Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

Honesty goes both ways

Dave

I posted last week about the doublespeak I hear on airplanes, and how refreshing it would be if companies would say what they mean in social media. I got some great comments on my post from Sara Livingston and DJ Waldow and AnnMaria De Mars that got me thinking.

Yes, we all want companies to be more honest and transparent. We would all love it if a company said, “I’m sorry. That sucks. We screwed up. Let us fix it.” Some companies do, but a lot of companies are scared.

Why?

Well, let’s look at the current situation with BP. They’ve taken a tremendous amount of flak for the work of their flacks, and it’s arguable whether or not there is anything they could say at this point that would make the situation any better. But what would happen if they said, “It’s our fault. We screwed up and we’re sorry”?

It would be used against them in court.

In many ways the traditional customer service model, especially consumer interactions with merchants, is adversarial in nature.

Consumer: “You took my money and you screwed up and now you should pay.”
Company: “You gave us your money and we aren’t sure we can trust what you’re saying and so we won’t pay unless you make us.”

Social media does create a pathway to make customer relationships more human, and allow everyone involved to see the people on the other side as people.

But if that’s going to work, we as consumers have to accept that companies are made up of people and people make mistakes. That means dropping the self-righteous indignation. Lots of people seem to deal with the powerlessness they feel in their everyday lives by exploiting their power as a customer. And lots of people are constantly on the lookout for a reason to sue.

That doesn’t work if you want openness and authenticity on both sides. The only way companies — and their legal departments — will become comfortable with acting and talking like humans is if consumers avoid the temptation to use it against them.

photo by Kyle MacKenzie

Would anyone want to make a documentary about your social media program?

Dave

The Mrs. and I recently watched “Art & Copy,” Doug Pray’s 2009 documentary that features some of the biggest names in the history of American advertising, people like Lee Clow “one of the creators of Apple’s “1984” campaign”, George Lois, “”I Want My MTV“”, Dan Wieden and David Kennedy “”Just Do It”” and Hal Riney “”Morning in America“”.

It’s a fascinating and powerful film that lets a group of very creative people talk about what makes them tick. I recommend it to anyone who spends any time thinking about how to influence the opinion of others.

I was struck by how many of the breakthrough campaigns seemed to revolve around one key phrase that some clever person came up with, maybe scrawled on the back of a napkin. “Got milk?”, for instance, or “Where’s the beef?”

Clarity, brevity, originality and audacity are common characteristics of great ad concepts. Heck, great concepts in general.

In a fascinating and somewhat eerie revelation, Dan Wieden said the inspiration for “Just Do It” came from Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who, when asked if he had any last words, replied, “Let’s do it.”

There are a few key characteristics shared by the men and women in the film. Obviously, they are all very smart and creative. But nearly every one of them said something to the effect of, “We had to show our clients that we were right and they were wrong.” Most of them had a story about a risky campaign that went on to be a breakthrough that scared hell out of their clients at first.

Nobody gets asked to be in a documentary because they played it safe. If – and I’m not saying this will or should happen – anybody makes a documentary in 20 years about the early days of social media, who will they want to talk to? Probably the people who are scaring the hell out of clients right now. The audacious people with the outrageous ideas who are 100 percent convinced that laying yourself and your company open is the right thing to do.

What would you rather say to a documentary filmmaker in 20 years? “We tried cool new stuff and a lot of it worked really well”? Or “We played it safe and jumped on the bandwagon near the end”?

photo by Digging90650

Little lies we tell our customers

Dave

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.

Integrating social media into your overall strategy: my presentation at the Ragan event at Cisco

Dave

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.

Explaining social media with a sippy cup

Dave

I’m on vacation with The Mrs and The Boy on Ocracoke Island, NC, one of my favorite places on Earth. We had lunch today at Howard’s Pub, an Ocracoke institution known for staying open 365 days a year no matter what the weather.

Somehow we only brought two sippy cups with us to the beach, so when we got back in the car after lunch and realized we’d left one on the table, it was a big deal. I walked back in to try to find it. Keep in mind it had only been a few minutes since we had left.

I told someone who I thought was a manager that we’d left a sippy cup on the table. He seemed kind of annoyed and said, “They probably threw it away. Do you want another one?” I realized he thought I meant the kids cup they had provided and told him it was a cup we had brought ourselves.

“Oh, then it would be at the hostess station,” he replied, and walked away. When I asked the hostess, she gave me a blank look, looked under the counter for a moment and went back to selling t-shirts.

The frustrating thing was I knew the sippy cup was somewhere on the other side of the kitchen door, either in a bus tray or at the top of a trash can or maybe on a shelf if someone had noticed it. I suppose I could have walked into the dish room myself and looked around, but of course, we just don’t do that. All I needed was someone willing to listen to what I was actually saying I needed, and take a moment to look for it.

I spotted our very helpful waiter and asked him. He walked through the door, asked the dish room guys if they’d seen it, and handed it back to me. I thanked him, and was happy we’d tipped him well for his earlier friendly and helpful service.

The old model of customer service requires the customer to conform to the procedures and structures of the company. In the social media model of customer service, it’s incumbent on the company to be where its customers are asking questions and answer them in the way the customer needs, regardless of how things have always been done or whether or not it conforms to their organizational silos and responsibilities.

Even more, it requires people who are willing and able to listen, think for a moment, and do what it takes to resolve a situation to the customer’s satisfaction. That’s always been the customer service model at exemplary organizations. Social media is making it the norm, and highlighting the exceptions.