::UPDATE:: I should clarify that I still think there is a need for 101-level social media conferences that help people understand the value and how to get started. My main point is we need to stop telling people simply to join the conversation without telling them how.
Year: 2010
Little lies we tell our customers
I’m flying home from Ragan Communications’ excellent Social Media Summit, held at Cisco’s HQ in San Jose. It was my first trip to Silicon Valley, and it was both impressive and a little disorienting to see all the well-known company names. Of course I knew that eBay must have a physical presence, but there’s still something slightly odd about seeing the physical manifestation of something that has such a large presence on the Web.
It was a bit like the time recently that I saw Elizabeth Edwards in the snack bar of our local Target. Yes, she’s famous and presumably still wealthy, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t shop, or eat.
Even I’m a little confused by that simile.
As I always do immediately after a conference, I’m running nearly everything through my newly-energized social media filter. So my ears perked up when I heard the flight attendant say, “We’ll do everything we can to make your flight as enjoyable as possible.”
Really? How about a foot massage?
What would happen if they said, “Folks, there’s a whole lot of you and only two of us. If you need something special, feel free to ask, but we probably won’t be able to get to it right away, if at all. Also, it’s really tight up here, so we’d appreciate it if you’d stay out of our way as much as possible.”
Wouldn’t that blow your mind? But why not? We all know that’s what they mean.
Lots of companies say they put customer satisfaction first. Do they really? If companies truly put customer satisfaction first, they’d give their stuff away for free for as long as the money held out, then go out of business.
“Our top priority at XYZ Corporation is to make as much money as possible so that our owners, shareholders and, to a lesser extent, our employees can buy more and/or better stuff, travel to nicer places, find more attractive mates and drink higher-grade booze. We can only do that if you keep buying our stuff, so we’ll do what we can within reason to keep a lot of you happy.”
I would be a customer for life.
We all tell well-intentioned lies every day, of course. When the woman in the terminal who sold me a bottle of aspirin asked me how I was, I said, “Fine.” Should I have said, “Obviously I have a headache. Did you think this was a souvenir?”
But we need to be careful not to carry these empty platitudes over to our social media communications. It’s one thing to have them in the boilerplate on our websites. But if you respond to someone on Twitter and say, “We’ll do everything we can to fix your problem,” you’d better mean it.
Look at the Twitter streams of companies that do a good job of social media customer service, like Comcast or Zappos. They are responsive and helpful, but they’re also realistic.
“Guy Kawasaki told a great story at the Ragan Cisco conference about testing Virgin Airlines’ responsiveness by tweeting, “I’m in seat 2A. Can someone get me a Coke?” Virgin responded, “Why don’t you ask the flight attendant?””
Social media is forever changing our customer interactions. It’s making them more immediate and, in many cases, more raw – on both sides. Between the expectation of an instant response and the brevity required by platforms like Twitter, every word must count.
Don’t waste them on things you don’t mean.
::UPDATE:: I was paraphrasing Guy’s Virgin story. I found it in Guy’s own words on the WebEx blog.
The perfect wedding guest
We took The Boy to see his former “and beloved” nanny Bonnie get married yesterday. I was a bit apprehensive about his ability to sit through the ceremony, but we hit on an interesting formula. He went down for his nap much later than usual, so he had only been sleeping for about half an hour when we got him up to go. He was dazed and cranky all the way there, and just waking up as we arrived.
He sat quietly and attentively through the short ceremony, then just as it was ending and Bonnie and Steve had been presented for the first time as husband and wife, he said, just loud enough to be heard a few rows away, “All done.” He got an appreciative laugh from the crowd. Then just as they turned us loose to head to the reception, he said, “Now let’s eat cake.”
Integrating social media into your overall strategy: my presentation at the Ragan event at Cisco
This week I’ll be heading to Cisco in San Jose for the Social Media Summit, put on by Ragan Communications. I’m excited to be attending and even more so to be presenting. I attended a Ragan event at SAS about two years ago, before I took on the Social Media Manager role, and met a lot of smart and inspiring folks, including Shel Holtz and Lee Aase.
The title of my presentation is, “Can 11,000 employees speak with one voice? How SAS is taking social media from grassroots to an integrated strategy.” “SPOILER ALERT: 11,000 employees cannot speak with one voice, and I wouldn’t want them to even if they could.”
I’ll be talking about what we’ve learned in developing our social media guidelines and recommendations for SAS employees and how to effectively create your own. More than that, we’ll discuss how a comprehensive and practical social media policy can form the basis for your social media strategy as a whole.
Whether you’re talking policy or strategy, it all starts with some basics: knowing what your goals are and how you define success, and getting all the right people together in the same room.
If you’re attending the conference, let me know what you most want to talk about. Let me know even if you aren’t attending the conference. We’ll be using the hashtag #RaganCisco. Expect some great content.
Oh, and am I a little nervous that I’ll be onstage immediately before Guy Kawasaki? Yes, but not as much as if I were following him.
The difference between sharing and taking
We took The Boy to the park today, and when he wasn’t literally running around in circles, he was engaging in his other favorite pastime: trying to gather up everything in sight and hold it all simultaneously. He’s not happy unless he has at least one thing in each hand, which can be hard when you’re climbing on monkey bars.
There was a little girl with some sort of primary-colored wheeled conveyance, and Conrad naturally decided he should be driving it. She wasn’t playing with it at the moment, and he sprinted across the playground, climbed on top of it and started to peddle away.
Now I know he’s only two, but I want him to understand that you don’t just get to grab everything you see. And by the look on the little girl’s face, I could tell she wasn’t particularly happy that this sweaty little boy was absconding with her vehicle. So I said, “Conrad, please give that back to her.”
To which her grandmother replied, “No, he can ride it. Can’t he, honey? You need to share.”
First of all, don’t go turning my lesson about not taking other people’s stuff into your lesson about sharing. I’ve just told my son to do something. Please don’t tell him he doesn’t have to, since, you know, you’re not his parent and all.
Second, do you really want your child to grow up thinking it’s okay to just take other people’s stuff? Or that if someone wants to take your stuff you need to let them? I know the instinct is right, but maybe we need to be teaching the toddlers that you should share your stuff when the other person asks, not when the other person just grabs.
The “big” Boy, the Bunny and the T-shirt
Since becoming a parent I’ve noticed two things: all the cliches are true, and it’s nearly impossible to avoid them when talking about your child. So this post is basically an extended “they grow up so fast,” with picture.
I just took this picture at breakfast. “I realize I take a lot of pictures of him eating because it’s just about the only time he’s sitting still.” I find it especially poignant for two reasons:
First, he’s wearing a t-shirt we bought him last week on Ocracoke. They didn’t have toddler sizes, so we got him an extra small, thinking he’d grow into it. It fits.
Second, the bunny. I bought that for The Mrs in the days leading up to Conrad’s birth. Somebody had recommended having “focal points” to concentrate on during labor, and this was one of them.
Jean stared at that stuffed rabbit for hours during the most intense and meaningful experience of our “all three of our” lives. Now, two years and a bit later, the reason for that concentration is here, wearing boy’s clothes and getting blueberry juice on Mommy’s focal point.
“insert cliche”