Likeable Business: Why Today's Consumers Demand More and How Leaders Can Deliver / Dave Kerpen, Theresa Braun, Valerie Pritchard

Q&A with Author Dave Kerpen

Carrie, my wife and President of the company, and Jenna Lebel, then a strategist and now our Global VP of Marketing, were sitting at a restaurant in Boston, brainstorming. We had decided that theKbuzz, our original name, was no longer fitting for a larger social media and word of mouth marketing firm. We knew Facebook was about to launch the "Like" button for brands, and Jenna and Carrie suggested "Likeable Media!" I immediately loved it! I called up my friends Randi and AJ who worked at Facebook, and told them our plan They loved it too, but warned me that Facebook changed things so often and so quickly, that if "Like" didn't take off, they'd change it and we could be stuck, Luckily, of course, "Like" did take off- and so did Likeable! The cool thing about Likeable is it means way more than just getting likes on Facebook - it means being worthy of being liked, and talked about.

Of the 11 strategies you outline in the book, are there ones that are more important than others?

They're all important, but the pyramid in the introduction of the book shows the relative importance of each one, and the ability to integrate more sophisticated, challenging strategies on top of one another. Listening (Chapter 1) is the most basic, fundamental concept to get right first, and gratefulness (the last chapter) is the most challenging but spiritually rewarding to get right.

Listen to everybody, especially those who have more experience than you. Don't think you have it right yet, because you probably don't. If you're not a good salesperson, become a great storyteller. Be transparent, humble and grateful, and yet persistent.

Businesspeople seem obsessed with "Big Data" these days. I'm not a data junkie myself, except for baseball stats. But I agree that capturing, understanding and then leveraging the massive amount of data available to today's business - is a promising development. Being likeable isn't a trend of course - has always been important as always will be.