chapter 11
anti-social media
fears and hazards of the new landscape

the question is inevitable and invariable: It comes without fail at the end of one of my speeches/when I meet a new consulting client/when my seatmate on the plane finds out what I do for a living. The question? “What should I do about social media?”

Let me first dive into the undercurrent contained in this questioning. I believe what people are really asking is, “Micah, isn’t it dangerous out there for my brand, my company, myself, in social media land? Can my brand really survive out there, with the floodgates of social media opened? How do I even have a prayer in this new landscape where any fourteen-year-old with a grudge can damage a brand’s reputation, and even the most unjustified, poorly articulated customer gripe gets a huge megaphone via Yelp, TripAdvisor, and similar user-generated sites?”

bicycle pumps and veterinarians

Yes, it is dangerous out there. Social media can affect your public persona and your profit picture. But don’t put the cart before the e-horse. Being an ace at social media won’t make you excellent, or even moderately good, at providing customer service any more than knowing how to work a bicycle pump will turn you into a veterinarian. The basis for establishing sound and responsive customer service starts with customers, not media.

Furthermore, it’s important to remember that the communications and connectivity revolution of recent years includes a lot more than social media. It spans mobile technology, the rise of web commerce in general, improvements in manufacturing and process design, advances in self-service, and more. So while social media commands most of the headlines at present, it’s not clear what we’ll be saying about the phenomenon a few years or even months from now, once social media has found its place in the communications mix.

In the meantime, though, there is danger out there. But like most dangers, it gets more manageable when you look at it in a straightforward manner—and tackle it head on.

regime change in 140 characters

When Terry Gross of Fresh Air asked Twitter cofounder Biz Stone if he had ever imagined that his invention was going to be used to bring down regimes in the Middle East, Biz shot back to Terry in a facetious “Dr. Evil” voice: “Of course, absolutely, that was the plan all along.”¹

The reality, joking aside, is that Twitter and other social media tools do have the power to bring about regime change in the business world. The names of well-known companies that have experienced this could nearly fill a chapter by themselves.

ouch: the first time they talk about you

Our concern, though, really isn’t these household brands. What about your company? The first time you discover that your company’s being discussed negatively online, it’s a tense, anxiety-ridden situation. What you see may look something like this, a moderately fictionalized version of a rant that was posted on the online review site Yelp:

The hostess here can’t pronounce “carpe diem.” I wouldn’t mention her ignorance on this point—even though the name of HER RESTAURANT is “Carpe Diem”—if she hadn’t left me waiting, spilled the drink she pressured me into ordering, refused to make eye contact, said “uh huh” instead of “You’re welcome,” …
But she did all that to me.
So I **am** mentioning it.

Ouch. Obviously this mixture of cattiness, generalized consumer upset, and actual, useful feedback represents something new. The world has changed. The balance of power between customer and business has changed. The timetable needed to respond has changed.

And the issue isn’t always limited to words, like those in this Yelp posting. Sometimes there are photos involved. Let’s say your above-Yelped restaurant, Carpe Diem, has a crack between two tables where your waitstaff forgot to clean. No business owner wants to see an oversight like that exposed online via TwitPic or yfrog, two services that allow you to send out photos via Twitter, but it can happen.

Just getting used to that concept? What about candid video? Yeah, it’s out there. And it can bite you in the social.

nobody uses twitter to tell a friend his fly’s undone

The first secret of dealing with social media feedback, even the ostensibly negative, is to realize the “bad” stuff is rarely all bad news. That’s because social media is such a remarkable source of feedback—round-the-clock, real-time hard data and nuanced subjective impressions that you can use to improve your service. Unfortunately, the entire world can be listening in real time along with you, which is, as my kids would say, kind of suckish. So you need to be listening … faster. Improving more quickly than the rest of the world is listening.

The second reality of social media feedback is that it would be more comfortable to not receive that feedback at all—the harsher stuff at least—in an open forum. It’s undeniable that it would feel nicer to have your customers voice their complaints to you directly and discreetly rather than hit the “airwaves” with them. So, the second secret of dealing with social media feedback is to reduce the need for it by making sure your customers know, as directly as possible, how to reach you. Think about it this way: If your friend saw you had your fly undone, would he tweet about it? No, he’d quietly tell you.² Use the same principle to your advantage here. Why should customers address issues to you indirectly via Twitter or their blogs when they can use email, the phone, or a feedback form on your website and know that it will be answered— immediately? (Or maybe a customer does go ahead and uses Twitter, knowing that you’re monitoring that particular handle, à la Delta or Southwest, so regularly that he will have every reason to repost in delight when you respond to him immediately.) What you don’t want your customers to feel is festering anger, frustration, fear, tension, or the old Capitol Hill construct “they left me twisting slowly in the wind.”

