Simple isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Social media is unique in that it is the only medium yet conceived where companies are playing in the exact same sandbox as we’re playing personally. Your employees and customers aren’t making TV ads on the weekend. Nor are they making their own magazine ads for fun...
Online community and our lust for it is at its apex. Companies of every size and description are pondering ways to engage with customers, and interact with their fans. But the big miss in many cases is social media staffing.
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The idea of community in business has taken top billing in recent years due in large part to the obvious growth of social networks and the community aspect they foster.
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Just to re-cap all of the data and the charts shown in this post are from a report which Jane McConnell put together. You can find the report available for purchase as well as a link to her new survey for 2012 here.
During the course of yesterday, my good friend, the always insightful Ana Silva was wondering, over in Twitter, and in her own blog, too!, under the heading “The Cluetrain Manifesto on art, work and life“, about potential new books to read during the summer vacation. A bunch of us dropped by and shared some suggestions that would surely make for quite an interesting and diverse reading. I mentioned a couple of them, but one that I really enjoyed reading for how thought-provoking, refreshing and liberating it was, to the point where despite the fact I finished it up a couple of months back, it’s still lingering there in my mind, was Steve Denning‘s “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management“.
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Harmon.ie commissioned a recent study that reported digital distractions have become a major issue at work. They affect both work and time outside work hours, often blurring the distinction between the two. For example, the majority of people under the age of 40 stay digitally-connected in bed, and 44% of people stay connected during a night out at the movies. Of course many of these connections are for personal reasons, but often work is involved. In the following result summaries the bullets are in the words of the study. Read More…
One of my all time favourite social networking tools for informal learning, as well as information discovery, on a good range of interesting and relevant topics, and specially Enterprise 2.0 / Social Computing and Social Business as of late is Slideshare. I could spend hours and hours in there diving through slide deck after slide deck digesting some of the most amazing content people have been putting together over the course of time and never get tired of it! Can you imagine saying that about presentations? Goodness! That’s what I thought, too! Anyone on Presentation Zen?
Curating good, relevant content that matters to you is just such a wonderful thing! Over the last couple of years there have been a good number of really insightful, and very helpful, blog posts that have caught my attention on what, to me, is still one of the most important topics within the corporate environment and perhaps well beyond as well, without not necessarily even being related to social networking alone per se: Employee Engagement. Most of those articles have always been very positive, over the course of time, in identifying how critical and paramount it surely is to help drive new business and to delight your clients to the extreme, but also to increase that sense of belonging, of unmeasurable loyalty, or everlasting generosity of going the extra mile without expecting anything in return, of driving the whole concept of co-creation as part of that co-sharing of responsibility, of feeling good, etc. etc. Some others haven’t. The reality is though that, in my opinion, and thanks to the extensive use of social software tools, amongst several other things, we are now seeing both inside and outside of the firewall, employee engagement *does* exist and, as such, every business, every organisation, needs to start figuring out a way to resurface it, to both embrace it and promote it heavily, if they haven’t done so already, as it walks both ways, i.e. from top down, to bottom up, before they realise, the hard way, and acknowledge, they are employing autobots and not truly passionate, dedicated, engaged, motivated, committed, professional knowledge workers with the determination to make a difference. And here is why.
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Social Media still scares many businesses both large and small. But hiding from social media isn’t the answer. The real answer lies in embracing it … in all of its brutal, raw honesty.
Let’s look at the case of restaurant reviews. In the past, small local restaurants had the upper hand. If they offered poor quality service, people would tell their friends–but it would take a while before the message spread. With the emergence of social media, the roles reversed. All it took was one obnoxious, fussy, or overly-particular customer who was active on social media, and a restaurant could meet an early and unwarranted demise. This got so bad it led one coffee shop to overreact and put up a No Yelp Reviewers sign.
However, now that social media has matured, many sites have tools for businesses to respond. I recently came across an example of a negative review …
…we’d gone out of our way to make reservations for 7 of us, and while 3 of us showed up on time, the rest of our party was lost somewhere in Gpoint. At which point the uber bitchy hostess says, we can only hold your table until 9:15pm and then we’re giving it away. We offered to go ahead and order for our lost compadres and apologized profusely, promising that our companions were definitely on their way, but she refused to make any accommodations. She snidely suggested we try to sit at the bar. ALL SEVEN OF US.
Now I’ve eaten at a lot of hoity toity restaurants, but NEVER have I encountered such a terrible attitude from a hostess. You’d think we were trying to get a table at Daniel. And we made a reservation!! This is Gpoint, dude. How do you get off with an attitude like that for a sweet neighborhood restaurant in Gpoint?!?!?! I am never coming back.Maybe she just needs to get laid.
Now this could have gone poorly. Not responding would leave a big question mark in the mind of anyone coming across the review. The owner could have fired back with guns a-blazing, which would have become a case of he-said/she-said. While doing so would lessen the effect of the question mark, it doesn’t remove it. What really happened was the owner got involved, leaving a measured, honest response:
Hi Joan. I am the hostess, although most people know me as the owner. I just wanted to say thanks so much for making it clear what our super reasonable seating policy is. We do not seat incomplete parties in our 30 seat restaurant, especially on a Saturday night, especially when we have other customers who have been waiting an hour for a table. And, let’s be honest Joan, you and two of your friends arrived at 9:15 for your 9:00 reservation, and the rest of your party was still not complete at 9:25 when I finally gave away your table. Your friend had made the reservation that afternoon for 8 people and I explained to him our rules. He said no problem. Sorry you felt the need to personally attack me about this, Joan. Seems likes it best for all involved that you’ve sworn to never return.
The owner responded perfectly. Anyone who reads both versions will probably believe her and not the whiney customer.
The lesson here is that companies need to understand that review websites and social media sites aren’t going to go away. Not participating doesn’t make people stop talking about you; it just means you aren’t part of the conversation. What businesses need to realize is they have to become part of the discussion and get smarter about how they do it. If you need a detailed plan, one of the best I’ve seen comes from the US Air Force chart for social media engagement. However, it really boils down to 4 key points:
Monitor – Companies need to monitor what’s being said about them on websites like Angie’s list, Yelp, HotPot, Expedia, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or any other niche-specific review websites. I like to use Raven Tools, because it’s fairly extensive, and it’s part of my daily workflow. Other similar services include Trackur, Radian6, and Lithium.
Listen – When I worked in retail, one of the important lessons I learned was that, when a customer complained about you, what they are really doing is giving you the opportunity to fix a problem. Too often most people take criticism personally and overreact, turning a bad situation into a worse one. If you listen–and I mean REALLY LISTEN–you’ll see that most customers are telling you what’s wrong and how to fix it …
Respond & React – Now that you know what the problem is, how are you going to react/respond and fix it? Yes, some customers are going to expect too much, but those are the fringe cases, not the everyday ones. If you are getting more complaints than compliments, then there is something wrong with your product/service and the way you’re positioning/selling it. You need to react to that problem to prevent future problems down the road.
Amplify the Message – Hopefully some of your customers are saying nice things about you somewhere. What are you doing with those messages? Are you spreading them around? Understand the difference between a review and testimonial and treat each of them differently. At the very least you should have a separate review and testimonial page on your website. However, if you want to be really smart and proactive, ask your customers for permission to republish the testimonials. Then set up satellite websites to do proactive reputation management and point some targeted anchor text at them.
So what are the takeaways from this post:
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