I’m always fascinated with the day-after fallout of the Super Bowl adfest. There are plenty of people doing their Monday morning armchair quarterbacking thing, lamenting how terrible the commercials were and how much they continue to suck year after year. It’s at this point I try to take my branding hat off and recognize something I think is rather important. The commercials were not made for us. They were made for the 95% of everyone else who wants to be entertained. They were made for people like my dad who could give two craps if there was an overabundance of slapstick violence and dudes trying to pick up chicks (Love you, Dad!). The only metric here is whether the ads were amusing and some of them were very amusing and entertaining, indeed.

Time for all of us who claim to be brand and online cognoscenti to get off our high horse and recognize that Super Bowl ads are not Shakespeare and they don’t need to be earth-shatteringly original. These commercials are made to appeal to a broad population and that population sits right in the middle of America. Like it or not. They like watching Betty White and Abe Vigoda get creamed in a football game, they like dudes wearing Doritos and attacking people, (and I guess they must like guys wandering the African savanna in their underwear).

Of course, feel free to not take my word for it. I grew up on Benny Hill and The Three Stooges so dumb, risque, slapstick humor is part of my cultural heritage.

Is your business still thinking of marketing as a set of campaigns? It might be time to switch gears and start thinking more about connecting with prospects and customers via community. Today, we learned that two major brands are rethinking their strategies (also read here):

Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010.

Yes, these are the big kahunas of the corporate branding universe…but can their strategies work for small and medium-sized businesses? Not only do I think the answer is a resounding “100% yes!”, I believe that building community over campaigns is an absolute must for nearly any enterprise today. Why?

Read the full blogpost at BaileyHill Insights…

photo credit: scoobay (via Flickr)

A few weeks ago, Mack Collier asked the question of whether your blog is losing its identity. To a great extent, Mack’s post was about the increasing degree of homogeneity in blog content. His perception is that most blogs are going the route of How-Tos, Echo Posts, and Top 10 Lists. It’s an interesting observation considering that most folks will say that its these types of blogposts that get the most visibility and attention.

The post also provoked a slightly different reaction with me. Below is the comment I left with some subtle updates:

Mack, here’s the problem and it’s one that I believe affects all media, both new and old. Do people really want to read original and fresh ideas? Or do they want to read overly-provocative posts from familiar and famous sources? For old media examples, we see hyper-provocative personalities on TV and print get all the attention as well as find run-of-the-mill sitcoms and stagnant dramas remain on-air year after year. This is while smart voices and excellent programming struggles to gain visibility and survive.

If we’re really serious about wanting more innovative and interesting ideas from our blogs, we not only have to write them…we have to nurture them in others. It starts with stepping out of our comfort zones and reading new blog sources. If someone writes really great stuff but it goes unnoticed, it’s very likely that they’ll stop writing altogether or submit to the more formulaic blog writing ideas that seem to attract the most eyeballs.

Now, let’s all do something positive and introduce great AND NEW writings to our own readers.

I honestly believe that if you carry influence in the online space, you have an obligation to use your voice to not just lift up familiar folks you know, but perhaps more importantly, give visibility to smart and talented folks who are less known. This goes triple for A-listers, some of which are better than others in this regard.

So for 2010, let’s make it a point to share visibility with other smart folks who need more attention to their ideas. And I’ll start…here are a just few who I’m excited to see more of their work:

Kelly Stonebock (@kellyopoly): kellystonebock.wordpress.com
A.J. Bingham (@ajbingham): readaj.com
Roxanne McHenry (@roxannemchenry): roxannemchenry.com

What will you do to help bring visibility to smart folks you know?

I hate the holiday shopping hoards and the inevitable battle against the sea of over-tired and under-patient humanity. Thank heavens for the internet. I try to do most of my Christmas shopping online these days, but it’s almost unavoidable that I’ll need to pick at least one gift up at an actual brick-and-mortar store. So it is that I found myself at one of the local upscale outdoor shopping centers that are prevalent throughout Austin. These places are far more than your everyday, pedestrian strip malls. They have immaculate boulevards and well-landscaped walkways to entice us weary shoppers out of our hard-earned money by convincing us we’re far more cosmopolitan than we might actually be. These shopping centers also have their typical upscale retail establishments like J. Crew, Coach and Burberry with their artfully designed storefronts. But as I entered another of these stores, I found myself faced with a parallel to something I see frequently in my work.

