United Airlines recently learned the hard way that news of substandard customer service travels far and fast, especially on social media. When the airline, on a flight from Nova Scotia to Nebraska by way of Chicago, was responsible for breaking a guitar that belonged to singer-musician Dave Carroll, his band recorded and posted a music video titled “United Breaks Guitars” on YouTube.
It turned out to be not just any video, but one that generated 6.6 million hits (at last count), which might as well be translated into a public relations death by 6.6 million cuts. United eventually responded with an offer of compensation, but the damage was done. “They were talking about United breaking the guitar, with quite a catchy little tune, but it’s really a story about poor customer service,” noted Paul Gibler, founder of the Madison-based marketing firm ConnectingDots. “United did not respond right away, and it did not realize the negative impact that it could have.”
With social media, benefits outweigh the negatives, especially when tools are used to engage, not enrage, the customer base. In the current economic climate, it can also patch up any hard feelings from downsizing and restructuring. “I think the biggest benefit is to build that conversation with the customer and be accessible,” said Deanne Boegli, national public relations manager for TDS Telecommunications. “Over time, we’ve had to make cuts in terms of open offices and local communities, and social media tools allowed us to reopen a door where a person can communicate with us”
Facebook has fans and Twitter has followers, but not every company has begun the process of building a following with social media, even though the tools are being integrated across platforms. Gibler cited multiple factors, including economics and a lack of technological savvy, for the reluctance of some organizations to employ social media tools. “Some of it is just unfamiliarity with what social media is all about and what it can do for a company,” he noted. “I think probably a lack of understanding that it does take people, resources, and technology resources to do it right, and then I think there is fear of losing control of messaging and losing control of their presentation in the market.
“I think for some companies, that’s probably the biggest thing.”
The lack of guidelines could be another inhibiting factor, but legal disputes soon might provide some clarification. Gibler cited the Los Angeles Times as an example of where the firewall between the personal and the professional is coming down. In a message to be mindful about what they post on social media, he said the paper has informed employees to assume their personal and social media lives have merged.
Related to that is the issue of who owns some of these social-media creations. Gibler offered an applicable scenario. “Let’s say if you work for a company and become a personality in that company as the chief social media person, or the person out on Twitter,” he said. “And let’s say the next thing you know, you move onto another organization, yet you have an account that has been in your personality and your voice. Suddenly, it’s a question of do you own that or does the company own that?
“There are some legal issues that are starting to arise on topics like that.”
State of the Union
Gibler cited the Wisconsin Union Theater’s use of Twitter as an example of a local organization that putting using social media to work.
“I ‘tweeted’ about going to a performance at the Union Theater, a [jazz singer] Jane Monheit performance, and I got a direct message back telling me that if I liked Jane Monheit, that I might like one of their performers who was coming in February,” he recounted. “It was a good marketing opportunity for them to not only show that they were paying attention to tweet about their brand, but also trying to remarket additional ticket sales.”
Esty Dinur, marketing and communications director for the Wisconsin Union Theater, said the theater has used a variety of social media, including blogs, e-newsletters, Twitter, and Facebook, and they tend to work hand-in-hand. The theater has 1,502 followers on its Twitter account, and 543 fans on Facebook, and while its use of those tools hasn’t reached the market segmentation stage, the theater can use them to get the word out.
For example, a scheduled concert by pianist Simone Dinnerstein received some press attention with coverage from 77 Square and local blogger Jacob Stockinger, who posted a two-part interview with Dinnerstein. The theater made sure its followers were aware of this coverage, sending tweets to followers that contained links to the articles. It also promotes its programs by sending tweets with links of good artistic reviews. “We have an e-mail account dedicated to getting information from Google about anything written on the artists that come to us,” Dinur said. “We go through that regularly to see interesting reviews.”
Wisconsin Union Theater also is interested in the kind of self-reviews that social media can provide. While Dinur supervises the use of these tools, a lot of the actual work is done by student interns. One day, Dinur discovered that an intern was deleting uncomplimentary feedback, and she put a stop to it because of what can be learned from criticism. “I think it’s very important to consider social media to be social,” she said.
Through student blogs, the theater can communicate with a target audience, student patrons, in their own language. Dinur does not write or edit the blogs because it’s important for new generations of students to convey authenticity. Recently, one student wrote a compelling Halloween piece about ghosts in the theater, which is actually a campus legend already chronicled on the theater’s Web site.
“It’s my feeling that we used to have generations that lasted 30 years, but now it seems like a generation is maybe two years because there is always new technology and new ways of communicating,” she noted.
The blogs have caused some anxious moments. A few years ago, an intern wrote a scathing blog about two artists that were part of the World Music Festival — not exactly good public relations for a theater that promotes it. Dinur had to weight that against the desired authenticity and, as luck would have it, nobody complained. “That was really the only moment that felt risky because the students bought into what we’re doing here,” she said.
