Users Not Customers

Boardroom conversations are adapting to a new and brutal reality; there is no such thing as an offline business. And if you don't embrace digital, you'll be out of business altogether.Blockbuster, AOL, Yahoo and Borders were all unstoppable, but they didn't see the new economic order coming. Google, Facebook, Groupon, and Twitter barely existed at the turn of the millennium, but are now rocketing ahead.Aaron Shapiro is CEO of HUGE, the leading digital agency which builds and operates websites that handle 150 million users a month and bring in $1.2 billion annually for their clients. That's the GDP of a small country. He thinks constantly about the most pressing issue in business today: how can businesses can use digital to thrive?Shapiro has studied what the businesses succeeding today have in common, and in Users First, Customers Second, he teaches us to recognise that it's not just customers who interact with the digital version of our organisations.The businesses who are now roaring ahead put the interests and the digital experience of all of their users - employees, business partners, media and anyone else who interacts with you through digital channels - ahead of everything else, including their paying customers.In a world were we are all users you have a choice: you can be sure that people are using your digital ecosystem, or you can be irrelevant.