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.

A few days ago, I managed to wade into a bit of a crapstorm that we’ll just call the Ikea Verdana Incident of 2009 (AKA Verdanagate). I heard last week about Ikea’s decision to stop using their customized version of Futura and switch to more universally available Verdana for their catalog. Now if that last sentence sounded a bit like ancient Greek to you, don’t be alarmed. Futura and Verdana are fonts and apparently Ikea’s decision has been construed by certain circles as one more sign that the apocalypse is upon us.

Here in the States, this news has been covered by Time, NPR (via Associated Press), and BusinessWeek. Meanwhile, other than this article from The Swedish Wire, there is very little hubbub about this in Sweden, where Ikea is based. And even more interesting is this article from the Norwegian Afterposten (translate) where some groups actually are welcoming the font change decision.

So, what’s going on here? And what is the connection between Ikea, their customers and their passionately loyal fans? Further, what how does this relate to other businesses that engaging in the work of creating strong relationships with their customers?

Passionate fans or passionate customers?
One of my core issues with this whole imbroglio is that the most enraged folks – graphic designers and typographers – are being labeled as Ikea’s most passionate fans. I’m certainly not going to devalue their feelings over the use of Verdana font (because it really isn’t as attractive as Futura) or dispute their disappointment with the company (their ideals concerning design have merit). They have every right to have their opinion and share it with others. But I think it’s incredibly lazy and disingenuous to call these very same designers and typographers Ikea’s most passionate fans. That ignores Ikea’s passionate customers who not only provide strong word-of-mouth, but actually purchase the company’s products. Sometimes passionate fans don’t sit in the same circle as passionate customers.

Which passionate fans are worth listening to?
Each of the news items above – along with several blogposts from folks I respect like Jackie Huba – make the mistake of assuming that all voiced outcries on the web are equal. In this case, a relatively small number of designers are treated as being the definitive source for whether Ikea’s decision was sound. But what about those individuals who shop the stores and purchase from the catalog and online? What do they think about all of this? Well, what’s interesting is that none of the bloggers or mainstream media sources bothered to ask that question and talk to actual customers. The assumption seems to be that any outrage, regardless of where it originates, constitutes the end-all, be-all of the discussion.

What this suggests about journalism…and our own media consumption
Somewhere along the way, journalists decided to gather one angle of a story and just stop there. Nothing new there – this point has been lamented for the past decade or so. Literally, none of the stories about “Verdanagate” bothered to include perspectives from customers. And it would have been so easy to gather this information. Hell, if journalists wanted to stay lazy, they could have just asked the average “person on the street” to take a look at the catalog and ask if they noted any problems. Or they could have went to the local Ikea store and gathered opinions.

Why the hell wasn’t the Ikea customer community involved?
IKEAFANS is an online community of 112,000 members. It’s unaffiliated with the Ikea corporation, but still a fantastic example of truly passionate customers coming together to share their love for all things Ikea. If this whole font issue is going to be a problem for passionate customers, this would be the first place to look for trending, right? I spoke with Susan Martin, one of the community managers for founder and owner of IKEAFANS and there has been zero chatter on their forums and blogs. Meaning that the people Ikea should be most concerned about don’t give a hoot about Verdana or Futura…they simply want the same quality of furniture they’ve come to expect from the company. It’s truly a damn shame that no one bothered to ask Susan or her community members for their thoughts.

The tyranny of the instantaneous (and the minority)
What’s somewhat more troubling is that far too many respected bloggers covering word-of-mouth and online marketing just blithely accepted the mainstream media’s portrayal of the issue. There was little critical thinking along the lines of “Wait! Does this actually constitute a problem for Ikea’s business?”

All of which leads to something that is causing me some concern. Is social media and our demands for instantaneous opinion undercutting our ability to think deeply about issues? It’s taken me a couple of days to put together this post because I needed to research the issue and think through different perspectives. Will I miss out on the buzz of the Ikea font debate? Maybe, but this post is really not so much about Ikea as it is about the issues it surfaces.

Are we suffering from thought erosion?
And another problem I see arising with social media is how easily a minority of individuals can grab public attention and convince us that their way of seeing things constitutes the majority. When our own attention is so scattered and thin, it’s not hard to see why this is. In nature, when plants are unable to take root in the soil it’s called erosion. Similarly, when critical thinking doesn’t have time to take root in our minds, we might call it thought erosion.

What are your thoughts? Should a company listen to every passionate fan? Maybe so, but should it alter its course of action when core customers are not among the vocal critics? Hope we can have a passionate and deep dialogue about this here.

Today, my youngest daughter, Katie, brought home something super-incredible and imaginative she did in art class. She was so proud of her work she practically burst through the front door so she could show me. And indeed, it was something to take pride in.

What did I do with it? Did I bury it under my papers or throw it aside with the bills? Nope. I hung it on the fridge so everyone in the family could admire it. And for Katie, it serves as a visible reminder of her own creative talents.

Isn’t this what social media is…a big whopping refrigerator? Each of us has the ability to create something magnificent and now share with the world. We get to be kids again complete with the same giddy excitement we once got when proudly sharing work.

Now, let’s flip this around a bit. As a company, are you creating a fridge for your customers to post their own proudly created content? Perhaps a video or pictures showing what they made using your product? Or a story about how your service made their day (or work) better? (Nonprofit organizations, you can feel free to ask yourself similar questions.) Imagine how much your customers will feel about your company if you give them a place to show off their best work? If they’re like Katie, they’ll be beaming from ear-to-ear.

