The Quisenblog

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The two kinds of online consumers.
Tuesday: Creating a Community, Part 1.
Wednesday: Creating a Community, Part 2.
Thursday: Social Media you can own.
Friday: Giving up control.

(This is the twelfth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

Where many organizations struggle with the realities and potential of Social Media is in accepting the fact that they aren’t in control of the agenda. Companies cannot force goals on people, can’t control what they say about the brand, can’t spin the facts.

Truth is, the power of Social Media is the ability to hear what customers are REALLY SAYING. There is tremendous opportunity in searching out negative comments and addressing them directly. Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to be responsive. Ignoring the true conversation coming from customers does no one any good. If someone has a bad story to tell about you, you need to accept it is being told somewhere. (See our post on “United’s Sour Note”) Social Media gives you the opportunity to get out in front of such stories and contribute to a solution.

You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word.

Here is an example of how Southwest Airlines uses Social Media to approach this:

You’ll note that “Sean” left a post complaining of a specific customer service concern. A few hours later, “Christi” from Southwest Airlines answered Sean directly, and tries to use this complaint as an opportunity for further conversation. Interestingly enough, “Phil” intervened before Christi had a chance to respond, and “stood up” for the airline, essentially evangelizing on its behalf.

This is typical of how social media works. For Sean, it is an easy outlet to contact the company, and list a specific complaint. The company then had the opportunity to address it, or at least acknowledge its intent to make things right. If nothing else, it had to make Sean feel better about the company being that he knows they “heard” him. His post also opened to the door for Phil, a loyal member of the SWA community, to weigh in.

Having loyal customers jump in and “run interference” for you isn’t that unusual, once you demonstrate to visitors that you are willing to hear what they really have to say, and demonstrate that you are trying to facilitate solutions.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll check in with you next week!

Posted by Mickey

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admin Social Media customer interaction, customer satisfaction, Facebook, solutions, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines

In days gone by, you could irritate customers, lie to them or otherwise treat them like crap, and there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. Oh, yeah, they could write threatening letters, tell all their friends and promise to never do business with you again. One nattily-dressed gentlemen I would pass everyday when I worked in San Francisco even protested in front of Bank of America wearing a sandwich board. But for the most part, that dissatisfaction stayed between you and the customer.

My how things have changed.

Today, when a customer feels he’s been wronged, he probably won’t keep it to himself. In addition to feedback sites (like yelp.com) and others, where one can express an opinion on anything from the freshness of a flower arrangement to the food at a restaurant to the customer service of a web site, there are more creative avenues he may take. Like create a Facebook page for unhappy customers. Launch a website named “yourcompanysucks.com”. Contribute to blogs or message boards. Or, he may choose to do what Dave Carroll of the alt/country band Sons of Maxwell did: create a music video and post it on YouTube.

Carroll’s video, named “United Breaks Guitars,” chronicles his exasperation at being treated indignantly by United Airlines customer service folks after the carrier severely damaged his $3500 Taylor acoustic guitar (in plain view) on the tarmac of O’Hare International.

While I’m sure everyone involved at United would claim they were “just doing their jobs,” the bottom line is that Dave Carroll wasn’t taken care of at a very critical touchpoint. No one at United felt his pain or became his advocate. And the video he created has gone viral and been viewed by more than 3.5 million people.

The result for United: not just more bad stories about the airline being circulated, but a finger to the eye of its position of “Fly the Friendly Skies.” Who’s going to believe the airline’s paid messages when you have real customers telling and forwarding stories like this?

While this case represents how the web’s transparency can create huge customer service problems, it’s also a case of how it also creates one-of-a-kind opportunities. When, Bob Taylor, co-founder of Taylor Guitars, found out about it, he made a video response supporting Dave, and launched a series of videos on his web site about how to safely travel with a guitar. Then he did what United should have done—replaced Dave’s beloved guitar.

Great PR for Taylor. A nightmare for United. And in this case, a bit of instant celebrity for one guitar-totin’ hero. All wrapped up in one.

As a bit of a diversion, I present another video, of one of my favorite artists, John Hiatt, performing a song on Letterman he wrote a few years back about broken guitars (of the celeb variety). Enjoy.

Posted by Mickey

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Mickey On Customers Bob Taylor, customer service, Dave Carroll, Facebook, Sons of Maxwell, Taylor Guitars, United Airlines