and publicly acknowledge users to strengthen relationships through Neutrogena Dermatologics.

Large enterprises can uncover millions of dollars in sales opportunities by deploying volunteer seekers to listen for buying signals on social media. IBM runs a formal initiative called Listening for Leads where voluntary seekers monitor social platforms for purchase intent phrases such as server replacements or storage inquiries. These leads are verified by telephone sales reps and passed to appropriate sales teams to close business.

Marketers must actively search for potential customer phrases, inventory brand and competitor mentions, and formulate a formal or informal listening routine to capture actionable insights from the social web.

• Write down a list of 5 phrases people might use that would identify themselves as potential customers of yours
• Conduct Twitter and Facebook searches for each of these phrases
• Conduct Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube searches for your brand, competitors, products, and services
• Take inventory of what people are saying
• Develop a plan and system to formally or informally listen on a regular basis throughout the social Web, and determine ways your organization can benefit from the insight and knowledge gained by listening

2. Define Your Target Audience and Think Like a Consumer

You must move beyond broad demographics to hypertarget specific segments and create valuable content that consumers actually want to receive.

Dave Kerpen defines hypertargeting as gearing marketing efforts toward specific groups using social media profiles and networks. Nanotargeting narrows search criteria down to an individual or a tiny segment. Instead of relying on sweeping demographic buckets like women aged 25 to 54, advertisers can leverage detailed profile data such as exact age, location, job title, employer, and personal interests to connect directly with true decision-makers or niche prospects. Platforms host immense pools of users, including 1 billion registered Facebook users, 160 million professionals and business users on LinkedIn, over 200 million daily tweets on Twitter, and 40 million US Facebook users over age 60.

The author tested Facebook advertising by creating a nanotargeted ad with an audience of one: his wife Carrie, a 31-year-old married employee of Likeable Media in New York City, reading "I love you and miss you Carrie." She responded by taking out a matching ad targeting him.

• Write down a detailed description of your perfect target audience including age, gender, relationship status, location, interests, job title, and workplace.
• Dive into the Facebook advertising platform to determine how many people fit your written criteria.
• Search LinkedIn by job title or industry for B2B prospects, and search Twitter and Facebook for people talking about relevant topics.
• Identify and cut back on marketing budget items that spend too much money targeting too wide an audience.

Twitter enables intent-based targeting by allowing companies to search for users who are actively expressing a need for a specific product or service. An entertainment law firm searching Twitter for the keywords "need entertainment lawyer" found three people who had actively asked for an entertainment lawyer within the last 18 hours.

• Go to Search.Twitter.com.
• Type "need [your product, service, or category]" or "I want [something you have]" in the search bar to find users actively asking for your offerings.

Narrow social media targeting helps specialized organizations connect directly with afflicted communities without wasting funds on mass media advertising. Likeable Media helped the Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centers target Facebook users listing fibromyalgia as an interest and monitored Twitter for phrases like "tired all of the time" and "chronic fatigue". They established a Facebook community called "Fibro 360" instead of linking ads to a commercial website, resulting in tens of thousands of members and a greater than 20 percent sales lift across 12 physical locations of Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centers.

• Identify specific medical or niche conditions or interest keywords your target audience uses in profiles.
• Establish a dedicated, supportive community group on social media rather than immediately pushing commercial sales links.
• Monitor social platforms for chronic pain or problem-related keywords to engage users organically.

Think Like Your Consumer

Traditional advertising methods such as direct mail, magazine ads, cold-calling, and TV commercials interrupt consumers and generate annoyance. Marketers must evaluate every message by asking if the recipient will find it truly valuable or if they would want to receive it themselves as a consumer.

• Ask whether recipients of a message will truly find it of value or if they will find it annoying and disruptive.
• Ask if you would want to receive the message yourself as a consumer.
• Write down what your typical customer likes, focusing on general interests rather than your company or products.
• Write 10 examples of likeable content.
• Rewrite past written marketing materials to be short, sweet, and valuable to the audience.

The Top News feed filters out unwanted noise using an algorithm with three primary edges: how recently the content was posted, whether the user interacts with the page often, and how many comments and likes the post generates. Global sneaker brand Conglomerate A with 1 million fans shared a traditional marketing message telling fans to buy new running shoes on their website, receiving few likes and limited visibility. A smaller competitor with 5,000 fans posted an engaging question asking if users were excited for the weekend and who was going running, generating enough comments and likes to stay at the top of feeds for a day and drive higher sales.

