Imagine Your Reality

I needed to redo the last two episodes of social media coach because of poor sound quality. They’ve now been redone and you can hear them this time..

Social Influence and Customer Service

Social Media Policies

In this video I discuss how customer service can be proactive on social media and what the benefits are.

A brief announcement about my available services

I have changed my services for social media. While I still offer some training, the majority of what I offer is social media management. For more information about social media management and my prices for it, please go to my website.

Carri Bugbee pointed me to this article about the suckiness of Facebook customer service, when she noted on her twitter stream recently that they had yet again complicated the User Interface (UI) by requiring users to add a plug-in in order to upload pictures. My guess in regards to the plug-in is they want to get more data, but needlessly complicating the UI in the mix just seems to create more problems and potentially gets people to leave Facebook. So why doesn’t Facebook care about what its users have to say?

My guess is they’ve gotten too big and like many other big companies they don’t think what the user has to say actually matters. It seems rather odd that its a social media company that thinks this way, if only because social media has proven that if enough customers speak out, the company will feel the pain and pressure. Than again, for that to occur, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to get enough people with substantial social influence to speak out, so that their followers accordingly bring the pressure to bear on the company.

At some point, the continued changes that Facebook makes to the user interface, which are done in a manner that inconveniences the user, will catch up to Facebook and more people will leave then join. It might be useful for Facebook to remember that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and to also remember that good customer service engenders the loyalty and trust that keeps people using the site.

Realistically, customer service can’t solve or satisfy every customer, but ideally the majority of people should come away feeling that the problem was addressed in a manner that showed them the company cared. When companies don’t handle customer service responsibly, it may for the moment cause the customer to leave frustrated, but in the age of social media, it can bring the torches and pitchforks to the gates, while causing current customers to start questioning whether they will really be taken care of.

Hopefully Facebook will appreciate that and improve their customer service, especially as there business is based on the very medium that so many people are starting to use to get their voices heard by big companies who’d rather ignore them.

The Latest Episode of Social Media Coach Radio is up! In this show I discuss social influence and who has it and who doesn’t as well as how it can be used.

Next week’s topic will be about the do’s and don’ts of developing social media policies.

Also be on the lookout for more interviews from Imagine Your Reality Radio. I’ve got a two shows scheduled, with two more in the wings!

In this video blog, I discuss the connection between social media and customer service.

Last week, I posted an entry asking whether social media is really as empowering for customers as it’s made out to be. One of the sites my blog gets fed to also has the entry and there was some interesting commentary on the post about an artist, who had been ripped off, and who protested about it to the company and on social media sites. The company denied it, until Neal Gaiman, the author stepped in and spoke up on his social media, with his thousands of followers. Only then did the company respond to the artist and show any sign of trying to remedy the situation.

So do you see how social influence really works and who is really empowered? Yes consumers are empowered by social media to a larger extent than ever before, but companies will only listen when you can get someone behind you with a sufficient following that it makes the company pay attention to how their reputation is being effected by the influential person. The key to getting a company to respond to social pressure on social media is to find people who will take up your cause and spread it to everyone they know.

And to any company that reads this, it truly speaks to the state of customer service that consumers need to get someone influential and famous behind them, to get you to respond in the way you should respond in the first place. Companies actually have an unprecedented opportunity to engage their customers proactively with good customer service, but continue to drop the ball in favor of trying to preserve the bottom line. The problem with that thinking is that it alienates customers and loses their loyalty, and the truth is that the bottom line is driven more by customer loyalty than by anything else.

Social influence is powerful and shouldn’t be underestimated, but we also shouldn’t overestimate it, as some social media enthusiasts are wont to do. It’s important to understand what social media can do, and more importantly what you need to do, to get the results you want. For customers that want a company to respond, find someone who’s influential and get that person behind your cause. The company will respond then. They have no choice when they see that they are getting lots of negative publicity. That, in the end, is really the equation of social influence and customer service.

Sometimes, no matter how much money a client can give you, the relationship you have with that client is toxic, and you have to fire him or her. Many times, a business won’t take that action, because they are more concerned with getting the money than actually preserving their sanity or happiness. The problem with that mentality is that its a scarcity mentality. You are more worried about the money and the security it brings, than about focusing on being happy. The irony is that when you focus on trying to keep that kind of client with you, you actually can end up more stressed and lost money, because you’re always having to deal with the client’s issues. You know the client I’m talking about:

S/he constantly complains about the price, constantly has questions or problems, constantly complains about business, and otherwise makes your life miserable, because nothing you do is ever enough for that client. There’s only one thing you can do with a client like that:

Fire your client. That’s right: fire your client. If you find yourself spending more time on that client and his/her issues, business and personal, then it’s time to fire him/her. You might lose some money, but you’ll be surprised at how much time and energy you free up and how much happier you will be. In fact, you just might find you get more clients, better clients, because you’re no longer invested in trying to make that problem client happy.