The store’s windows and exterior were creatively developed to be eye-catching. I imagine someone painstakingly took their time to design and arrange the various props to entice casual shoppers like me to open the door. It was all so neatly done that I felt compelled to go inside and see if they had a gift for my wife. And here’s where the disappointment hit me like Santa himself swinging a bag of coal at my head. Not one of the sales staff welcomed me, not one asked if I was looking for anything in particular, not one did anything that would potentially complete a successful transaction. As easily as I entered, I left. What the hell was the whole point of the work devoted on the outside if it all goes to waste inside?

Now before you think this is just a problem with the retail buying experience as a whole, let’s think about a similar experience in the online world. Most businesses know they need a web presence to compete and so they go through the exercise of creating a spectacularly beautiful site. It has all the bells and whistles we associate with business or e-commerce websites. It’s chock full of animation and sliding panels and dancing kittens and all the usual links to every single social media network known to man. You look at it and think, “My word, this is the most impressive website I have ever seen and will likely see ever again!” And then what? Well, this is often where all that wondrous and creative design talent goes straight down the crapper. No one ever thought to ask about business objectives or about generating a sale. In other words, your customer just walked through the door based on an artful exterior but doesn’t know what to do next…so they wander aimlessly and likely leave.

Most consumer-driven websites unfortunately don’t focus on the all-important Ask, which is the primary funnel for directing visitors toward taking an action. But there are a few things you can do to ensure that your site not only looks great but fulfills the investment you’ve made in your web presence.

Know your goals before ever thinking about design. Don’t spend all that time on the external window dressing only to ignore the reason why your customers enter in the first place. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen clients get wrapped up in the design process without a clear vision for what they want their site to achieve. It’s the classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Before building a new site or committing to a redesign project, get clear about what you want your site to do to drive business to you.

Be crystal clear and inviting with your Ask. Think of your website’s Ask as the warm greeting your customer receives when they enter the store. If you know your audience’s needs, then your Ask should be a knowledgeable sort of “How can I help you today?” What does your business do and how does your website help you do it better? If your business is built to sell directly to your visitor, then develop an Ask that guides your prospect toward making a purchase or bundle of purchases. Or perhaps you’re a B2B company that uses your site to offer product information and generate leads; if so, then create an Ask that funnels visitors toward a lead generation form. Whatever you choose for your Ask, make it not only clear, strong and tied to your business goals, but focused on the psychological needs of your customer.

Measure your results. You just can’t assume that your Ask is going to be automatically successful. That’s like having a great storefront and a greeter at the door only to take whatever money you receive from purchases and toss it in a bag and forget about it. You have to know whether what you’re doing is leading to achieving the key objectives you set for your business at the beginning. Same thing for your site. Know whether your Ask is funneling prospects toward completing a goal. There are several tools to help you like Google Analytics. It’s free so you have no good reason for not incorporating measurement into your plans for success.

Your website isn’t just there to look pretty. It has a purpose. Help your customers achieve their purpose through a great Ask and you’ll see successful results.

Bob Sutton is one of my heroes. This excerpt gives some indication why:

Does your interview decision-making process end something like this?

I like this candidate. She fits our organization. She’s like us.

If so, it’s time to take a good look at the organization you’re building. In this day and age, do you truly believe the best way to succeed is going to be hiring like-minded people with like-minded outlooks and like-minded skillsets? If so, tell me how the view at the bottom looks. Because here’s the brutal truth: it’s not the like-minded individuals that grow and transform business in this maelstrom. It’s the counter-thinkers, the revolutionaries, the courageous souls who throw all the usual bullshit out the window in order to make room for ideas that transform.

Bob Sutton – Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company (p 11)

How many organizations use their “corporate culture” like a cudgel, bludgeoning and cramming every employee into a narrowly defined sense of what fits the executives’ idea of success? Its always couched in a way that makes it seem like its the best course of health for the business…but is it? For every Zappos that might get it right, there are countless other organizations that flail about with yet another way to control their employees.

Is the notion of corporate culture that’s paraded about today beneficial? Or does it lead to a form of necrosis that threatens the future welfare of the enterprise? Unlike organic cultures, corporate cultures rarely evolve. Instead, they become entrenched, just one more thing that gets added to the mentality of this is the way things have always been done.

What if there’s a different way of understanding culture? Of creating a better workplace that is not only successfully groomed for the future, but humanizes the organization?

