One of the all time great movie quotes from the great movie "Being There." We named our first dog "Chance" (pronouncing it "Chauncy") after the central Peter Sellers character because it was so hard to tell whether the dog was brilliant or just lucky to be always responding the right way at the right time.

There are so many parallels to life, business, entrepreneurship, success, and social media in that brief elevator pitch about the movie and our dog.

Seth Godin writes today about the idea of actually participating versus being along for the ride in a way that reminded me of Being There. He is so right about how many people are mostly there to watch, rather than being an integral part of making it happen. This is anthema to a startup--they can't afford the tax of watchers on the payroll.

But I am more interested in how it manifests itself in Social Media. Godin says:

Experiencing is hot right now, being part of the social network, helping maintain that online tribe you belong to.

How true. How many read blogs without ever writing one or even commenting? If you're an individual, you're just missing out personally. But if you're a business or organization, the cost of non-participation could be much higher. Businesses ought to be participating. They have to participate, in fact. It's malpractice not to. But, they should also be finding ways to get more of their customers participating.

This is one of the reasons I am so excited about Helpstream. Traditional Customer Service applications (available from all the biggies) deliver such a solitary and lonely experience. The Customer Service Representatives don't really want to talk to you (couldn't you tell the last time you had one on the phone?), or at least their masters, the company they work for, don't seem to want to make it easier or fun. Instead, you are encouraged through a process called "deflection" to trawl through knowledge bases of Frequently Asked Questions to see whether one might not apply to you.

It works because its all most organizations have today.  But the times are changing, there are better ways available, and as the world gets more and more invested in the web, the patience of your customers to deal with that approach is waning. 

The beauty of introducing community as we have into the picture, is it is all about this opportunity to increase participation to a good end.  Let me just give one example.  If you convince a certain portion of your customers to use community instead of submitting a case (we do that automatically in our application, ask for a demo if you haven't seen it already), then two kinds of participation develop.  First, people other than agents can offer answers.  Whether that's your own well-informed customers who may have dealt with the problem, or other people from you company, it's a richer source of content than just your Customer Service organization.  Second, the resolution, the best answer that derived from the community discussion, is participation that lives on.  The next time somebody else has the problem, the answer is already there for them to find as we automatically incorporate all community activity into our knowledge base search.

We're available to help you, inside or outside our garden (paraphrasing the line Sellers used when contacting the author of the original novel).