• Determine when your specific audience is most likely to be logged onto Facebook based on their daily schedules.
• Post content during high-engagement windows, noting that weekends often yield high user presence with fewer competing companies.
• Focus heavily on generating comments and likes to maximize algorithmic visibility.

When companies focus entirely on brand features and corporate announcements, consumers ignore them. The Pampered Chef shared recipes, recipe contests, and photo requests rather than brand promotions, gaining over 100,000 likes in the first two months without paid advertising. Omaha Steaks, a family-owned company for more than 90 years with over 80 retail locations, posted about golf, football, old movies, and sixties music alongside a Table Talk feature, resulting in higher annual purchases per customer than ever before.

• Create a daily content calendar centered on consumer interests, questions, and discussions rather than corporate press releases or earnings statements.

3. Invite Fans, Engage in True Dialogue, and Handle Complaints

Growing your fan base and engaging in two-way conversations builds resilient communities, while quick public responses to complaints prevent PR disasters.

Inviting Your First Fans

Getting a user to like a page is more valuable than driving a direct link click because it establishes a permanent communication channel and endorses the brand to all of the user's friends. A Facebook like subscribes the user to ongoing updates and exposes the brand to the user's personal network, which averages 130 friends on average per person on Facebook. Furthermore, likes create lasting search optimization effects, showing personal endorsements to friends when they perform future searches, at a time when one-quarter of all Internet page views were on Facebook.com as of November 2010.

The Text to Like mobile feature allows physical locations, retailers, and restaurants to easily convert offline customers into online social fans. Dr. Edward Zuckerberg placed signs in his dental waiting room and e-mail reminders instructing patients to text like PainlessDrZ to 32665, helping grow his fan base past 50,000 people and bringing in new patients using the 32665 FBOOK text shortcode. Uno Chicago Grill sent a dedicated email offering a free appetizer to all fans once the page hit 100,000 likes from a starting base of 30,000 fans. The restaurant gained over 10,000 new fans within 24 hours and reached its 100,000 fan goal in three months, with customers staying for dinner and dessert to drive a massive sales lift.

• Develop a clear value proposition detailing what benefit customers, staff, vendors, and partners receive from becoming fans.
• Integrate calls to action to like your page across websites, e-mails, employee signatures, business cards, brochures, receipts, snail mail, phone calls, packaging, and in-store signage.
• Instruct users to text like [page name] to FBOOK (32665) from a mobile phone connected to their Facebook account.
• Post signage near cash registers or waiting rooms offering incentives like discounts in exchange for texting to like your store.
• Craft a dedicated email campaign announcing a specific milestone reward or free gift for all fans once a target fan count is reached.
• Create a 15-second elevator pitch explaining why customers should like and follow your social channels.

Creating True Dialogue

Companies must move away from outdated one-way broadcasting models and instead foster genuine two-way dialogues with and between their consumers.

Just as a small discussion workshop engages students far more than a large lecture hall where a professor simply talks at the audience, social media requires companies to listen, respond, and facilitate community conversations rather than trying to dictate the message. Building an authentic and engaged brand community on social media enables customers to help each other and defend the brand during crises. Stride Rite built a Facebook community around babies and moms rather than just shoes, growing to over 80,000 fans joined the Stride Rite community on Facebook at Facebook.com/striderite where moms answer each other's parenting questions and drive steady online sales.

Failing to engage customers and address complaints publicly on social media can lead to catastrophic viral PR disasters and financial losses. Country singer Dave Carroll had his guitar broken on a United Airlines flight and was refused compensation, so he posted the United Breaks Guitars YouTube video that gained 100,000 views on YouTube after one day for the United Breaks Guitars video and 1 million views within four days. United Airlines stock price fell 10 percent, costing stockholders about $180 million in value, with 12 million views on YouTube after two years. The New York City Department of Health used a Facebook page for its Quit Smoking program to provide daily content and build an engaged community, resulting in increased phone calls to 311 and an accidental online support group where New Yorkers helped each other quit smoking, while 311 is the number New Yorkers call to access nonemergency government services and request free nicotine patches.

• Determine what resources you have to put toward a social media program for authentic engagement.
• Hire an online community manager if you do not yet have one to build and grow the community.
• Write a list of five ways that your communications could be more engaging and less like a college lecture.