As you get ready to enter 2010, take a good, hard look at whether your “corporate” culture is growing and transforming your business. Or if it’s creating Stepford-like employees who think and act alike, now is the time to make changes to your people practices.

It’s okay to embrace values to define your organization, but not at the expense of insisting each and every employee conforms to a top-down, highly limited idea of corporate culture. Stop seeking out and creating clones. Let your employees bring their whole selves to work even if parts of those selves conflict with your notion of “fit.”

Recently, Aaron Strout at the Powered blog wrote about three absolute musts for social media success: authenticity, credibility, and transparency (otherwise known as the ACT trifecta).

I dig Aaron’s work and how he thinks about the impact of social media, but there was something that needled at me while I read his post. By the end, a question formed that continues to tumble around in my head: are authenticity, credibility, and transparency enough? Let’s create a hypothetical company, one that exemplifies each of the ACT qualities. They are open, honest, and human in their interactions. These are important features and we should begin to expect them from the companies we engage with. But something just feels like its missing.

In my comment to the post, I tossed out another quality (or actually it might be more of a condition) for success: amplification. I know of many companies and individuals who embody authenticity, credibility, and transparency in their work…yet they remain in the shadows while the companies that already have the spotlight such as JetBlue, Zappos, Ford and Best Buy receive attention.

What do you think? Is authenticity, credibility, and transparency enough to garner success in social media? Or is there something missing that needs to be added to the discussion?

As I’ve talked with folks about my academic training and work in the field of business anthropology, one common response I get is: “Wow! That’s cool! So, what in the world is business anthropology?” One of my assignments this week was to read a chapter written by Marietta Baba from a book called Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application and write a synopsis. I immediately saw it as an opportunity to post information on the field based on the writings of someone I greatly respect.

I know it’s lengthy but hopefully it gives a sense of the history behind the field and how we anthropologists can be exceptionally useful within business. Enjoy…and feel free to leave any of your own questions or ideas in the comments.

Anthropology in Business and Industry: A Synopsis
2005 Baba, Marietta L. Anthropological Practice in Business and Industry. In Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application, ed. Satish Kedia and John Van Willigen. Westport: Praeger.

Summary
In this chapter, Marietta Baba provides a brief, yet comprehensive history of business anthropology in the twentieth century and compelling insights into how anthropology can benefit the objectives of private sector organizations.

The Historical Development of the Field
Business anthropology may seem like a recent offshoot of applied anthropology, but its roots lie further back in the twentieth century. Baba links the origins of the field to a set of experiments that took place within Western Electric Company (now part of Lucent Technologies) and its Hawthorne Works. Starting in the early 1920s, the executives of Western Electric tried to determine how to improve working conditions and set up experiments to test their hypothesis that manipulating just one variable (such as factory illumination, incentive pay or number of rest breaks) would generate sufficient conclusions. Unfortunately for the company’s management, the test results were almost always highly contradictory.

Elton Mayo, a Harvard psychologist, was asked to help interpret the results. What he and his colleagues observed was a much more complex social system at work where changing just one variable affected several other variables. Mayo knew about anthropology and its potential usefulness in understanding these social systems through his friendships with Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Mayo was introduced to W. Lloyd Warner, one of Radcliffe-Brown’s students, who consulted with Hawthorne researchers to develop the next phase of the experiment – the Bank Wiring Observation Room (BWOR) in 1931. Baba argues it was this event which gave birth to what we now call business or industrial anthropology (223).

In a uniquely anthropological approach, the BWOR used ethnography to observe what workers actually did rather than listen to what they said they did via interviews. It became the “first systematic observational investigation of a work group’s social system, or, as we would call it today, the work group’s organizational culture” (223). The experiment also revealed a complex, and up to that time poorly analyzed, relationship between management objectives and the work group’s own productivity. The Hawthorne conclusions provided the first empirical evidence of “informal organization, defined as the actual patterns of social interaction and relationships among the members of an organization that arise spontaneously and are not determined by management” (224).

Out of the Hawthorne study, business anthropology in the 1940s was dominated by the human relations school of thought which posited that any conflict between management and employee was due to a disruption of a natural equilibrium. Therefore, the aim of this school was to balance the equilibrium between manager and worker and create beneficial relationships that ensured optimal performance. This asymmetrical power relationship would ultimately be called into question by anthropologists and it lost much of its influence as a result.

