CHILL ZONE SETS TONE
In fact, without having the advantage you have in face-to-face conversation, to inflect different emotions in your voice or use nonverbal communications, the tone of your written words on Facebook or Twitter is incredibly important. Think about the difference in perception when you read this: “Thank you very much for your feedback, sir. We appreciate your support.” Compared to this, “Thanks, man. You rule!”
The truth is, people are more likely to buy products or services if they feel they know you and like you (both in general and in an online sense.) They are therefore much more apt to want to see something positive than something negative about your company. If you can authentically and accelerate positive word of mouth about your organization, social media provides the tools for accomplishing this on a huge scale. In the offline world, if a customer shares positive feedback, it’s the perfect time to ask, “Do you have friends who would be appropriate for me to talk to?” Or, more passively, “Thanks. Please let your friends know on Facebook. Or when you receive a compliment, it’s the perfect time to say, “Thanks. Please suggest this page to your friends! Click the link beneath our profile pic.” The average person on Facebook has about 130 friends, but some people have as many as 5,000 (which is the maximum) and then many people following them. It is likely that your happy customer has more than a few friends who might also be interested in your page and will show their endorsements as well, creating a cycle of approval. The situation is similar with Twitter. On Twitter, if you receive positive feedback, reply and ask the user to re-tweet, or share you with the user’s followers. The average person on Twitter has 120 followers, and some have as many as 50,000 or more. Again, one recommendation on Twitter can go a long way toward building a new follower base. None of this can happen however, if you don’t recognize and thank your customers who actively follow and interact with each and every one of them.
Action Items:
1. Determine how you will allocate resources to respond to negative comments posted on social networks. Is it the visibility of the marketing department, the customer service department, an agency, or an agency?
2. Develop a plan to respond swiftly and publicly. Work with your lawyers to develop language that is OK by them and is as customer-friendly as possible.
3. Make sure you have enough resources to manage negative comments in a timely manner. Have the resources to not only respond to comments but actually fix the problems efficiently.
4. Write a list of five ways you can respond to negative situations positively, turn around customer complaints, and use “surprise and delight” to leverage otherwise negative situations.
ACTIVATE YOUR BRAND AMBASSADORS
Every small business knows that the handful of customers who are your die-hard people who swear by your service, all the time, or consistently refer others to your business. Big brands hopefully have even more of these people—folks I call—brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors are those customers who love your organization no matter what. They are happy to tell others about your company without any special incentive, and without you even asking them to. Still, they’ll be more likely to spread the word if you do ask, so why wouldn’t you?
Picture Rod Tidwell telling Jerry Maguire (in the movie of the same name): “Jerry Maguire, my agent. You’re my ambassador of quan.” Tidwell describes “quan” as “the entire package” made up of love, respect, community, and the dollars, too. Come the end of the day, this quality, “quan,” is what all companies are searching for: a community built of mutual respect resulting in financial growth for the business and satisfied, loyal customers. Brand ambassadors, or so-called “ambassadors of quan,” want to share the “special sauce” that you’ve got—all you have to do is tell them to. It helps that now, thanks to social networks and privacy settings, you can quickly tell how many online friends people have. Online influence varies greatly from one person to the next, and since all organizations have limited resources, you’ll want to find brand ambassadors who not only adore you but also have lots of friends, fans, or followers. Once you’ve identified your brand ambassadors, you can do much more than just thank them for being customers. You can reward them with incentives, special perks, and exclusive content. For example, provide them with online tools or samples of your product so they can share with friends or hand the products out at parties they might host with your help. You can give them multimedia content such as pictures and videos and encourage them to create “mashups,” adding their own voice and interpretation to your material before passing it along to followers. The goal is to activate your customers who love you enough to regularly share their passion for you publicly.
FULL DISCLOSURE
You’ll want to amplify your brand ambassadors’ voices as much as possible—just make sure you have them disclose their relationship with you. If you end up giving them anything of material value, the Federal Trade Commission requires that reviewers disclose they received something in exchange for posting a review or other comments. For instance, you can’t give someone a trip to your resort in exchange for them blogging or writing on Facebook about their experience, unless they clearly disclose that they received a free trip in exchange for the review. (More on transparency in Chapter 9.0). Word-of-mouth marketing has always been a good business practice, but today, the ability to effectively and efficiently utilize it through social networks is unparalleled. In the past, if a celebrity visited your store, you’d certainly treat him exceptionally well and ask him to spread the word about his experience. Now it is important to think of every customer as an online celebrity with followers, friends, and, above all, influence. Sure, not everyone who posts on your Facebook wall or tweets about you has as much sway or trendsetting ability as some “celebrities,” but they certainly can spread the word on your behalf easily and quickly—especially if you thank and encourage them. Some users probably have more online influence than so-called celebrities, too!
