Digital Sense. Snook Chris

says Marty McDonald, coconspirator of Save Our Chiefs and senior director of Strategic Development and Sales at G/O Digital. “Simply stated, your prospects and customers simply want to be a great guest at the dinner table of your brand. Treat them that way and they'll embrace your brand.”

      Fast forward to January 2016, the Chiefs 23-year playoff futility ended, when they won their first playoff game since 1993. Saved indeed.

      Optus in Australia

      In November 2014, Travis was traveling to Australia for the first time to speak at Ashton Media's conference, the Data Strategy Symposium, north of Sydney in an area known for its wine, Hunter's Valley. It's a great conference put on by Mark Abay and his Ashton team.8

Before travelling, Travis sent out a tweet to his friend @ChrisBrinkworth asking if T-Mobile had service there, as he was feeling a bit unprepared for international travel and need to figure out his SIM card situation. The local phone carrier, Optus, was doing some social listening and tuned into the conversation. Paolo from @optus (Figures P.8, 9, and 10) sent a couple of tweets to Travis, instructing him to drop by once he arrived in Sydney and they could set him up with their prepaid options.9

Figure P.8

Figure P.9

Figure P.10

      “Sweet,” Travis replied. “Nicely done. Consider this a conversion, Paolo.” He then recommended that Optus connect with @MiaD, my former boss at Symantec, who was also speaking at the same conference.

      Well, when Travis arrived in Sydney, he saw the Optus store and was ready to buy a SIM card for the trip. However, when Travis walked up to the store, an Optus employee, Jordan Zac, said, “Hello, Travis. Welcome to Australia. We've been waiting for you.”

“What?!” Travis was blown away (Figure P.11) by the customer service already. But wait, it gets better. Jordan handed Travis a huge Optus bag, and inside it were some Australian items, such as a six-pack of Victorian Bitter Beer, some flip-flops, some delicious Tim-Tam cookies, some Vegemite so he could make a sandwich, some other gadgets and gizmos, and, best of all, a free 4G hotspot with 10 GB of free data for the trip.

Figure P.11 Optus Australia

In case you were wondering if they had a system in place to serve others this way, they gave Mia Dand a similar experience (Figure P.12).

Figure P.12

      Optus gave Travis the free hotspot since Apple and T-Mobile wouldn't unlock his iPhone 5S, so they went the extra, extra mile and hooked him up. Talk about digital sense. Travis has been back to Australia twice since then, and guess which phone carrier he uses?

      The moral of these two stories is that digital sense goes both ways. It can infuriate a customer or inspire them. It is also possible to gain real momentum out of a major commitment to redeem your organization when you have failed to have digital sense in the past.

      The Genesis of This Book

      What you have in your hands right now is a book that will teach you how to keep up with the pace of change, keep your customer at the center of your decision processes, and inspire the people inside your organization to lead from wherever they are with more honed Digital Sense.

      Soon after the Chiefs incident in 2012, Travis and Chris were speaking on the same panel at the 2013 Denver Startup Week festival in Colorado. Chris, a serial entrepreneur, was on a personal sabbatical in Colorado, mired in ethnographic research around the Fourth Industrial Revolution and customer experience, following a venture exit. Chris and Travis immediately hit it off.

      In Summer 2015, they reconnected and the concept of this book was born. Chris was back in build mode with Ethology (a customer experience performance media agency) and Travis had become one of the most sought after thought leaders in marketing technology. Travis was working on building his agency, CCP Digital, was a paid columnist at Inc. magazine, and had a new podcast on VentureBeat, called VB Engage, with the incomparable Stewart Rogers. We had originally decided to write the book and self-publish it, when serendipitously a few weeks later, Lia Ottaviano, from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in Hoboken, NJ, reached out, and a deal for Digital Sense was born with the country's oldest and most prolific business book publisher.

      In this book, you will learn how to blend customer experience, social business strategy, and marketing technologies using the Experience Marketing Framework.™ This book will teach you how to amplify that content correctly, and give you some different hacks and tricks on how to look at digital. It will help teach your organization how to be more digitally savvy at an individual and collective level.

      We want digital sense to permeate your whole organization and the world at large.

      With over 3 billion more humans coming into the commercial cycle globally in the coming years, as mobile web and smartphone access proliferates in the Third World, we no longer live in the information age, instead residing firmly in the age of opportunity.

      You have an unprecedented chance to capitalize and thrive (not just survive) through what Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has called the Fourth Industrial Revolution.10

      Having a model to cultivate a continually increasing digital sense will be an imperative. In the coming decade, the road ahead will not merely be a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution, which used electronics and information technology to automate production. It will be a complete and distinctly different revolution wherein everything exists as bits centered around velocity, scope, and impact as humanity enters a time of scale where technology has no historical precedent.

      Our hope with this book is to share some of the wisdom we have picked up during our collective 40-plus years of marketing and technology startup experience. We have unified our sharp tongues and quick wits into one voice for the narrative to make your reading experience fluid.

      You've heard the quote from Wayne Gretzky that says, “I skate to where the puck is headed,

8

Travis Wright, “Data Strategy Symposium,” Ashton Media, YouTube video, 59:24, from Data Strategy Symposium, February 9, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xosapBvUeQ4.