However, in spite of its early successes, the field of business anthropology faded from the anthropological landscape in the 1950s and would not return to prominence until the 1980s. Baba lists four primary reasons for this decline:

• Failure of first generation of industrial anthropologists to produce a second generation.
• A theoretical shift from human relations school and rise in contingency theory, which based findings on primarily quantitative research and statistical analysis
• Changes in academia where more anthropologists were able to find tenured work due to increased college admissions from baby boomers.
• Political and ethical issues raised by anthropologists who viewed working within corporations as unethical. This had a devastating impact as the American Anthropological Association instituted principles of professional responsibility in 1971 that prohibited any research that could not be freely disseminated to the public. Baba notes that since industrial research can often be proprietary, “this code of ethics virtually banned anthropological practice in industry for the next two decades” (230).

By the early 1980s, the economies of other areas of the world began to compete with the dominance of the United States. Industries in Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore increased their own power which meant not only new competition but new markets for U.S. goods, as well. U.S.-based companies knew very little about their new international customers but recognized the importance of what we have come to understand as globalization. Two important developments would help resuscitate the field of business anthropology at this time: industry providing a demand for tools to better understand new cultures and their markets; and an overproduction of PhDs relative to few academic positions forcing changes in the professional code so anthropologists could accept jobs within industry.

Business anthropology also received a lift in importance as the concepts of “corporate culture” and “organizational culture” resurfaced in the business lexicon. As American industrial superiority began to decline in the face of challenges from foreign companies, executives in the U.S. sought viable reasons and solutions. Two best sellers published in 1982 from Deal and Kennedy (Corporate Cultures) and Peters and Waterman (In Search of Excellence) highlighted the role of culture and its connection to successful and unsuccessful businesses. However, by this time, studying organizational culture was no longer solely an anthropological activity. Business efficiency consultants, organizational development specialists and other social scientists were poised to offer insights into the issue of culture.

While each discipline has demonstrated its own particular strengths within business, it is important to point out the special capabilities that anthropology delivers to help organizations better understand their customers and their employees.

Anthropology’s Approach to Business Needs
Within business anthropology, there are two major subdomains that address business needs: the external consumer marketplace and the internal corporate work organization.

Consumers and the Marketplace
Baba comments that consumption, as the engine of a modern capitalist economy, is far more significant and complex than often recognized. There is a particular cultural significance underlying our purchases which rarely receive attention, yet “research has shown that such actions are integral to our individual definitions of self and reflect cultural patterns at both the societal and subgroup levels” (236). In other words, we typically buy goods and services that reflect our own identity. These purchases can be conscious decisions that promote a certain status or unconscious decision where it is other individuals who attribute meaning to our choices. There is a symbolic value at work here as our consumption acts as a type of interpersonal communication where the “coding and decoding of signals [is] dependent upon deeper meanings that have their roots within a particular cultural context” (236).

For marketers, anthropology provides unique insight and guidance into how a company can best position its goods and services to customers. As human behavior is not predetermined and the creation of meaning can be uniquely peculiar, marketers face a near-constant dilemma. Their challenge is to figure out what meaning the buyer will create from the product since it is the consumer who derives meaning from a thing, not the marketer. An anthropologist who is trained in cultural theories and ethnographic methods can develop the research necessary to gain a deeper understanding of patterns that impact product concepts, functions and design. They are also positioned to uncover the subtle cultural meanings that consumers may attach to these products, for example, by comparing and contrasting what a buyer says and what they actually do.

Corporate Cultures and Organizational Change
The anthropological study of corporate culture is more in line with fieldwork traditionally conducted by practitioners. It is also a direct descendant of the Hawthorne studies from the 1930s which proved that employees within organizations are rarely bound to the formal, rational objectives designed by management. Again, accepting that human behavior is not predetermined, anthropologists study how people who form working groups develop their own shared systems of meaning that persist over time. These shared, open systems also evolve and shift spontaneously in response to perceived challenges from both inside and outside the group’s scope of operations. Further, anthropologists possess the conceptual tools and methodologies to understand the relationships between the various layers of culture that exist within and outside the organization.

Organizational cultures can also come into conflict, such as the culture promoted by management (referred to as a rational system by Baba) versus the culture that organically emerges throughout the workforce (or natural system). To assist an organization, anthropologists can serve as a type of “knowledge broker” by recommending ways to allow the natural systems to adapt to changing situations without suffering harm. Anthropology can also negotiate agreements between rational and natural systems that allow management to design objectives while promoting conditions necessary for employees to co-create healthy work communities that align with those objectives.

