We’re asking companies to listen and use social media but when they do, we question their motives. Or whether they really care. Or whether they’re just responding because someone yelled loud enough or has enough followers. Or whether they’re just going through the motions because someone said they should.
What exactly do we want from them?
I, for one, am happy to see businesses that are starting to change the way they do things to meet new customer expectations. That doesn’t mean every business can overhaul their customer service in the blink of an eye, or resolve every issue perfectly, or prevent every mistake from happening. And sure, some companies are probably getting involved reluctantly or with some initially misguided intent.
But if we’re going to stomp our feet and demand that they pay attention to us and this social media thing, don’t we have the responsibility to offer a little bit of acknowledgement – dare I say commendation – when they do? When they try? When they start somewhere?
When I told people I wanted to lose weight and try a new start at fitness, I got lots of cries of support that included “starting is the hardest part!” and “little changes can equal big results” and all that stuff. Everyone encouraged the change and the importance of the effort. No one would ever dream of disparaging me from not being able to run a marathon in the weeks that I start to jog around my block.
But we do that with businesses. All the time.
We’re asking them to change, but we’re exceedingly unwilling to reward small victories or acknowledge effort. It’s all or nothing. The fact that someone responded to a Tweet just means they’re scared, not that they might actually be trying to deliver better customer service. If someone comments on a blog post, it must be because they’re trying to cover their butt, not because they really are trying to improve their responsiveness and connection with their community.
Heaven forbid a business take a baby step.
I know there are trust issues in business, folks. That’s part of why we’re all here doing this stuff. But if we’re going to be the agents of change, we have to be willing to nurture it, not crush it in it’s awkward and sometimes stuttering beginnings.
Go on being a cynic if you like, or always assuming the worst, or refusing to be satisfied with anything other than perfection. I’m going to be over here giving people a chance to do exactly what we’re asking of them, and doing my best to reward the small changes along the way.
I’d love to have you with me.
I know what are you talking about Amber, and I also think I know the answer to why people (me included) behave wrongly towards brands taking their steps into social media: we stop thinking to interact with humans and we think we’re interacting with robots. We think brands are there to exploit the good that’s left on the Internet, brands cannot be honest or involved, they just want our money.
Of course any brand with a SM strategy is there to eventually earn something out of it, but this doesn’t mean their interaction with us cannot be as genuine as any other, after all there still is a human behind that corporate account. For now.
Hi Amber.
You’re absolutely right of course – it’s all to easy to view any ‘corporate’ attempt at ‘social interaction’ as a veiled attempt to simply sell you something, and that’s probably still the thinking behind a lot of commercial social activity.
But if they haven’t already, then they’ll soon learn that those companies that are successful with their social strategies spend more time listening and replying than simply broadcasting a sales message.
Of course, the real test is are companies / brands prepared to pay someone to monitor all frequencies?
Until we encourage some sort of participation by ignoring the ‘sales speak’ and interacting in a more natural way, nothings going to really change (sigh!) – I guess we’ll keep on doing what we’re doing – like right here and now – and eventually everyone will catch on and catch up.
There’s a certain answer machine like phobia for many when feel they want to respond or start a dialogue with a brand / business.
Jonathan
Having a bit of the social media for dummies-type talk in your training and consulting is fine as long as you convey that there are certain best practices and minimum standards that your clients need to shoot for, but not acknowledging the steps they take to get to their goals is just bad business. I feel like engaging a consultant or an agency demonstrates enough intention to warrant a bit of patience and support from any SM consultant, whether they’re the ones being engaged or not. For some of my clients, I’ve found that, even though I would have liked them to have started faster, it’s probably better that they didn’t because interaction rates, FFFs, etc sometimes cannot be pushed too much regardless of how active an organization is. If they had started faster, they might have just been investing more time and effort than the benefits warranted.
Hurrah for celebrating the small stuff! That’s what’s going to help resolve the trust issues that exist in business. 🙂 Great post Amber, thank you for raising this – I hadn’t given it much thought till now.
We’re a terribly cynical lot, aren’t we? Especially when it comes to the corporate world. Thank you, Amber, for reminding us to start giving folks the benefit of the doubt a little more frequently, rather than just the doubt.
I’m 100% with you! Give some encouragement to the businesses that are getting a clue and taking a step forward!
This hit a sweet spot with me today. I’m currently working in a situation where an industry as a whole is behind on social. Sure it can be frustrating and then seeing companies jump on and do things “wrong” can easily strike a nerve. However, social media is a learning process. It’s easy for us to lose patience seeing other people just starting to go through a learning process we ourselves may have already gone through years ago.
