The first ‘The Relationship Management Institute’ award goes to Zappos for embracing social media to create an open, transparent and collaborative company with blogs, tv and great UI. The website is a testimony to all that can be accomplished with dynamic and interactive media for both customers and staff alike. Zappos is an extraordinary success with a mantra “Build open and honest relationships with communication.”  A winning formula because more than 60% of their customers are returning shoppers. Zappos.com made FORTUNE MAGAZINE’s “100 Best Companies To Work For” list for 2009. FORTUNE puts out this high profile list every year, in at #23 this year, making them the highest ranking newcomer for 2009.

Zappo’s CEO, Tony Hsieh writes on the company blog that ‘building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to build your brand.’

Tony understand that it’s a very different world today, with the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. Whether an unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee, any story can spread like wildfire by email and tools like Twitter.

Zappos have 10 core values that act as a formalized definition of their company culture. The core values weren’t formed by a few people from senior management that sat around in a room at a company offsite. Instead, they invited every employee at Zappos to participate in the process, and here’s the final list we collectively came up with:

1) Deliver WOW Through Service
2) Embrace and Drive Change
3) Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4) Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5) Pursue Growth and Learning
6) Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
Do More With Less
9) Be Passionate and Determined
10) Be Humble

Tony declares:’The cool thing about the Zappos core values is that I’ve used them as my own personal values as well. So it makes tweeting really easy for me… Whether I tweet about something personal or something related to Zappos, if I’m living my life through these 10 core values, it all goes towardsbuilding the Zappos brand while shaping me personally as well.’

Employee First, Customer Second (EFCS) is a radical new philosophy of HCL Technologies.
Through this philosophy the aim was to create a unique employee organization, drive an inverted organizational structure, create transparency and accountability within the organization, and encourage a value driven culture. I think this presentation is a similar ethos and lays out how HCL technologies also espouse the same cultural code to positive effect: