Sell Your Help, Not Your Business

           The final, and most surprising, piece of information Schaefer conveys to his audience is the idea that businesses should use the internet to sell the help you can provide to a customer, not an actual product. At first glance this may not seem far-fetched. However, Schaefer attests to providing free help and availability in order to make the customer feel welcomed and build a sense of loyalty between each party. By providing free strategies and other helpful information, the customer is provided with a warm, comforting experience that will bring them back for more. The high quality substance of the free help shows the customer that the company is not holding anything back and is not in business just to make money, but to actually help and provide the customer base with as much as they can possibly offer.

           Schaefer uses an example of one of his blog readers, Lisa Reath, and provides supporting evidence how free, helpful information paves a path towards success for a company. He explains that Reath implemented a new social media strategy that included weekly polls on her Facebook page with responses by her staff of doctors, videos that were posted on her Facebook and YouTube pages, and weekly quizzes for clients that provided customers with information in a fun, creative new way. Reath also provided interested clients with a free e-book, by using the idea of the web 2.0, with the intention of informing her audience in an entertaining way while also not directly pushing her company on the reader. As explained by Henry Jenkins et al., the web 2.0 “represents a reorganization of the relations between producers and their audiences in a maturing Internet market, as well as a set of approaches adopted by companies seeking to harness mass creativity, collectivism, and peer production” (Jenkins et al., 2013, p. 49).  The innovative methods written about by Schaefer and the applied experiences that Reath created for her potential customers gave customers an incentive to want to learn more about a company’s services, consequently leading to higher rates of face-to-face interactions and online purchases.