Responding to Bad and Good Comments

Companies must adhere to the Do-Not-Delete rule, never removing negative comments unless they are profane, obscene, bigoted, or contain private information. Deleting a customer's complaint acts as digital censorship, infuriating the consumer and often provoking them to launch retaliatory campaigns, viral videos, or boycott groups that cause far more reputational damage than the original comment. The optimal response to online complaints is a prompt public acknowledgment followed immediately by taking the detailed resolution to a private channel. Verizon FiOS converted an angry customer named Ray Umstot-Einolf, who posted a furious complaint about billing errors and threats of a lawsuit, into a raving fan after a team member responded publicly, moved the issue to private channels, and had a regional manager correct the bill within days, following a rule of thumb of 24 hours or sooner for responding to negative comments and 72 hours as the target window for following up with a private message resolution.

During peak holiday rushes like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, 1-800-Flowers.com staffed its Facebook community 24/7 with a commitment to reply within an hour and over-deliver with larger bouquets than ordered, successfully protecting public brand reputation and turning complaints into positive follow-up posts through 24/7 staffing for key holidays by 1-800-Flowers.com and a 1 hour commitment to respond publicly to any complaint during peak periods. Sage North America noticed a tweet from a student named Andrew, sent him a goodie bag for finals, flew him to an internal meeting, and eventually hired him as a summer intern, demonstrating how a simple social acknowledgment can evolve into a deep relationship, keeping in mind that 130 friends is the average number for a person on Facebook and 120 followers is the average number for a person on Twitter.

• Determine how you will allocate resources to respond to negative comments posted on social networks.
• Develop a plan to respond swiftly and publicly using customer-friendly language approved by lawyers.
• Make sure you have enough resources to manage and actually fix negative complaints efficiently.
• Write a list of five ways you can respond to negative situations positively and use surprise and delight.
• Create a social brand bible for response determining whether your brand voice should be fun, serious, personal, or professional.
• Determine necessary resources to respond to every customer comment or question on social networks.
• Determine formal or informal ways to reward loyal and influential customers to accelerate positive word of mouth.

4. Be Authentic, Honest, Transparent, and Ask Questions

You must operate like an improv show rather than a scripted musical, maintain radical honesty, and ask questions to spark engagement.

Traditional advertising operates like a loud, expensive musical with a fixed script designed to dazzle passively. In contrast, social networks require a two-way conversation where you listen to consumer ideas and go with the flow.

Authenticity and Improv

You rely on individual human authenticity rather than corporate scripts. To maintain absolute authenticity with a specific demographic, you must occasionally surrender complete control over messaging and let peers speak to peers.

The Boston Public Health Commission wanted to prevent youth violence through a project called B1Example. Recognizing that urban teenagers would never trust a government official or a traditional marketing agency, they recruited and trained ten Boston teenagers to independently run the project channels.

The B1Example project used ten Boston teenagers to run social media channels, generating thousands of interactions without filtering grammar, proving the power of peer authenticity. You can also humanize your brand by sharing short, unscripted behind-the-scenes videos.

• Take an iPhone to a new department, staff person, vendor, or executive once a month.
• Ask them a few questions on camera about themselves and their roles at the company.
• Keep the video between sixty to ninety seconds long.

Honesty, Transparency, and Asking Questions

Word of mouth marketing and social media engagement must strictly adhere to honesty and transparency standards to protect brand trust. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association established an ethics code centered on three forms of honesty: honesty of relationship by stating who you speak for, honesty of opinion by sharing true beliefs without shilling, and honesty of identity without falsification.

Elected officials and public figures can build massive engagement and trust by directly interacting with constituents and listening via social media. Cory Booker set a high standard for politicians by personally managing his social media accounts, connecting openly with constituents, and empowering local agencies to use social tools transparently.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker responded to a resident's New Year's Eve tweet about her snowed-in father by personally showing up at the house an hour later with salt, shovels, and volunteers. Booker reached 1 million followers on his Twitter account, while Newark schools received a 100 million dollar private financial gift from Mark Zuckerberg.

Unlike traditional advertising where space is limited and brands must tell people what to think, social media offers unlimited space to ask questions. Question-based posts outperformed informational posts by up to 6 times in engagement, while posts asking fans to like an update achieved a 5.5 times engagement multiplier. On one tested page, a specific like-this update reached 26.6 times the engagement rate of informational posts.

Vitamin Water crowdsourced a new flavor and packaging design through social media questions, resulting in over 100,000 participating consumers and a year-to-year sales increase of more than 10 percent. A user earned a 5,000 dollar prize by submitting packaging designs. You can use table talk questions to act as living focus groups:

• What would you like to see more of in this community?
• Who are you inspired by most?
• Where is the most interesting place you've used our product?
• When did you first use our service?
• Why do you like this page?

5. Provide Free Value and Share Stories

Acting as a publisher of free expert content and sharing authentic stories creates emotional connections and drives inbound business.

