Tag Archives: social media

August 11, 2014 · 12:02 pm

The Ostrich Strategy

We’ve all heard the myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand, particularly when they’re frightened.  It’s not true (hence a myth) – they’re probably turning some eggs they’ve laid.  We used to have a dog – a bulldog! – that would sort of do the same thing when he was scared or had done something bad.  He would turn his head away from you  – we were 100% sure he believed he was invisible: since he can’t see you, you can’t see him.

Many brands seem to be following a similar strategy when it comes to social media and customer complaints.  A few years ago, Bain Consulting conducted a study that  discovered that while 80% of companies believe they deliver ‘superior’ customer experiences to their customers, just 8% of customers agree.  Who is kidding themselves here?

It’s not an occasional problem.  Another study – this one by Social Media Marketing University – showed that 58.2% of brands receive customer complaints via social media ‘occasionally.’ 10.9%receive them ‘somewhat often’ while 4.9% receive them ‘very often.’  So what do they do, given that surveys reported in news media found that customers expect a response to a complaint posted on a brand’s social media account within one hour?  They pretend they’re invisible.  Is that a bad thing?  You tell me:

  • 58.2% of brands receive customer complaints via social media ‘occasionally.’ 10.9 percent receive them ‘somewhat often’ while 4.9% receive them ‘very often.’
  •  26.1%  of brands reputations have been tarnished as a result of negative social media posts; 15.2% lost customers and 11.4% lost revenue.

And here is the kicker:

  • 23.4% of brands not only do not have a strategy in place to manage negative social commentary, but do not have plans to develop one. 24.5% of brands are in the process of developing a strategy and 7.6% have strategies in place that are currently proving to be ineffective.

This isn’t the only survey that found businesses lacking.  Another one which comes from Sprinklr shows that 20% of companies rarely, if ever, respond to customer complaints made via social. The “ostrich strategy” is about the worst choice a business can make.  Putting your head in the sand doesn’t make the issues go away – it just makes it harder for you to hear them as they get louder and louder.  That’s my take.  Yours?

 

 

 

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July 24, 2014 · 11:21 am

We Need Smarter Social Thinking

Sometimes it feels as if it’s one step forward and two steps back with respect to marketers and social media.

English: Southwest Airlines 737-300 N310SW. I ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The latest example of this comes from a company that generally has a consumer friendly reputation, Southwest Airlines.  I’m willing to cut the home office a little slack in the tale of woe I am about to relate.  But only a little.

Southwest, like every airline, has a top tier of frequent passengers.  These are generally heavy business travelers and are the ones any airline executive will tell you really pay the bills since they’re often flying full fare and doing so frequently.  They receive perks, and in Southwest’s case one of them is priority boarding.

One of their “A-list” flyers was traveling from Denver with his young children (ages 6 and 9) and wasn’t allowed to board early because they don’t have VIP status.  We can debate if that was a mistake by the gate agent or bad corporate policy but what happened next is really the point.  He told the agent ‘Real nice way to treat an A-list. I’ll be sure to tweet about it,’” according to  WCCO.  He went on to do just that.  According to him, it was “Something to the effect of, ‘Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate C39, not happy @SWA.’”  Here is where things get interesting and, from a social marketing perspective, just silly.

Southwest’s social crew does a great job listening.  As an aside, they thanked this same traveler for a nice tweet about an agent a month ago.  They saw the tweet and must have called the gate agent about the unhappy customer.  The agent proceeded to remove the man from the plane (upsetting the children) and to demand that he delete the tweet to be allowed to travel.  He did so and according to all involved there was no bad language and threats made by him.  The agent did threaten to call the cops.

Since this incident (for which Southwest has apologized to the traveler) there have been TV stories, newspaper articles, and many screeds such as this.  The guy kept tweeting about it too.  Southwest offered the guy three $50 travel vouchers.  He has said he’ll never fly them again.  So much for an A-list passenger’s business.  I suspect the social crew at Southwest didn’t intend for the agent to take the action she did but someone should have thought about that being a possibility.  I mean you call someone up and say they pissed off a top status passenger and now it’s on Southwest’s “permanent record” and what do you expect?

As marketers we need to have thicker skins when we’re in the social stream.  If you were speaking with a number of business partners and one said something a bit off-putting, you’d probably make a mental note and let it go.  At worst you’d say something privately later.  This just threw gasoline on an already lit fire.  That fire has gotten brighter as it gets more oxygen from all that’s being written about the incident.  It’s hard enough to develop an A-list customer.  Retaining them should always be a top priority, maybe even if it means bending the rules (like expanding priority boarding to kids under 18) from time to time.

Thoughts?

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July 2, 2014 · 8:34 am

Missing The Measuring

I guess there is generally good news with respect to marketers and how they’re measuring social media.

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The”generally” qualification, however, means that there’s still some work to be done. As you’ll see from the data below, while many organizations are getting better about measuring the effectiveness of what they’re doing, what they’re using as key performance indicators could use a lot of fine tuning.

According to the results of a survey put out by the folks at Ipsos OTX for the Association of National Advertisers, 80% of US client-side marketers measured the effectiveness of their social content, with social media metrics such as “likes” the most common.  That’s the good news.  The bad? Metrics that could identify business ramifications were not used nearly as much, with financially based measurements such as return on investment and sales landing near the bottom.

What did the study find that these companies are measuring?  “Likes” leads the list.  Putting aside that it’s an easy number to fake (you can buy thousands of likes for not much money) if you had a reason to do so (your bonus is tied to the number perhaps?), it’s a quantitative factoid that has very little to do with results.  It’s very likely that a brand would make more revenue from a couple of thousand highly interactive fans who post one comment each, than from one million fans who rarely interact with the brand.  Something as basic as follower counts or likes might have importance but it’s a relational importance – how many do we have vs. our competition – rather than being important in and of itself.

Some of what the study found is encouraging.  “Advocacy” is being measured by 27% of brands and “conversation volume” by 52%.  Those are engagement numbers.  It’s good to measure how many people see a post.  It’s better to measure how many are talking about it.  It’s way better to understand what they’re saying and the best is when you can measure all of that along with seeing and reporting what actions they took.  Hopefully that action rang a cash register or brought you a new customer.

Does that make sense?

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