With my line of work in social media marketing, communications, etc. I've noticed something very alarming in the discussions and processes that happen: we forget about the one person that this all matters to. The end user.

The end user is a marketing term to refer to you and me. The person on the other end who will see your posts, watch your video, click on your ad, buy your product, use that product, and hopefully become a customer for life.

What happens in all the meetings and design iterations, and talks, where the product/ad post/tweet campaign flops? Why did this happen? I think we forget how someone would interact on the other side. We stare at these words for hours on end, scrutinizing every phrase and punctuation, and forget that it's just another email in someone's inbox that will probably be deleted before being opened.

If we took some time thinking about it from the end user perspective, it could help make our brand and product even that much better. Good design, and good products, truly speak for themselves, and will get recognized. But to get someone to even look at them first, we need to understand how our work is perceived.

One thing I like to do is pull someone who has had no discussion and no knowledge of something that I am working on, and show them a design that I am working on, or watch a video that I created, and get their reaction. What did you think? What was the message you took away from it? Did it make sense? Did it seem relevant?

Taking this one step has helped out tremendously in avoiding some gaffs; but you can't avoid every person's perspective and interaction. Learning the art of persona building helps too, where you build a "person" or a group of "people" who are your target audience, and filter things through this character. What kind of work do they do, what's their day like, interests, hobbies, favorite foods?

In the end, though, the greatest tool you can use, in my opinion, are your ears. Listen. What are people saying? How are they responding to what you are doing? Taking the time to listening can help shape your work to be effective.

I want to leave you with a great talk by Seth Godin, called "It's Broken" from 2006. An oldie but a goodie on how people interact with things, and how it affects people's perspective. Enjoy!

My wife and I recently purchased a used car in preparation for our first child (our current vehicle is not too car seat friendly). Within a few days, we noticed small spots of oil on our driveway. We called the dealership we purchased the car from, and received an extremely poor response: "Well, if it's part of the drive train it's covered under warranty, but if not, it would be a service fee."

Now I don't want to come across as entitled with this post, but we had had the car for less than a week, and noticed it leaking oil. It was a fantastic opportunity for the dealership to do the right thing and say something like: "We're so sorry, bring it in right away and we'll take a look at what could be happening."

Instead, after getting nowhere after a couple emails and calls, we took the car to a local authorized dealer, and they did an oil change which fixed the issue (apparently there's a gasket that needs to be replaced every time there's an oil change performed on these cars).

We let the first dealership know that was the issue, so that they didn't make the same mistake on the next sale, and a gain the opportunity to do the right thing was lost.

This is an event where the dealership that sold us the car could have created raving fans for their business, and potential referrals. Instead, if people ask us about our experience, we'll share our story about how they were unhelpful.

What does this all mean? We're in a time where we can no longer run businesses that are just "good enough." We're connected through our technology, and a bad customer experience can spread faster than ever. My thought is that we need to hold ourselves to better experience standards as businesses, not out of fear of backlash online, but because it's the right thing to do.