If we want people to be social, we’re more likely to have success encouraging those little victories. Sometimes just taking the initiative to set up a Twitter/FB/YouTube account is a tiny celebration on its own. These things take time to build. I’ve been working for a year and a half at our company and I’m just now starting to see some gradual adoption by others – within the walls and outside of our company. It takes patience more often than not to see these things work out well.
Encouragement trumps discouragement in regards to change any day
Amen, Amber.
Berating people for trying something that they have not yet mastered – and who has mastered SM? – is just rude. Imagine trying this tactic with your children, students, or employees as they’re learning new skills. There would be very little progress made, and we’d see a lot of people quitting before ever seeing any success.
I congratulate people and businesses for stepping into the unknown, and sometimes shark-infested, waters of SM and committing to learning this new medium for themselves and for their customers. We all start at the beginning. It can be easy to forget that when we’ve moved on to higher levels of understanding and mastery. Our job at that point should be one of guidance – with patience.
Thank you for the heartfelt way in which you write and address issues!
Nice post, Amber.
Jonathan, I’d like to respond to your question, “are companies/brands prepared to pay someone to monitor all frequencies,” with a question: If we are going to lend a helping hand to companies/brands to prepare them to monitor all their frequencies, how far should we go in assuming that role? As social media advisors, should we simply monitor all frequencies on behalf of a company/brand, or is it ok for us to act as a voice on their behalf?
In addition to providing social media strategy to our clients, something we’ve been doing for some time, our PR firm is starting to offer a community manager to clients who need a helping hand implementing social media tactics. In short, this means that the community manager acts as a voice on behalf of the client on social media platforms. As long as this voice is authentic and honest and on message, we don’t see this as any different than ghostwriting a bylined article for a trade magazine. What are your thoughts?
I would argue that sometimes people expect companies to be better at their more “traditional” channels than engaging in Social Media so the perception of businesses trying to cover up comes out. I don’t think this is right, but I’ve audited my thought process, because I too went to hard on businesses just starting to use Social Media and that was what happened with me. I wanted them to have better service and then do Social Media, because I thought the money could work better if invested in improving the quality of service.
But you’re right, we should give companies time and space for them to Wow us with their Social Media initiatives.
I think I will send this post to any company who gets that wicked backhand in the future Amber.
It is interesting how we are often able to dish out criticism with well honed blades of wit, yet often are unable to take it when on the receiving end (the quick “block”, “unfollow” and “de-friend”).
A great reminder Amber and we all dipped our toe in the pool of social media first with some trepidation, rather than being the aggressive undertow, we should serve as the lifeguards or flotation devices for these businesses.
Thank you for your perspective.
Excellent post, Amber. Many businesses are just now “getting” that they need to have a social media presence. We need to encourage and support each other.
I totally love where you’re coming from, but the psychology of the masses will mean this will continue. People on the whole complain more than they compliment when dealing with brands or companies. That’s just human nature. As professionals, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, absolutely. But the consumer? They’re going to do what they do. You can’t please all the people all the time, you just try your best.
I like to think of this just like we do with technology and software. Every product or brand has a beta phase. We have to trust that the company has a vision for it even if they do not have a perfect prroduct from day 1. Our feedback is infact key.
That is what i tell companies i work with. Mistakes are okay as long as they have a good motive and adopt a certain degree of transparency. And since this is really social media and not technology it is all about the people.
Hmm Amber, I’m with you, but what specific examples can you give (just out of curiosity)? I’m usually always one to give props to a job well done, be it in person or in line because I don’t think enough good praise is given anywhere, not just for companies getting into social media. However, recently, you may or may not have heard the story of a northeastern grocery store chain called Price Chopper allowing it’s PR Rep to patrol twitter on her personal twitter account. Which ok, fine, but that person took it upon herself to react strongly to a customer’s semi-negative tweet, and went so far as to contact that customer’s EMPLOYER (quite a few execs actually) just because it was on his twitter bio, and said that he was destructive and negative and should be dealt with. The Consumer Insights team said this was a “rogue” employee who didn’t have the authorization, but this lady (who can no longer be found on twitter) said she was in the PR department. Yes – this is all so new, things don’t change over night, but before anyone DOES jump into it there should be policies in place, and crisis strategies thought about. Obviously this Price Chopper thing is an extreme case, but it brings up an AWFUL lot of issues of companies getting into social media too soon, without consult, and without thinking through their strategy. Sometimes it comes down to basic customer service, so before implementing social media, they should take a look at their already existing practices and make sure that everyone is on the same page in every department.
that’s a great analogy, Maya. I like it.
