If in Part 1 you answered the question of why building company culture and using social media is important, then in Part 2, you’ll answer how to build the right culture within your company and make your employees happy.
Remember, you are a startup—so enjoy your advantages and make the most of them because:
“Smaller companies are often still full of passion and have the freedom to experiment.”
And don’t forget:
Creating engaging content allows you to connect platforms, work collaboratively to develop your story, extend the conversation, and truly connect with your audience.
Let’s read and practice the first steps of the book together:
HOW TO USE EFFECTIVELY
Top-down: Creating the right culture
According to The Thank You Economy, success depends on caring about customers, but a caring culture must be built from the top down. If you want that culture to extend beyond your company to your customers and then spread even further, you must ensure your ambassadors live and breathe that culture just like you do. Therefore, the greatest concern of any leader following the principles of The Thank You Economy is not competition or customer service, but their employees.
Happy employees
THE FIRST THING that makes an employee happy is being treated like an adult. They should be allowed to manage their work in the way they see fit.
Second, they should have their personal needs met. This is quite rare. To make it happen, company leaders must interact directly with their employees as they would with their customers.
Cultural Foundations
For medium and large companies, an effective CCO must understand each person as an individual. This may sound impossible, but it is entirely achievable if the company builds on the foundational cultural values of the Thank You Economy. If you're unsure where to begin, here’s your guide:
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Start with yourself – strong self-awareness can shape a good corporate culture.
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Full commitment – commit both rationally and emotionally.
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Change the tone – express your intentions directly and boldly. Employees will feel the difference immediately.
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Invest in your employees – prove you value them more than anything by letting them freely ask for what they want, experiment, and be themselves.
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Trust people – start hiring people who share your vision and whom you know and trust.
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Be genuine – good words spread close, bad words spread far.
The Perfect Combination: Traditional Media + Social Media
If you’re on a great date and the chemistry is strong, you don’t stop at dinner — you go for coffee or dessert after.
Combining traditional media with social media allows you to do the same when talking to people about your brand.
Creative content bridges platforms, lets them work together to tell your story, extend the conversation, and connect with your audience.
Just placing your Twitter or Facebook logo at the end of an ad or a TV spot isn’t enough.
Instead, create compelling content, include your social handles, and engage people in a way that makes them want to look you up, continue the conversation, and stay connected.
Goal: Quality with Quantity
I always believe that if you have a good purpose, it will show and draw people in. A good purpose creates attraction.
If you’ve ever planned a digital campaign or run a few before, what was your goal? Getting people to click “Like”? Or building your online brand and strengthening customer connection? If your answer is the former, you now understand why most ad campaigns fail.
Social media works best when you trigger emotions in your target customers. If you're launching a campaign, it has to spark some emotion — positive or negative — that compels people to share. Give them something to talk about, unleash the power of word of mouth, and let them care about you naturally.
Surprise and Delight
Money spent on creating pleasant surprises is often more valuable than spending on Facebook ads or even SEO managers’ salaries. Big companies with large marketing budgets can obviously create amazing surprises.
But you can still get meaningful reactions with smaller gestures. For example, what if you pick your 20–30 most loyal customers and send each a handwritten thank-you note with a rose or a small gift? It’s a low-cost activity with potentially high impact.
Conclusion
If marketers apply the principles of the Thank You Economy, reallocating resources wisely and learning to maximize both social and traditional media — and how they complement each other — they’ll see an incredible return on investment.
The Thank You Economy has fundamentally shifted customer expectations. Businesses must innovate and personalize to meet those expectations. What works today may be obsolete tomorrow. The point is to think long-term. To survive, businesses must innovate. Social media gives us the opportunity to understand what customers want — even before they do.
Businesses must do everything possible to gain first-mover advantage. Marketers need to both ride current trends and anticipate future ones.
BONUS THOUGHTS
Fear can kill innovation
It’s becoming increasingly common to see great products come not from big companies. Vitamin Water didn’t come from Coke, and Pom wasn’t born from Pepsi. Big companies are often trapped by fear and short-term thinking, making them risk-averse and uncreative.
Smaller companies still have the passion and freedom to experiment.
The Path Forward
Many companies still don’t use social media. You can point out plenty of weaknesses in social media, but traditional media has just as many. The undeniable truth is: in the end, brands must still follow and connect with users online.
The ROI of Emotion
The return on investment in social media is closely tied to the emotions of the crowd and how an individual relates emotionally to the product.
The heart wants what it wants.
Billboards
Seeing an ad doesn’t mean seeing a billboard. People are so distracted by their phones they barely notice the road — let alone billboards.
Innovation Fuels Culture
You’ll almost never fail if you pursue creativity. Even if your campaign doesn’t yield business results, there’s still hope — your company culture benefits from experimentation. Talented people are drawn to other talented people. Any creative team seeing you try something original will keep you top of mind when they enter the job market.
The Biggest Mistakes Companies Make Using Social Media:
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Using tricks instead of strategies
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Using it to provoke disputes
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Using it to brag
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Using it as a press release platform
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Posting other people’s content instead of their own
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Using it to push products
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Expecting immediate results
Translated by KisStartup Team.
Nguyễn Đặng Tuấn Minh – Managing Director & Co-founder, KisStartup