Benefits of Anthropology to Business
There are three primary knowledge domains that anthropology brings to business: general knowledge of culture and culture theory; competency in the practice of ethnography; and specialized knowledge of particular cultures and languages.

General Knowledge about Culture
Since culture is a somewhat amorphous term, Baba offers a definition that is particularly salient for business: “The distinctive, shared patterns of behavior, thought, and feeling that emerge from a group’s historical experience in a particular environment and that are taught to new members as the correct way to live” (251). Out of this definition, an anthropologist is relevant to a business’s needs by answering questions related to culture’s impact on its success. Anthropology’s application is one where a business learns “what decisions it should make and what decisions it should take in light of its interests and goals, one the one hand, and cultural realities on the the other” (252).

Baba proceeds to present some aspects of the value proposition that anthropology brings to any business (and I would add that these work for not only private enterprise, but nonprofit and government organizations, as well).

Anthropology:

• Offers a holistic approach integrating a wide range of social and behavioral phenomena in describing and explaining culture.
• Recognizes that history is an important factor in understanding the origins of cultural patterns and what shapes them over time.
• Values multiple insider (or emic) perspectives as a way to understand the varied layers within a culture.
• Offers cross-cultural comparisons that generate insights into how different groups relate to each other.

Competency in Ethnographic Practice

Ethnography is a term gaining prominence in business circles but with this increase in awareness comes a danger in it being poorly executed. Anthropologists are trained in ethnographic practice and Baba notes some best practices described by others (254):

• Requires that anthropologists conduct significant fieldwork. The degree of fieldwork needed or possible within a business organization is usually dependent on time and fears of distraction and disclosure of confidential information.
• Uses multiple methods and techniques. These include interviewing; direct observation and videotape recording of behavior, events and situations; census and surveys; focus groups; and network analysis.
• Conveys a sense of being there. Ethnography captures “detailed and nuanced portrayals” of a field site.
• Searches for and provides details and conclusions that are unexpected or counterintuitive. Business decision-makers need help discovering issues that may be hidden or unknown. Ethnography can be exceedingly helpful in making sense of contradictory data.
• Offers a model or theory. Ethnography goes beyond just surface-level description and aims to provide explanations as to why something is the way it is.
• Contextualizes its findings. Again, ethnography is holistic in its objective to relate human thoughts and behaviors to multiple contexts of history, geography, environment, society, politics and economics.
• Emphasizes both what people say and what they do and the disconnect between them. Some of the most valuable insights anthropologists gain through their ethnographic work is locating discrepancies between verbal behavior and actual practices.
• Looks closely at how language is used. Ethnography captures the unique emic terms, phrases and expression cultural insiders use to describe their points-of-view. This language is often a condensed form of cultural meaning.
• Protects the people being studied. Anthropologists are professionally committed to the principle of “first, do no harm” in whatever field site they work. This commitment ensures informed consent, respect for confidentiality and agreement to not engage in projects that endanger or degrade a people’s livelihood. Baba notes, “Our particular sense of ethics in a business project may be one of the most important features characterizing anthropology in the private sector” (257).

For those of you who may not know, I’m currently a master’s candidate in Applied Business Anthropology at the University of North Texas. My broad focus is working with organizations and helping them better understand their internal employee cultures.

The capstone of the program is a practicum where students work with a sponsoring organization to design a research project to solve a very real problem. For me, I have two potential areas of interest and am searching for organizations which might satisfy one or both project possibilities. This will be a great opportunity for any company to get help understanding and resolving a thorny problem through research-based solutions. Oh, and also at no cost to the organization.

If your organization would be interested in sponsoring me and would like more information, please contact me at chris -at- chrisbaileyworks -dot- com.

Interest #1: Organizational Change and the New Rules of Business
In the last few years, there has been a phenomenal shift in business thinking related to the influence of social software on business strategy. Professionals in the technology and business consulting fields have termed it “Enterprise 2.0.” Generally, it differs from traditional business by using newer technology tools to break down silos within organizations; build more collaborative working structures internally and externally; develop more authentic relationships between the company and customer. Yet, with these dynamic changes in business strategy, there is a tension between the old ways of operating and the new, less familiar ways of doing things.

