How These Web 2.0 Companies Build Good Relationships to Build Their Brands
NEW YORK For Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos, meeting up with a customer at a bar in midtown Manhattan was perfectly natural. Most execs with 1,600 employees and doing over $1 billion in annual sales would probably pass on having drinks with an individual customer, but Hsieh is not your typical CEO. In the past week alone he had given away shoes on Twitter, sent out an open invitation to a company barbecue and solved a service problem a customer left in a blog comment. If this seems exhausting, Hsieh sees it as part of a larger strategy to build Zappos into a brand on par with Virgin.
"We think our brand is going to be different because we want people to feel there's a real person they're connecting with, whether it's when they call us or through Twitter or any way they come in contact with us," he said.