Action Items:
1. Create a social brand bible for response. Determine what your brand’s voice should be like in its responses to customers on social networks. Fun? Serious? Personal? Professional? Write down several different specific ways, based on this brand voice that you would say “Thank you” to a happy customer.
2. Determine the necessary resources to respond to every customer with a comment or question who posts on a social network, based on your understanding of the current number of customers, fans, and followers your organization has. How will your staff do this? Will you do it internally or use an outside vendor? What about nights and weekends?
3. Determine formal or informal ways you can reward your most loyal and influential customers in order to accelerate the positive word-of-mouth recommendations they have. What assets can you offer? What expectations will you have? How can you be assured that they are following the laws of the land and disclosing to their friends what they received from you?
TRULY VALUING ALL YOUR CUSTOMERS
Every company says it cares about its customers, but so many don’t actually back up this claim on social networks, let alone elsewhere. You wouldn’t hang up the phone on a customer or walk away from one face-to-face, so don’t ignore them on Facebook, Twitter, or any other online social networking medium either. By valuing each customer, at least enough to say “Thanks,” you show the world that you are truly an organization that cares about its customers. By throwing in some surprise delight and getting your biggest fans to further spread the word your “quan” can travel a long way.
Let’s take this customer care example: “Thank you for calling us. This is your customer care advocate, how can I be of service to you today?” You hear this on the opposite end of the line. “Great”, you think, this sounds like someone who can help. “I’d like to dispute part of my bill that I don’t understand,” you reply. “Account number, please,” the customer care advocate responds. Though you entered that number into your phone keypad just moments ago when you first called, y
ou proceed to give the representative the information anyhow. “I’m sorry,” the customer care advocate replies. “There’s nothing I can do about that problem. You’ll have to speak with the billing department, and they’re only open Monday through Friday. Can I help you with anything else today?” The employee is just doing his job, of course, but all his job entails is following a script. Not only does this interaction leave you frustrated at the company’s inability to help you with your problem, but it also may leave you scratching your head about the inauthenticity of considering a phone agent a “customer care advocate.” In no way does this employee’s job seem to involve caring or advocating for you, the customer.
How about “financial counselors”? Have you ever received assistance from a “financial counselor” who in fact is an insurance salesperson concerned little, if at all, with helping you sort out your financial issues? Not everybody with the job title of customer care advocate or financial counselor is inauthentic. There are likely lots of great folks doing those jobs. But the job titles themselves are misleading, intentionally or not. Of course, this inauthenticity does not apply only to job titles: brand promises from slogans, advertisements, and websites are often guilty of the same inaccuracies or false representations. Many large companies have a hard time being authentic in their interactions with customers. As organizations get larger, it becomes difficult to manage higher volumes of staff and clients. To deal with this growth, managers develop models and processes, and customer service centers create scripts. These attempts at efficiency might cause some aspects of the organization to run smoothly, but in dealing with customers, they make it easy to miss the mark. Models, processes, and scripts will not help you connect with your consumer. Instead, such impersonal devices create a division between your service or product and customer, with a loss of valuable human interaction. Social media provides an opportunity to reverse this trend for larger organizations and to showcase authenticity for smaller ones. Your company can actually “be human” in dealing with its customers through current social networks. You’ll find that your customers will respond positively and appreciate you more as well. Be warned, the of this is true as if you try to deal with huge numbers of customers on social networks in an inauthentic, highly processed way, it can and will backfire. Before going any further, I should point out specifically what I mean when I say that you have to be authentic on social networks. Overall, you have to be human and demonstrate a personality. No one wants to feel as if she is talking to a machine or dealing with someone who cannot empathize with her situation.
The online social Web is all about human interaction connecting with one another on some level. As a company, you need to want to connect with your consumers or prospects in a personal or individual manner. You also have to be flexible and responsive, with the ability to cater to a customer’s various or changing needs, wants, opinions, and ideas. Become part of the online conversation and truly seek to understand your consumers and the role your product or service plays, or could play, in their actual life. While in the context of representing your brand, you, and anyone else connected with your organization, have to be the person you really are—you can’t fake it anymore when it comes to dealing with the consumer. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for the hit movie The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook and its early days, told Stephen Colbert in a television interview (aired September 30, 2010) that social networking is more of a performance than a reality. He so glaringly missed the point. On the contrary, social networking, done well, is authentic and real, unlike Sorkin’s scripts. Others have speculated that social network users are narcissists, sharing their every move with the world (think when users post what kind of cereal they had for breakfast this morning). Yes, there are some people, and companies, who use social net- works for such self-centered purposes and fail to see the true possibilities of harnessing the online social Web. Such users are short-sighted and in many ways tragic, as the promise of social network communication holds much greater potential. Facebook, for example, can in fact be a place for people to authentically connect with one another and for companies to build true and long-lasting relationships with customers and prospects.
