Social Media: Shut Up Fool! Your Customers are Trying to Tell You Something…
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 8, 2008 | Share This
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Often when a company thinks about participating in social media, whether it be a site like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, the in-house marketing folks try to figure out what their online message should be, how it should fit into their offline message, how they can enhance their brand through linking and posting and friending and widgets and then they all collapse from the exhaustion of saying all of this, let alone doing it. This is not to say that these things aren’t important, indeed they are. But as Dianne Wiest said to John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, “Shhhhh, don’t speak…no no no…don’t speak.”
Before you delve into any of that, visit some of these sites and find out what people are saying – about your brand, your competitors, your industry. Just this morning I went to check for updates on one of my favorite blogs, The Flack. Turns out Peter Himler is hopping mad, but not at an advertising or marketing agency – his usual subjects. Instead, he’s blogging about never buying a Ford product again after a negative experience with his
Comcast cable was on the receiving end of similar customer reactions online from fed up people. The most famous social media byproduct of this is the now-famous YouTube clip (over a million hits) of a Comcast worker sleeping at a customer’s house:
An article today in the Boston Globe by Carolyn Y. Johnson shows that Comcast finally got the seething hatebomb of a message from their customers and has started to respond. Among the responses: “Comcast has also set up teams of employees who are encouraged to click around social networks or online forums.” The article opens with a customer twitting about a service problem and surprisingly hearing back from a user named ComcastCares who scheduled a service call within 24 hours. (On a side note, who can you twit to about Twitter when Twitters on the fritz?) My favorite nugget of info from the Globe article is that Southwest Airlines actually has a position called Chief Twitter Officer, which I suppose is better than Head Twit. Southwest also has “…an online representative who fact checks and interacts with bloggers, and another who takes charge of the company’s presence on sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. So if someone posts a complaint in cyberspace, the company can respond in a personal way.”
Take another blog posting, also from today on RipTen complaining about a serious issue with a Dell laptop. After some frustrating Ford-like experiences with customer service the blogger finally posted a call-out explaining what he had to go through to get satisfaction. In addition to getting 3460 Diggs so far he also received a response in his comments from Dell. Well, it was a Dell Community Ambassador which fairly reeks of Starfleet, but it’s a start.
Just in case it isn’t already super abundantly crystal clear why it’s important to listen, Reprise Media’s Director of Search Engine Optimization Naveen Thattil directed me towards a post by the ubiquitous Matt Cutts today suggesting that there might be money in it. Bet that got your attention capitalist pig! Cutts didn’t exactly get into the ROI ramifications himself but the comments section suggests that at the very least social media can be a cheap market research tool. Certainly Comcast learned that they were having a service issue with their customers and by now Twitter knows that a number of customers are just a few airlifted whales away from switching to a different service. Responding to the input you get from these communities helps to maintain your customer base and reputation so that’s more cash in your pocket right there.
Topics: Blogging, Facebook, Reprise Media, Search: How-To, Social Media, Uncategorized |
This is a perfect example as to why companies MUST keep up with social media. It can be a make it or break it deal in terms of maintaining a positive reputation and listening to your customers. This is a great article - kudos!