Providing Free Value

You can build long-term trust and inbound sales by sharing valuable content for free online. Every organization can act as a publisher by sharing in-house or curated articles, videos, and useful information. You are no longer limited to expensive PR pitches.

Essential Design and Real Estate shares news and legal updates relevant to high-net-worth New York homeowners. This strategy generates millions of dollars in business from a handful of prospects who appreciate the information.

You can also use short videos to showcase your personality. Blendtec created humorous YouTube videos asking "Will it blend?" featuring items like iPhones and golf clubs. This approach led to one of the most popular corporate channels and many sales.

To implement this approach, you should follow these practices:

• Brainstorm and write down all the ways to provide value to your target audience without focusing on selling.
• Write down the format or formats your organization is most capable of using, such as blog articles, videos, games, or curated content.
• Create content and test it with a friend or two to ensure it is seen as pure value rather than an advertisement.
• Determine whether your organization fits a Groupon-like model of deep discounting for increased sales volume.
• Use an inexpensive camera rather than wasting money on expensive equipment.
• Keep it short and sweet, with online attention spans no longer than two minutes.
• Share the videos everywhere on YouTube, Facebook, and distribution platforms like TubeMogul.
• Have fun with it so the positive mood shows in the final product.

Sharing and Inspiring Stories

Sharing authentic stories about your origins and staff humanizes your brand. Matthew Weiss, founder of traffic-ticket-fighting law firm 888 RED LIGHT, shared entertaining client stories on his blog. He attributed this practice to a 22 percent increase in year-to-year business.

You can also inspire customers to share their own stories. Epic Change launched TweetsGiving, a 48-hour social media fundraiser. Thousands of participants shared stories of gratitude and donated money to support Mama Lucy's school in Tanzania.

Fiskars identified crafters as their most passionate users. The brand created the Fiskateers community in 2005 to bring enthusiasts together to share their passion.

You should plan your storytelling efforts using these practices:

• Write down your company's founding story and package it for easy consumption on social networks.
• Research other organizational stories of customer experiences, unique staff members, and community involvement.
• Determine how you will best share your stories using a blog, online video, or specific social networks.
• Decide how you can create new stories through charitable partnerships or promotions.
• Define your wow factor or build talk-able features into your products, services, or processes.
• Define your most passionate subset of customers, identify their social networks, and give them tools to share.
• Determine what incentives, recognition, rewards, or contests might accelerate word of mouth.

6. Integrate Across Departments, Use Ads, and Admit Mistakes

Social media must span all customer-facing roles, utilize targeted social network ads to start permanent conversations, and handle mistakes with humble apologies.

Departmental Integration and Ads

Customers do not care about internal job titles and want comprehensive support. Every department from advertising and customer service to research, sales, and IT must understand basic social media principles.

Dave Kerpen and ten colleagues visited a Macy's counter for a Marc Jacobs foursquare promotion, but the staff knew nothing about it, resulting in a frustrating experience due to poor internal communication.

You must embed social media across your entire business:

• Include social media links and value propositions in all paid linear media.
• Determine, create, execute, and measure promotions on Facebook and other social networks.
• Listen to customer comments on social networks and swiftly respond.
• Encourage customers on traditional channels to share feedback publicly on social networks.
• Ensure signage, receipts, and touch points include interactive opportunities.
• Listen carefully to prospects and major partners online to create value propositions.
• Design new products by listening to customer sentiment and surveying users.
• Serve as online spokespeople for the brand through Twitter, video, and blogs.
• Ensure website social integration, application management, and data security.

Social network ads can be personalized so that prospects see which of their friends already like a page. With an average of 130 friends per user, a page with 100 fans reaches a potential target audience of roughly 13,000 people through Friends of Connections ads. A page with 1,000 fans reaches 130,000 people. Ad platforms also let you use Homepage Engagement Ads.

You can filter your audience using precise criteria:

• Target people by country, state, city, or specific radius.
• Input age and gender demographics.
• Identify people by their interests, hobbies, or job titles.
• Target users on their birthdays.
• Target by relationship status.
• Target users by language.
• Target people by education status or specific company.

Ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter should aim to generate a like or a follower rather than an immediate sale. This pull-marketing model allows you to engage with that consumer for the rest of their lives without additional ad expenses. Likeable Media used Facebook ads starting at $30 per day, targeting specific job titles and building a community that grew the firm into a six-million-dollar business over five years. Across 300 clients, costs per click ranged from $.50 to $3.00.