BE AN IMPROV SHOW, NOT A MUSICAL
Musicals, plays, and operas are all wonderful, traditional forms of entertainment. Theatergoers attend, sit back, and relax, and the performers “put on a show.” Performances can be subtle and nuanced but are often loud, larger-than-life productions, especially musicals. Most musicals include lots of color and sound expensive. They use scenery, props, and costumes in an attempt to “wow” the audience and leave a lasting impression. The same script is performed night after night, and with stellar writing, acting, singing, and directing, the show comes together and wins over the crowd. Improvisation comedy shows, on the other hand, usually have little to no set and almost nothing scripted. Improv features several performers, who interact with the audience throughout each show by soliciting ideas for skits then basing their performances on audience suggestions each night. Unlike a musical, every show is different, but as long as the audience brings creative or interesting ideas and high energy, and the performers are talented, it makes for an incredible experience. Your brand, company, or organization can create such an experience for your customers and prospects on networks. Even better news is that this can be done without the huge budget of a Broadway show or a television commercial. It will, however, require a fundamental shift in the way you see media and marketing, now that social media has enabled a two-way conversation between the company and the consumer. You’ll have to think less about “putting on a show” and more about building an excellent team that is flexible, able to go with the flow, responsive, and engaged. And unlike in improv, in which performers are playing different parts every night, your team needs to rely on its own authenticity as unique, individual people.
DEVELOP AN AUTHENTIC VOICE
Advertising has traditionally been more like a Broadway musical than an improv show. The goal has been to create a brilliant distraction to get people’s attention, be noticeable, or generate buzz, even if the products or services offered often lack a sense of authenticity. Consumers, however, have gotten used to talking to each other through social networks with a level of humanity they have come to expect from all users. Now, as an advertiser or company, you need to join in this conversation, and when you do so, your organization must keep your consumers’ expectations in mind. You have to be an authentic human being in your interactions. Anything less and your consumer might consider the conversation nothing more than a marketing ploy, no better than if you repeated a bland corporate mantra. Consider what your brand or organization is really like. How can you convert our mission statement or the “About Us” page on your website into actual conversations you’ll facilitate and be involved in each day on Facebook and Twitter? You need to let the world know about your company’s, or brand’s, personality while showing that you truly care about your consumers and are willing to put the time in to make a connection with them.
REGULATING DISCUSSIONS
Hopefully, your organization already has protocols for how customer service reps interact with customers, how salespeople pitch prospects, or how public relations executives talk to traditional media reps. With the advent of social networking, all of that “talk” online is a matter of public record forever. There is a tendency, especially in large organizations, to carefully regulate that speech, making sure it meets corporate and legal guidelines and that nobody says the “wrong thing.” For example, corporate communications and legal departments may be concerned about their employees or representatives going “off message”, making negative comments, or admitting liability through an apology. That attitude is a mistake on social networks and renders authentic communication nearly impossible. The more you try to regulate brand conversations, the more impersonal you’ll make them, and the less customers will respond. Worse still, the less flexible and authentic you are, the more it will sho
w, and the less you’ll be trusted. Remember, online, your trust and reputation with customers is everything “happy” at your company. So what can you do to keep the lawyers but maintain that all-important authenticity? The best solution is to develop a set of guidelines for what tone of voice will be used and what you really can’t say. Then, make sure that trustworthy people are representing the organization on social media platforms.
THE AUTHENTIC CELEBRITY
Social media provides a platform for celebrities, who typically have had to hire marketers or publicists to promote them and speak directly with consumers and fans. Actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, authors, and other public figures all have excellent opportunities to grow their fan bases, shape public perception, and accomplish their objectives by harnessing online social networking. Authenticity must be a key part of their plan, though. Ideally, any public persona is Facebooking and tweeting for themselves, an authenticity that is impossible to top. Keep in mind that mobile phones allow anyone to share information on the run, opening a world of instant communication no matter where you are or what you are doing. Of course there will be times when fan interaction may not be feasible, and it certainly is not possible for public figures to respond to each and every comment from admirers on their own. Agencies or staffers are commonly hired to help in this process, but still attempt to make the response as personal as possible, sometimes indicating when they, and not the celebrity, are responding by sharing the initials of their name. Being up front as to who is actually responding on behalf of the public figure maintains authenticity.
Be Your Brand Page 14