Tag Archives: social media

When Customers Attack

The explosion of social media has given almost everyone access to a digital printing press, soapbox and a potentially very loud virtual megaphone. These folks include your customers, some of whom, may be upset with your products or the way your organization treats them. Others may simply have an ax to grind, and you may just be the first thing they see after sharpening it.

Communications consultant Paul Gillin and tech entrepreneur Greg Gianforte (G&G), have written a valuable book – Attack of the Customers. It is part history, part survival kit, and part vaccine help you deal with the next customer attack. To quote G&G: “There has never been a better time to be a critic.”

The book explores both the challenge and opportunity that empowered and angry customers afford. The threats are obvious. It used to be that unsatisfied customers would not return or tell a small circle of friends that they didn’t like your offering. Now if you alienate them, they can create a Facebook page or go to Youtube and post a criticism. If their critique get noticed, think of United Breaks Guitars; you’ve not only got mail, you’ve got a problem.

Attacks can also be opportunities. G&G show how engaging unhappy customers can convert them into loyal fans. Responding to criticism can allow you to improve your own procedures, operations, and business models. This can enable you to increase both customer satisfaction and profitability.

The book is no academic treatise. It is a deep compendium of cases categorized and analyzed for lessons learned. Students of social media may be familiar with notorious cases, such as Jet Blue’s stranding passengers on the tarmac for up to nine hours. G&G, dive deeper and present examples and analyses, I had not encountered.

Social media can both amplify and shape responses of small groups of consumers. Often these complaints fail to propagate and so die out, before attaining critical mass. But not always, as the book illustrates extensively. The author’s broad experience is a welcome antidote to simplistic or formulaic responses to bad PR and worse corporate reflexes. G&G offer perspective on when you should engage critics and when it may be safe to ignore them. The latter should be a conscious choice rather than an ostrich-life reflex.

If your organization hasn’t been savaged in social media yet, it may well be tomorrow. Read Attack of the Customers and be prepared.

Note: Attack Of The Customers is currently available only through Amazon.com. You can also read a free sample chapter here.

Skewed Sentiment in the Twittersphere

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging and messaging service, has become a big deal – and not just among social media. By its sixth birthday in 2012, it had an estimated 500 million “active” users worldwide, 140 million of whom are in the US. Based on its latest round of financing, its implied market capitalization would be $ 9.9 billion.

Activity on Twitter has become a leading indicator and Twitter sentiment is often reported in newscasts. The very volume of Twitter activity has become newsworthy. For example, the Academy Awards telecast generated 8.9 million Tweets and the Super Bowl garnered 24.1 million. Of course, many minor events are tweeted about – it seems that every conference, meeting, or presentation I attend – begins with announcing its hashtag.

A number of services such as Twitturly, Twitscoop, and Monitter allow you to track Twitter activity about your brand, organization, or cause. This can be interesting, but how relevant is it? Twitter measurement is relatively cheap and easy. Still, should you judge a marketing campaign or prospects for your latest product by reception on Twitter?

The folks at Twitter seem to think so and want to sell you a “promoted account,” which solicits more followers for you. Presumably, more followers will lead to more mentions. If that won’t prime the pump, you can also pay for Promoted Tweets, which you can send to audiences who don’t follow you.

The question still remains, is Twitter sentiment a good proxy for what the Universe thinks about your organization or product? An interesting study just released from the Pew Research Center points to significant selection bias in reactions on Twitter, compared to responses in statistically representative surveys. For example, the 2013 State of the Union Address was substantially more positively rated in polls (42%) than by Tweets (21%). According to the Pew researchers ” Twitter users are not representative of the public.”

This may not be shocking, but it should give one pause. How many of your users not only have Twitter accounts, but are actively engaged. Unless you’ve restricted your market to Twitterati, you may be wise to do some of the heavy lifting involved in market research.

Please Tweet me your thoughts @4ourth.

Preserve Us From The Uncool

Twitter, the once esoteric microblogging utility has “crossed the chasm.” It is now popular, if not yet mainstream.

Consider:

In case you missed it, last Friday, 17 April 2009, was “Twitter Day” on Oprah. And Oprah has shown she can move markets, if not mountains. Not only is she on Twitter, but at least for Twitter Day was tweeting live on her show. Oprah herself has in a few days gone from a standing start to over 300 thousand followers. If you want the current stats on the followers, visit her Twitter page and see the block in the upper right corner.

Actor Ashton Kutcher became the first to amass a million followers on Twitter. This was not spontaneous. Rather it was the result of well orchestrated marketing campaign, including — you guessed it — Twitter.

Many radio and TV shows accept or even solicit listener input via Twitter, while businesses and organizations are actively playing with it.

During the presidential campaign of 2008, one Twitter account dominated all others. As you may have guessed this was Barack Obama’s. His campaign understood and applied social media better than any competing candidate. He currently has about 887 thousand followers.

In these depressed times, meteoric success like Twitters cheers me up – all the more so, because it was so improbable. Who’d a thunk it? Initially the experience of most Twitter users, and I include myself, was not love at first Tweet. Gradually, we found ways of making this lightweight utility pretty darn useful. Each of us did this in different ways with different constituencies.

All is, however, not well in the Twittersphere. It is very likely that increased traffic will strain Twitter’s servers. There will be more temporary interruptions in service just as we had come to depend on Twitter.

Among certain quarters, the objections are more profound and profoundly less rational. That is, by becoming popular, Twitter will loose the cachet it had by being esoteric, counterintuitive, or to many just plain weird. As in one of Yogi’s bon mot “it’s so crowded nobody goes there.”

PR maven and Twitter user Steve Rubel posits the decline of Twitter because the geeks, who were its first patrons, will desert it for the next cool thing.
Technology analyst Jeremiah Owyang, expects a backlash as Twitter approaches mainstream.
While PC Magazine columnist Lance Ulanoff laments that “Oprah and Ashton will destroy Twitter.

I don’t think so. Email may be uncool, but it’s not going away anytime soon. Most of those who joined Twitter only because of Oprah may drop out, unless she starts Tweeting messages relevant to them. Those who find it useful will stay, no matter how they first got there.