Wow – just did a keyword search on Zappos and realised I haven’t blogged about them yet. How can I possibly expect to be taken seriously as a communications professional if I haven’t even mentioned them before?

Let’s put the record straight. I love Zappos. I love Tony Hsieh. I love their new website. I love their core values. I love their weirdness. I love the fact that Amazon paid $900m for an online shoe shop.

I’d probably love to work there if I was not so utterly in love with Betfair.

Zappos core value number 6 is a thing of beauty: Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication. Zappos believe that open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship. They don’t need to spell out if they mean internal or external communications. For Zappos they are the same thing. Zappos internal communications are conducted in public, in the full view of their customers and their fans.

They acknowledge that communication is always one of the weakest spots in any organization, no matter how good the communication is. That’s why I guess they are so driven towards communicating with their customers and their people so openly and honestly. Because it creates trust and trust is the basis of any relationship, especially an online commercial one.

So if anyone was going to create a TV ad campaign based around real customer and staff interactions, it was going to be Zappos. I really like the results. What a great way to expose your company’s personality!

If you are interested in Zappos, you can follow Tony Hsieh on Twitter – alongside 1.6m other doting fans. I can’t think of many other CEOs who can command such a following.

Actually I can’t think of any – can you?