People Business

Business is about people. Real people buy things from other real people who work at real stores selling things that were made by a real person on the other side of the world. It is easy to forget that this is what business is, not the piles of numbers and graphs that dominate the modern corporate culture. Numbers serve a purpose, and that is to allow one to view trends of thousands of people simultaneously: Business. However, the further numbers become removed from the thoughts and actions of actual people, the less relevant they become, and the less value they hold.
Take the smart phone market for example. From when Palm announced the Pre smart phone in January, to its release a little bit ago, Palm stock had huge gains, rising from about Penny Stock level, to a respectable $16 per share. Upon its release Wall Street was abuzz with rumors of huge shortages; analysts slapped on huge target sales numbers; articles hailed the next "iPhone killer." But in the end it took a single analyst calling up a few stores and talking to the real people that were actually selling this real product to discover that there were actually none of the vast shortages that appeared on spreadsheets all over Wall Street. It turned out that none of my friends have even heard of the Pre.

Several days ago, Sprint released quarterly earnings well below analyst estimates, pulled down by less than expected Palm Pre sales.

What does this mean? It means we need to look past pie charts and power points. We need to focus on people and engage them as a real person. It means that Twitter is not just for bloggers and PR departments. Twitter is for everyone who cares about what people think. Twitter can allow decision makers to glance past the layers of filtering and pretty charts and discover what real customers think. Twitter can allow your company to refocus on what is most important in any business: real people.