On the Facebook channel, the theater sends its fans various links to articles, Web sites, and videos. Thanks to the advancement of high-speed Internet and streaming video, and formats like Adobe Flash Player that are more compatible with Internet browsers, online social media tools like YouTube have become a cost-effective way to distribute video.
Plus, unlike the spray-and-pray approach of television, a simple metric like the number of hits can tell you exactly how many people have seen the video, or passed it around. “When done right, when you produce a great-looking video that connects with people and then put it on social media vehicles, it produces a great viral effect, which is the great benefit of it,” said Paul Ranola, co-owner of Requisite Video Productions.
One thing Wisconsin Union Theater learned from Facebook, however, is that even social media has its social limits. To get more fans, the theater was conducting campaigns on Facebook, but people found that irritating. “We stopped doing that,” Dinur stated. “We’re letting people find it themselves.”
With a new tracking mechanism, Dinur has plans to evaluate Twitter’s impact on the box office, but the theater used a survey to find that while much of its audience is into social media, a good portion is still is wedded to print. “We are learning that different audiences have different preferences,” Dinur said, “and the direction is to go toward segmentation of various media.”
Mary Bart, Faculty Focus Editor for Magna Publications, indicated that Twitter allows for segmentation via grouped networks. Bart plans to use Twitter to update prospective attendees about a forthcoming Teaching Professor Conference. She was surprised to learn how quickly she could build a network of Twittering college professors.
The use of the TweetDeck feature to organize her network of professors into different tiers based on frequency of contact has made it a more efficient tool. Once skeptical of the silly things people would tweet on Twitter, she now knows it can be content-rich and relevant and she’s become a convert — assuming it’s used for the right reasons. “You run into people who use it just to promote themselves, and that turns people off very quickly,” Bart explained. “You really need to be transparent as far as who you are.”
Channeling TDS
The more astute companies are setting up well-aligned social media customer service units and social media marketing units. TDS Telecommunications now deploys a Facebook page, three Twitter accounts (including niches), and LinkedIn to engage employees, customers, and the media.
According to Boegli, Twitter came in handy during power outages in metropolitan Milwaukee. TDS has experienced two cable cuts in the Milwaukee area, including downed phone lines that eliminated one sales channel. Still, the company has been able to communicate estimated service restoration times — in real time.
“During the last outage, our phone lines were down and we had no way to get to the media people we normally talk to,” Boegli said. “We were able to do it though Twitter on their Blackberries, and it worked pretty well.”
In these circumstances, a customer service Twitter is used to provide immediate interaction, through group posts, with rate payers. Twitter, e-mail, and the company Intranet were used to disseminate H1N1 information; Twitter primarily was used to provide links to stories about prevention.
TDS also is using a LinkedIn account to connect alumni with existing employees, which not only builds a sense of corporate family but exposes current workers to a reservoir of knowledge that has retired, but can still be tapped into. To a limited extent, LinkedIn can be used for internal collaboration, but Boegli said the company is researching social sites like Mingle and collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint to help foster that.
Twitter has been especially beneficial in posting job openings. According to Boegli, those postings tend to get “re-tweeted” a lot. “We may say we have an open position, and we may do a hashtag [a way to group tweets] with jobs or a hashtag with careers, and then that will feed into people’s search feeds,” she explained. “We’ve been very successful with the job postings.”
Facebook, which is in its infancy at TDS, is used a lot like Twitter, only in more depth for product updates, new or extended promotions, give-aways, and news coverage and press releases. Interested customers can become a fan of TDS’ Facebook page, just as they can opt to become Twitter followers, and then company updates automatically post to their site.
“Once they become a fan, they sort of opt-in to get those notices from us,” Boegli explained. “It’s only a few months old, so we’re still trying to build our base and encourage customers to follow us [on Twitter] and be a fan [Facebook] so that we can really use these channels to a greater extent.”
If TDS is able to build a base with thousands of fans through its Web site and marketing, it might replace some of its printed newsletters. “The trick in all of this is that they [customers] have to follow you. You can reach out, but you can only reach out to people who have decided to follow you. So our goal for the next year is to get more fans and more followers, and to do that you have to continuously put out information they want.”
Customer segmentation and additional permission-based marketing will have to wait until the fan and follower bases are built to a sufficient degree. In terms of engaging customers, Boegli believes social media tools help more in the area of serving existing customers than in attracting new ones. “I would say, for the most part, it’s the existing customer because those are the people you need to communicate with immediately,” she noted. “Over time, from a marketing perspective, if we were to advertise on Facebook and get customers that way, that’s difficult with our geographic-specific nature.”
The main cautionary tale is to not go overboard. Boegli said the communications channel has to be respected, and that a blast full of junk mail will turn fans into boo-birds. “They are obviously very personal media for a lot of people,” she said, “so I don’t want to make our fans angry by posting too many times.”
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