With their round-the-clock access to the “airwaves,” make sure that the first impulse of customers is to reach you—day or night. Have “chime in” forms everywhere; it’s like building escape valves for steam into your machinery. (If you’re Amazon.com or another online aggregator, with a vast product line that’s supplied in large part by outside vendors, your sensitivity to open conversations will be lowered; your customers can let off steam with zero downside for your overall brand. But most of us, obviously, aren’t Amazon.com. More about this in Chapter 13.)

In Chapter 2 I laid out the formula for customer satisfaction, starting with a “perfect product” and “caring delivery.” In consideration of that framework, the key way to avoid impact from negative public feedback is to make sure you’re doing so many things right (that your product is so perfect and your service so caring) that the occasional wrongs seem like outlying events. Exceptions to the rule. Freakish occurrences, even.

But post some people will, which brings us to the third pillar of addressing the realities of social media: You need to develop strategies for rapidly responding in a concerned, empathetic, nonconfrontational manner. We will go through this subject in detail in the next chapter (Chapter 12).

social media is not a disease

Social media isn’t a newly emerged exotic disease with no effective cure. The reality of the situation is that social media is most dangerous to your company when your organizational structure and culture are set up in a way that keeps you from providing one-on-one service and responses to issues in real time with great flexibility. Top-down decision making with a helpless, slavishly script-driven front line will kill you in the social media world. You need to push individual employee ability to act down the line to the actual people who work with customers.

a story that almost became a viral tweet

Here’s a story that almost became a widespread tweet. I include it here because I want to impress on you why it’s become more important than ever to give elective power to employees, to hire those employees appropriately, and to build a pro-customer culture in your organization now that companies face a rush-to-tweet-your-frustrations world. When a company fails to offer employees flexibility and discretionary power, and lacks a culture that encourages employees to take the customer’s side quickly, it risks great danger in the world of social commerce.

I bought an e-reader some fourteen months ago, choosing from the various options available on the market. Now, two or so months out of warranty, without any abuse to the unit that I know of, one morning the screen suddenly looked like a broken Etch A Sketch®, or more accurately, like an Etch A Sketch that someone has painstakingly drawn lines on of varying thicknesses up and down its entire length, making any text I try to read on it utterly illegible. Immediately, I sent a note, explaining the situation to the manufacturer. I expected the situation would be resolved immediately. After all, what company wants to be represented in the world by something so visibly problematic?

Shows what I know.

In a return email, the customer rep asked me for the order number, date of purchase, and serial number of the e-reader.

Hmmm.

I obligingly went through my old paperwork to find the order number. I copied the eentsy serial number off the back of the e-reader. All the while, I was figuring these were just formalities—part of the representative’s attempt to figure out which refurbished or new model to ship me.

Five days later came the terse response: I could return the Etch-A-Sketchified reader if I wanted and the company would send a replacement for $189 plus shipping (gotta love that final knife twist: plus shipping).

And what about my value as a customer—most obviously my purchase of dozens of books for the e-reader, as well as the background information that should’ve been visible in my file showing I’d been a good customer for various other products of theirs as well? Nothing I wrote to the customer service rep got through, because it didn’t jibe with her received policy guidelines. It was as effective an interaction as trying to coax a change in facial expression from one of the guys on Mount Rushmore, the lowest point probably coming when she wrote “I hope you understand: If we helped you out with this we’d have to help everyone.”

Well, I wasn’t going to put another $189 (correction: $189 plus shipping) in that company’s coffers. And by not doing the exchange but instead holding onto the Etch A Sketch e-reader, I get to use it in my customer service presentations as probably my favorite visual illustration of how far off the rails customer service can go.

It’s not a problem for a customer to tell a story like this in 140 characters when it’s accompanied by a gory image uploaded to Twitter via TwitPic or yfrog. A story like this—ripe with outrage, visuals, pathos, even a bit of humor—is always ready to go viral.

So learn the principles in this book and you’ll have less to fear from the itchy “send” fingers of your socially aware customers. Fail to learn them, and you’ll be at their mercy.

“and your point is?”

The balance of power between customer and business has changed, and the timetable needed to respond has changed.

The first secret of dealing with social media feedback is to realize that even the bad stuff is rarely 100% bad news because social media is such a remarkable source of feedback you can use to improve your service.

The second secret of dealing with social media feedback is to reduce the need for it by making sure your customers know, as directly as possible, how to reach you 24/7, whether that’s via email, the phone, or a feedback form on your website.

The third part of dealing with social media is that you need to know and develop strategies for rapidly responding in a concerned, empathetic, nonconfrontational manner. This will be addressed in the next chapter.

Social media is most dangerous to your company when your organizational structure and culture are set up in a way that keeps you from providing one-on-one service and responses to issues—in real time, with great flexibility.