My interest within this field is to study how established industries at a macro-level or businesses at a micro-level are adapting to the changes incurred while moving toward Enterprise 2.0. My hypothesis is that as core functions of business are being changed, businesses not only need to alter their policies and procedures, they need to recreate their people-systems and the cultures that exist within their organizational boundaries. They need a more clearly defined roadmap to deal with the disruptive paradigm shifts that Enterprise 2.0 introduces to daily business and the costs and benefits it generates.

The draw to this particular topic is strong as it aligns with conversations I’ve had with business leaders and their admitted need for help changing their internal people-systems and cultures to meet new challenges posed by technology. My own personal experience corroborates this need as most businesses can easily focus on execution, but more rarely do they have the time to understand the “why” behind that execution. It’s even more pronounced when that execution hinges on understanding how culture is linked to success. For this reason, I believe there is a place for an anthropological approach providing a holistic assessment of how the human interactions and relationships contained within Enterprise 2.0 contribute to a new mode of organization.

Two professions – public relations and human resources – and one major industry – mainstream media (e.g., television and newspapers) – are at the top of my list of potential sites to perform a practicum on this subject. Each of them is struggling to adapt to critical changes wrought by technology and the impact on their business models. Delving deeper, there are also key issues often embedded in each of their organizational cultures. These manifest as how executives communicate with their employees on rules surrounding social media relationships, how managers build new competencies that integrate old and new skills, and how employees approach their work in an environment where professional and personal personas are increasingly blurred.

Interest #2: Startup Organization Maturation
This interest is one I have been developing over the past couple of years. Recently, I worked inside a company that was in the midst of evolving from a startup to a mature enterprise. What I discovered in talking with individuals who had been with the company from the beginning is how much they missed the “good old days” and were concerned about losing some of the characteristics that made it a great place to work. There was a genuine concern the organizational culture was changing as the company grew beyond the startup set of employees.

These dialogues inspired me to think deeply about what happens when a startup organization is no longer a startup. What happens when the company starts to grow up, find success, increase its product and service offerings, hires new people with different competencies? How does an organization maintain the positive aspects of its startup culture and excise what is necessary for beneficial growth?

My personal experience came inside a maturing startup in the technology sector. In Austin, TX, there is an abundance of such companies which would provide a wide array from which to choose. Ideally, I would select a technology-based company that is somewhere in its fifth to eighth year of existence. The anthropology angle would be to conduct interviews with individuals at various levels of the organization and with various lengths of tenure. The aim would be to learn the stories and rituals of the early startup to understand what cultural attributes originated, which ones have been discarded and which ones have been retained.

Yesterday, Matt Singley (@mattsingley) asked a simple, but rather provocative question via Twitter:

What ensued was an interesting mini-conversation about how to successfully and effectively engage with a competitor’s customers through social media.

The set-up
Let’s say you work for Company Y in Matt’s scenario and have a social media/online monitoring program that watches not only for mentions of your company’s name but your competitors’ names, as well (and if you don’t already have such a program in place, I happen to know a very good agency that can help you).  In the course of your monitoring, you discover that Company X has screwed up and now has some royally discontented customers. What do you do?

Your first instinct may be to jump on this golden opportunity quickly so you can grab some new customers…and I’m going to suggest you squelch this instinct. By being overzealous in your online efforts, you can actually do more harm to your company’s online reputation than good. Don’t be the jackal eagerly waiting to pick off the discontented carcasses of your competitors’ customers.

What should you do, instead?
First, listen, do a little legwork, understand. Find out what happened. In our online world, it’s not that hard to uncover what’s going on when a competitor screws up. Do not – REPEAT, DO NOT – wade into any tweetstream or blogpost until you figure out what’s going on. Failing to grasp an initial understanding of how the customer feels will only make you appear insincere and predatory.

Second, be a human being. Sorry if that seems overly simplistic and obvious, but its astounding how often we forget that long-term sales relationships starts with treating customers like humans with respect. After gaining an understanding of the situation, practice some empathy. Ask yourself, “If I was this individual, would I want someone to start aggressively hawking their wares under my nose right now? Or would I prefer someone to treat me better than I’ve just been treated by Company X?” A little empathy goes a long ways.

