Here’s a quick follow up to my recent post about Tony Hsieh and Zappos. I’m pleased to report that the company delivers on its WOW promise. Shortly after placing my order at www.Zappos.com on Wednesday, I received an email stating:

“Although you originally ordered Standard (4 to 5 business days) shipping and handling, we have given your order special priority processing in our warehouse and are upgrading the shipping and delivery time frame for your order. Your order will ship out today and be given a special priority shipping status so that you can receive your order even faster than we originally promised!

Please note that this is being done at no additional cost to you. It is simply our way of saying thank you for being our customer.”

Sure enough on Thursday my shipment arrives, complete with the cool Paul Frank monkey shirt for my son Ayrton. He’s wearing it proudly at school today. It’s always good to know another company that truly values relationships with customers.

This classic 2005 article on the Creating Passionate Users blog contains some great thoughts about how marketing has changed and how “education has become the killer app in a newer, more ethical approach to marketing.” It also contains a lot of good links, trackbacks, and comments to good educational marketing resources to explore. Worth a careful read.

Of course, despite the forward-thinking wisdom in this article and many of the others linked to it, traditional marketing (Out-spend instead of Out-teach) still has a very strong toehold. And even though it won’t make people “passionate” about your brand, outspending still works. My experience in marketing states that the “consumer education” message hasn’t been quite compelling enough to break that toehold.

Instead, the disruption necessary to really change marketers’ minds, and open them up to the importance of consumer learning and research, is coming with the advent of Social Networking and User-Generated Content. The content users weren’t getting from brands, they now seek from each other. Marketers who have been sitting on the sidelines watching this happen are suddenly getting this nagging feeling that if they don’t understand this new social world and figure out how to be a part of it . . . well, they might have to find something else to do for a living. When you say “social,” marketers are ready to listen.

At its root, Social Commerce is about education: brands teaching consumers and consumers teaching each other. Learning is key to the buying process, and even more broadly it is key to making consumers care (or become passionate) about your brand.