Not all clients are good clients. Some are toxic…and you can recognize them by how much they complain and how much they bring down you mood. If you feel depressed or unhappy about working with a client, it’s time to let go and get focused on clients who will appreciate you, even as you appreciate them.

What do you think?

Something I don’t see often enough is businesses posting about the clients they serve. And I’m not advocating posting bad things or complaints, but rather posting about working with the client, or talking about something the client has done. In other words promoting your client on the social media web.

Why should we do this? It’s a way of showing the client appreciation for working with you, and it also shows that you get the client and agree with the mission the client is on. When it comes down to it, it’s a great opportunity to give back to the client and shows that business just how much you value it.

One of the things I like to do with new clients is interview them on my radio show. It gives me an opportunity to learn more about them, while also promoting them to my listeners, and best of all the client gets to be enthusiastic about what they love to, while getting interviewed by someone who is just as interested in their success as they are.

When we promote clients, we show them support. We also show that we don’t just seem them as numbers or money to be made, but as real people, and ones we have a relationship with. We get invested in their success and at the same time we stay more visible in a positive way to those clients. And let’s face it: Who doesn’t love being interviewed about something that’s important to them? So if you work with a client, post a status update about them on your social networks…tell people what they do and show your client you care about their success. The social capital you get will definitely be more valuable than the amount of income you get.

What do you think?

I read a rather interesting article in Forbes, where a famous person posted about her problems with maytag on twitter and her blog and as a result got Maytag to fix the washer that they originally weren’t going to fix. What this situation and others like it continues to demonstrate is that any person who has a sufficient number of followers will also have corresponding social influence with those followers.

Some people would argue that social media empowers customers in general and I do agree with that notion, when it comes to being able to do research and get opinions from your network, but I also find that the social influence a person has is dictate in large part by how many followers a person has. If I complain about maytag on several social media sites, I might get a response, but if someone has a one million followers, as this person evidently did, then she will definitely get a response, because what she says will motivate action in many more people.

The fact is that while social media can empower consumers and allow them to share information about companies, and complain about those companies, the influence to get a company to respond has to be large enough to actually get that company to take notice. The only time that really differs is if a company is actively proactive in social media and makes a point to respond to issues as they arise instead of waiting for someone influential enough to come along and stir up a lot of people.

It may seem rather cynical to note that only people who have lots of followers get the kind of response that the person in the article received, but in similar cases, when a company has been prompted to respond it has occurred because the person complaining has lots of followers and has issued a call to action that has started to impact a company.

So are customers really empowered by social media? In the sense that they can do research and get information from other people they are, but in terms of complaining, unless you can find someone who has sufficient influence with a lot of other people, its fair to say that a customer continues to have the average amount of influence on companies, which is to say very little. Your best way to change that is to accrue followers and develop enough of a relationship and reputation with them so that they will act when you complain.

In the previous two posts, I focused on identifying your audience and your business model. After you’ve done these two steps, your next step is to focus on learning what your audience needs. Ideally, you already know this since you have clients you are taking care of, but it doesn’t hurt to spend some time checking in on what they need.

First spend sometime writing down key words and phrases that you believe sum up the need that your business meets. You can also include words that you believe people would use to search for your business. You want to think about this in term of need, because what you’re doing is solving a problem of some form or another for the people who are your clients. They may like your service, but what they love is that a problem is being solved.

Next, ask some existing clients what need it is that your service or product fulfills for them. See if what they say matches up to the words you’ve already used to describe the need your business fulfills.  You might also ask them at the time, how well you fulfill their needs and/or what complaints they have. Your reason for asking that question is to learn how to be more proactive with your customer service, a must for using social media for marketing your business.

Finally, compare what you wrote with what your clients told you and determine if there is a trend toward using certain phrases or words to describe what your business does. You’ll then want to get on Twitter or Facebook and search for those same words to see if people on social media sites are using them in context to the problem your business solves. If they are then you can use those phrases for your SEO, and also for finding people on social media sites who need your services (and don’t know it yet).