What might this look like? Here is a fresh scenario from Twitter:
A customer becomes irritated with a rival’s product or service. Here’s an example from @Dotpage who is calling out @logitech’s slow driver updates:

Let’s say you work for Altec Lansing and uncover a tweet like this. Now maybe no one – including your own company – has drivers ready for Snow Leopard, but here’s a prime opportunity for you to approach a competitor’s disgruntled customer. A course of action might be to research the social media chatter coming from Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+to%3Alogitech) where you’ll find this issue is significant source of irritation among Logitech’s customers. Then, your first @ reply should be to note the problems faced by the individual – in this case, a lack of updated drivers. Perhaps send a tweet such as “Sorry to hear about the problems you’re having with speaker drivers…it sucks to not be able to hear sounds from your Mac.” Resist the urge to openly sell your product on first tweet. Remember, your aim is to build a long-term relationship not make a quick sale.

Not everyone you send @ replies are going to respond and that’s okay. For those individuals who do reply, here’s the opportunity to guide your competitor’s customer toward your own products and services. Ask what they want from a product, what drives them crazy, what a company can do to improve their experience. You now have a personal, one-to-one conversation with a buyer that can turn them into a raving fan. People become passionate about purchasing from other people, particularly those who genuinely want the best for them. This interaction can be a catalyst for introducing a customer to your own products and services without the need for even making an open sales call.

After you’ve made contact with the individual on Twitter, then follow them. Don’t make following the first course of action – this is the type of behavior that bots employ and again can be seen as an overly aggressive predatory tactic that will turn off the potential prospect.

Third, make sure every single person in your company is working from the same playbook. This is where breaking down silos and cross-functional planning cannot be under-emphasized. If just one person from your company leaps in like a jackal, then there’s a better-than-average chance your company’s image will be tarnished along with that of Company X.

Any thoughts or counterarguments here? What’s worked for you as a disgruntled customer? What’s worked or hasn’t worked for your company in having conversations like these?

I’ve argued for a while that it’s not only rude and douchebaggish to not respond to your Twitter @ replies, its a form of online social incivility. I twittered about this before and I know the counterarguments:

I get a lot of bozo/auto-generated replies and its hard to filter them out.
I have too many followers to respond to each of them.
I’m way too busy to respond to every @ I get.
I don’t know how to keep track of the @s I receive.

…with the bottom-line response that I’m not being realistic or fair.

Here are my thoughts on each of these arguments:
1. The Bozo/Auto-generated Reply
Yeah, we all get the various bozo/auto-generated replies and I’m not talking about them. Bozos are like those damn robo-calls and dickish spam emails which none of us take seriously. But perhaps you have trouble separating the good from the bad and the ugly. It’s getting easier to spot bozos and Twitter’s ever-evolving TOS tries to pare them down for us. But if a tweet looks like it comes from an actual person (look at their profile and their last 20 tweets…this is usually enough) and isn’t an attempt to bait us into a reply (something controversial aimed at starting a flamewar), then let’s call it legit. And if its legit, it deserves a response.

2. Too many followers
Yes, I know its easy for me to talk about this issue since I have around 2000 followers. Here’s why I’ve been on Twitter for three years and only amassed 2000 followers: I make it about the relationship. If I wanted to get 10,000 followers by the end of the month there are plenty of ways to game the system to get there (see folks who have 10k or 20k followers but only 100 tweets as Exhibit A). But if you have thousands of followers, you still have the civil responsibility to acknowledge them when they communicate with you. Because one day, they’re probably going to get tired of being ignored and wonder why they bothered following you in the first place. Ain’t celebrity a bitch?

3. Too busy to reply
I’m not saying we all can’t get busy and miss some replies. Life happens and it’s okay. I’m talking to the individuals (and organizations) who tweet like mad, but never acknowledge the responses they receive. For them, here’s what I suggest: stop tweeting. Seriously. Delete your account and go back to blogging or whatever form of broadcast communication you desire. If you want to use the somewhat tired analogy of “Twitter as a cocktail party,” this would be like the pompous guy talking to everyone but also saying that he’s far too busy to listen.

4. Don’t know how to track @ replies
The good news is that it’s not hard to start. Either use an app like Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Both apps give you the ability to easily see all the @ replies sent to you. Or if you’re a fan of the web interface, go to http://twitter.com/#replies (don’t be afraid to use your custom RSS feed for all your replies). Just don’t NOT make the attempt to reply because you don’t know how. Ask for help and I guarantee it will be freely given.

I hope this doesn’t come off too much as a “Chris got slighted and is pissed” post. And yes, my approach to using Twitter is different than the approach others may take. My goal is to highlight what I hope become more common-sense social norms in how we use social technologies. But then again…if you’re an douchebag in real life, you’re probably just going to be a douchebag on Twitter.