Crisis Management and Surprise

When a crisis or misstep occurs online, swift and humble apologies using relaxed language humanize the brand and defuse anger. You must eliminate corporate-speak during these moments.

When Loft faced negative backlash on Facebook for showing cargo pants only on a tall thin model, they apologized two days later and posted pictures of real female staff wearing the pants, turning negative feedback into positive media attention. This helped grow their Facebook community to 1.2 million fans. Domino's reached 700,000 views on YouTube with a similar turnaround video.

Prepare your team for potential crises:

• Create a social media crisis plan detailing roles, responsibilities, and public responses.
• Work with legal and corporate communications teams to establish guidelines for using humble personal language.
• Conduct a fire drill or two to test organizational readiness.
• Monitor online conversations closely during weekends and holidays.

Delivering unexpected value helps your brand stand out amidst heavy competition. You can rely on a surprise and delight strategy or a Twelpforce approach to energize your community. Jesse Landry, a Twitter follower Dave Kerpen had never met, offered to overnight his own copy of a book mentioned in a tweet. This action led Kerpen to explore Landry's company for human resources support months later.

Execute your own surprise initiatives effectively:

• Develop a strategy to exceed customer expectations by writing down five ways to surprise consumers.
• Determine a budget for dedicated promotions, contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes.
• Create a social network communications plan that includes unique language to make people smile.

Large organizations deploy these tactics at scale. The New York City Department of Health runs an annual campaign giving away 10 million free condoms. The Cisco Networking Academy fan page, which reached 380,000 fans, is managed in part by customers.

7. Make Buying Easy and Master Core Social Concepts

The most reliable digital sales occur when engagement is high and the buying path is painless.

Social networks are primarily for socializing. Direct selling must be made extremely simple, integrated, and completely frictionless.

Carrie Kerpen bought a scarf from the Limited directly inside her Facebook news feed after seeing it featured on Oprah. She then shared her easy shopping experience with hundreds of friends.

Social Commerce and Inventory

Businesses can leverage specialized third-party applications to launch fully functional e-commerce storefronts directly within their social media pages. Dell sold more than 7 million dollars worth of refurbished computer equipment through its @DellOutlet Twitter account by sharing timed, deeply discounted offers with its 1.5 million followers. JetBlue created @JetBlueCheeps to solve empty seat problems by offering last-minute airfare deals priced from 39 to 89 dollars.

Conducting social commerce successfully requires specific operational steps:

• Conduct an assessment of your current online buying processes for simplicity and ease.
• Research and choose a Facebook sales application to integrate into your page.
• Develop simple mobile applications to drive buying opportunities wherever people find you.
• Utilize applications like 8thBridge, Payvment, Shop Tab, Shoutlet, or Show & Sell to build a storefront on Facebook.
• Build a large enough pool of potentially interested deal seekers.
• Install applications like Wildfire Interactive's Group Buying app on your Facebook page to run group sales directly.
• Write five sample Facebook updates that combine an engaging question or valuable content with an irresistible offer, linking to a website to buy or learn more.

Conclusion and Core Concepts

When navigating the overwhelming landscape of social media tools, you should focus on four foundational concepts. Listening informs all marketing objectives and builds enduring customer loyalty. Embracing radical transparency creates trust when things go wrong.

Apply these four core principles to every campaign:

• Listen to what customers and prospects are saying publicly before and while you communicate.
• Embrace honesty and transparency, especially when mistakes happen.
• Respond to every public comment or query on social networks.
• Share only content and stories that you would personally want to like, comment on, and share.

10 Key Ideas

1. Effective communication requires fifty percent listening, and social media provides the first scalable platform to monitor customer chatter and uncover sales leads.
2. You must move beyond broad demographics to hypertarget specific segments and create valuable content that consumers actually want to receive.
3. Growing your fan base and engaging in true dialogue builds resilient communities, while quick public responses to complaints prevent PR disasters.
4. You must adhere to the Do-Not-Delete rule, never removing negative comments unless they are profane, obscene, bigoted, or contain private information.
5. You must operate like an improv show rather than a scripted musical, maintain radical honesty, and ask questions to spark engagement.
6. Acting as a publisher of free expert content and sharing authentic stories creates emotional connections and drives inbound business.
7. Social media must span all customer-facing roles to ensure comprehensive support and seamless internal communication.
8. Ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter should aim to generate a like or a follower rather than an immediate sale to allow lifelong engagement.
9. When a crisis or misstep occurs online, swift and humble apologies using relaxed language humanize the brand and defuse anger.
10. The most reliable digital sales occur when engagement is high and the buying path is painless.