I wrote about the Price Chopper thing, actually, but in a bit of a different context. And yep, that wasn’t handled well. But to the other side of things, my post yesterday was about Hotel 71 and how I had a difficult experience, and how they remedied it. I had several people on Twitter remark about things like “they only responded because you have all those followers” or “yeah, but do they really care or are they just going through the motions?”
They did everything that I would have wanted them to do, yet there were several dozen people questioning their motives. So which is it? Do we want them to make an effort, or don’t we?
I’m not willing to surrender to “that’s just the way it is.”. I’m on a mission to change that, one person at a time, however I can. You’re right about not pleasing everyone, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop speaking up when I think we can do better as professionals AND individuals.
What you’re getting at – and I agree with – is that the substance has to be there behind the activity. In other words, you have to have the INTENT to deliver good customer service to back up the window dressing. Otherwise, that’s all it is. And that’s why companies DO stumble badly. Putting lipstick on a pig, as they say, just gives you a prettied up pig.
Alexandra, not sure if my .02 are okay to add here too, but… I think agencies can do a great job being that helping hand if – and this is the key bit – they’re doing it with the intent to teach the company how to do it themselves. Like training wheels. You can’t be their “voice” forever, because social media IS different than a trade magazine. Social media’s expectations are different; people are engaging there because they’re looking to have a better connection with the company itself. For the long term, I feel pretty strongly that companies need to lead the interactions for themselves, even if their agency or consultant helps get them on the right path.
We didn’t think we needed websites either, once upon a time. Teaching’s reward is the long term learning. And that doesn’t happen overnight.
We seek advisors because we want support and guidance. And as those purporting to want social media to take hold, we need to exercise some judgment about how we forge that path, and welcome those that are trying to do the right thing. There are mistakes in every nascent industry, but the more we smack down those that misstep, the more they’ll be reluctant to even try.
Glad to have seen this post (thanks to Scott Stratten for posting this blog thru Twitter on @unmarketing). Our business (a thoroughbred horse farm) is trying to gain a social presence, and while we have a facebook page (several actually), and a Twitter account, our *communication* is still lacking. I’m the person in our office who’s being charged with getting this up and running, but social media is a direction that the entire Thoroughbred industry is far behind on. One of the problems we have is that there are two distinct generations involved in the industry–one that embraces technology, the other which despises it. Because of this, any money that would be invested in ensuring a staff member is free to communicate and update social feeds must be shared with the traditional marketing department, which is significantly more costly.
I agree with @Drew, our company has also been trying to get a handle on this new direction for over a year, and it is definitely a long-term growth. What makes it even more difficult is that up until recently, companies and marketing agencies have pushed the whole “cold-calling” approach, something I’ve learned from Scott (mentioned above), and hopefully after reading his book I’ll have a better understanding of the new direction marketing has undertaken. Thankfully I’ve never actually been trained in marketing, so that may be a step in the right direction.
– Dayn
Amber, it’s definitely here a problem in the pharma world, where I do most of my consulting (and speaking and evangelizing…). Since it’s a highly regulated industry, the companies participating tend to take baby steps at first – AS THEY SHOULD – and are often roundly criticized for seeking to practice safe social media. I try to applaud every effort that at least seeks to explore and add value, as tentative as it might be – how else can (understandably) cautious companies make progress??
It’s important that people like you do (and everyone should spread the word too). After 10+ years in media, however, part of me is going to be cynical. But don’t take that as I don’t support the cause 🙂
I think that the “ridiculous expectations” are a trend today – ie. politics – cut budgets and expect schools to not lay off teachers.
I agree – too much “refusing to be satisfied with anything other than perfection” – I think that perfection would say (to me) that it isn’t a person ;-p What makes me nuts is when it is obvious that they are scripted – stop worrying about offending me and TALK to me…
You do make a convincing argument. Using social media is a new thing for many businesses, so it is natural that they wont want to jump into it right away when they have a system already working (somewhat at the moment) which suits them fine.
It would be better if we did encourage them to make baby steps, but very often people dont see the company as a person but rather as something inhuman…a company. So our more usual responce to give encouragement is not present. It comes down to our being able to see a company as a collection of people, worried as anyone would be, in being shouted at trying something new.
Thanks for another great post Amber. Caring is so important but it seems few companies seem to really get that. Caring about your visitors and customers is the mantra of Gary Vaynerchuk I believe it’s a huge part of his success.
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Nick, The Traffic Guy