Social Media Blowback
Friday
Jan 15, 2010
Marketing has historically been a godsend for lousy companies. With an effective marketing team, even the surliest, most incompetent and inattentive companies could create an illusion of excellence, caring and success.
They could write a powerful and inspirational mission statement professing their devotion to essential core values and tout their commitment to clients and community.
In a word, they could lie.
They were able to craft their own deceit because there was no simple, inexpensive and effective way for any single customer to counter their message. What’s a wronged airline passenger to do when the airline bumps you from a flight, loses your luggage or confines you for hours on a frozen tarmac? Before social media, you simply had to take it. Grudgingly, angrily and frustratingly you simply had no ability to counter the beatific corporate message.
Not anymore.
If there’s any aspect of your business that sucks, you can expect these deficiencies to be magnified, not eliminated, through the effective deployment of social media.
While many large companies believe that they can continue to manage and control their message through social media channels, they’re in for a rude awakening. The explosion of social media platforms and their rapid embrace as a tool of retribution by an increasingly savvy and knowledgeable public means that they control your message, not you.
Want proof? United Airlines – with annual revenues of $17 billion and a massive marketing budget – could not control their corporate message when confronted by a single implacable passenger with a broken guitar. When Dave Carroll, a Canadian musician, could not get satisfaction from United for their baggage handlers breaking his guitar he wrote a clever song, shot a video and posted United Breaks Guitars to YouTube where it has accumulated over seven million views and nearly 25,000 negative comments from similarly disgruntled passengers.
While Dave Carroll’s effort received international attention, there are thousands of similar stories emerging every day on blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Legitimately unhappy customers who are simply fed up with poor service, lousy products and an uncaring or inattentive company and who decide to let everyone know exactly how rotten you are.
Social media has permanently shifted the balance of power from deep pocketed corporations to passionate and sophisticated social media participants. Got flaws? You’d better fix them.
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Comments
Heidi Cool
January 15th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
John, this is a great way to phrase the concept. The companies aren’t the only ones with media access. Now all of us are publishers, video producers and whatever else is necessary to bring our message to the people. This post also brought me back to our lunch last summer when you inspired me to write, “Take control of your social media presence before someone does it for you.” That message remains the same, since the companies can’t control the message they must accept it, start listening to the messages that are out there, become part of the conversation, and learn from it all. If they take what they learn and act on it to improve themselves, then the messages will improve as well. In 2010 that’s what will give them control – listening and responding to customers. Of course if you think about it, that’s how it’s always been. Happy and unhappy customers have always told their friends about their experiences. It’s just that now they broadcast them for everyone to hear.
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John Heaney Reply:
January 15th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Heidi, it appears that most of the legacy Fortune 500 type companies are still under the illusion that they can control everything surrounding their message. After all, they’re the ones with the most cash. Not only are they missing the conversations going on whether or not they’re in the room, but they’re failing to respond when their brand is taking incoming fire. United’s response to Dave Carroll was emblematic of these lumbering behemoths. A single tweet from the official United communications flack stating that they were trying to reach Dave and a second tweet saying they were offering to compensate him
to shut him upto take care of him. No blog response. No YouTube response. No genuine apology from a real person with some real responsibility. Just a sterile corporate release. Contrast their response with the way Southwest actually engages their passengers on the assorted SM platforms. Night and day. Now, guess which airline is profitable?[Reply]
Heidi Cool
January 15th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
John, great example. They can’t just pay lip service to the process, and they can no longer assume that their audience is getting their primary messages from mainstream media channels. I can go days without turning on a television or reading a paper. Sometimes I hear about news on Twitter before anywhere else.
As individuals we may be small voices, but connected as we are through social media we have the power of their top corporate clients. When added together we can also produce equivalent revenue, which Southwest seems to have figured out as well.
Aside from the obvious PR failure of not responding appropriately, quickly or effectively, they also failed at seeing the opportunity to turn these lemons into some yummy lemonade. A positive cross-channel response from them could have gotten them all sorts of brownie points at a time when the whole world was looking at them, ears open ready to hear what they had to say. It was like being given 30 minutes of airtime at the Superbowl and not using it because they felt sheepish. And as someone who has had a United Frequent Flyer card for years and generally been happy with the service, I feel like a customer who has been let down. It makes me wonder why something I’ve generally liked seems to have wandered off track. That’s not a way to build loyalty. Granted I’m not jetting about that often, but others are. This once small customer service failure turned into a major brand management fiasco through a simple communications failure that could easily have been avoided.
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John Heaney Reply:
January 15th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
So much of a company’s facility with social media seems to be a reflection of their corporate culture. Compared to Southwest, United is a sclerotic, hidebound bureaucracy whose instinctive response to a public complaint revolves around carefully crafted statements from a centrally managed corporate communications department, not an immediate, genuine response from their front line employees. It’s simply not in their corporate DNA to respond creatively. Besides, their legal department would never allow it.
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