[Note: I originally wrote this post for the BaileyHill Media blog. Even though it is aimed at a political audience, I think there is a great deal of relevance for nonprofits or other organizations that are charged with building a strong volunteer network. Enjoy!]

Do your supporters know how to most effectively support you and your campaign? Sure, maybe those key individuals who have been with your campaign for a while know how to do it. But what about new supporters? Have you made it easy for them?

My majority of my professional background was spent in nonprofit association membership management. For my association to be successful, we had to be adept at quickly engaging prospects and helping them go from curious prospect to new member to passionate advocate. The cost of not engaging these individuals at their first exposure to the association could have dire consequences for the long-term success of the organization. It’s very much the same for your campaign. If you want to create a welcoming environment that helps turn a curious potential supporter into a passionately vocal advocate, here are a few ideas you can implement on your website and Facebook page:

Create a Volunteer 101 page. Don’t assume that everyone knows how to volunteer for a campaign or what they should expect from the experience. You likely find that many folks are getting involved in supporting a political candidate for the first time. Go beyond the all-too-typical Be A Volunteer/How I Can Help web form and post information like…

• a volunteer FAQ answering typical first-timer questions
• descriptions of volunteer activities with anticipated time commitments
• profiles of volunteers with their testimonials

Have your passionate volunteers serve as welcome committee. Go to almost any church and you’ll see a good model for how to welcome new folks to your campaign. As important as he or she is, it’s not the minister who does the bulk of the welcoming – its the passionately excited members of the congregation. Figure out who your most faithful are and prep them to reach out to prospects and new volunteers.

Show videos of other volunteers in action. Take away some of the mystery of volunteering by showing your volunteers canvassing door-to-door or making phone calls or hosting house parties. Create a documentary as volunteers share their experiences, what works, what doesn’t work and why they feel their volunteering for your campaign is so important.

At some point, every blogger faces the question of whether or not they should moderate comments. The primary reasons for moderation are rational and simple:

• Kill spam
• Control trolls

Worthy reasons for sure. Nobody wants or needs spam and trolls camping out on your site. But do the risks outweigh the benefits gained from comment moderation?

There are three levels of comment moderation:

1. No Comments/No Moderation. A blog is intended for broadcast purposes only. Few can get away with this. One exception is Seth Godin and I’m not exactly sure I’d consider his site a blog (see below).
2. Comments/Moderation. A blog has comments, but these comments are moderated by the publisher. It can be hard to tell if your comment is going to get sequestered until after you click Post. If you’ve commented on blogs before, you know what I mean.
3. Comments/No Moderation. A blog has comments and these comments are posted in real time once you click Post. I’ve made the choice to go this path with comments here and my other blogs (which might reveal a bit of bias).

Let’s put aside the No Comments/No Moderation level since it shouldn’t be part of your game plan if you’re publishing a blog. I would even suggest that any site that doesn’t offer the ability for readers to respond and interact isn’t really a blog. It’s just a broadcast engine.

This leaves the other two levels and the issue of which method to use. If you choose to set up moderation, here are a couple of questions to answer:

• Is an objective of your blog to inspire interaction among your readers?
• Can you quickly approve comments so they enter the dialogue stream shortly after posting?
• …And if not, are you okay with your readers either not bothering to comment in the future or not returning altogether?

I apologize if it seems that I’m setting up this argument a little too much. My experience is that moderation rarely corrects the problems it’s intended to solve. There are several spam-filtering tools available for blog platforms (e.g., Wordpress comes with Akismet; Typepad has its own built-in solution). These tools nail the spam comments before they even hit your site. And if you’re concerned about trolls posting inappropriate comments, let’s approach from another angle: what is the probability of true troll behavior (not to be confused with opposing viewpoints) appearing on your blog to the degree that the comment needs to be deleted?

I argue that moderation imposes significant risks to the health of your blog’s community – particularly if your blog is new. When someone leaves a comment on your blog, they want it to post in real time. They want to be part of the dialogue. When you sequester their comment until you get around to approving it, you’ve effectively kicked them out of participating in the community. Worse, most folks don’t know when their comment is going to get approved so they move on…and you’ve potentially lost them as both commenter and reader. If you’re truly worried about trolls, put a solid commenter policy in place letting your readers know what happens to inappropriate messages.

So ask yourself if moderating comments adds or detracts from your blog’s interactive experience. And unless you have good cause to moderate (and yes, there are a few out there), promote an open dialogue in your community.

As much as it may offend our current animal-loving sensibilities, the spectacle of bear baiting was once a very popular form of entertainment (and in certain areas of the world, it remains an attraction). Basically, it involved tying a bear to a post in the middle of an arena and attacking the beast with large, trained dogs. It was also common to provoke the bear further by poking it with long, sharp prods. Cruel? Without a doubt.

But I argue that the very same mentality that conjured this sport into creation remains with us today. We still love to sit around and watch corporate C-Levels get skewered for their mistakes or whole brands get mauled when they screw up. And now with social media, it becomes a full participation sport. (And lest you think I’m pointing a finger outward, there are indeed three pointing squarely back at me…I’m unfortunately guilty of this behavior, too.)

So what does this actually say about us? Have we really civilized ourselves and evolved out of our barbaric and bloodthirsty selves? Perhaps not. Perhaps we still love a good show where we can easily provide instant judgment of missteps, quick criticism of poor decisions. Hopefully, we’re not doomed to this quest for base entertainment…hopefully, we have the potential to be better. Here are a couple of ideas for how we can exit the arena and leave the poor bears in peace:

Let’s interactively communicate with the C-Levels, the corporate brand managers, the folks who do exist behind the actions we’re itching to criticize. For Pete’s sake, its as if there’s no room for error anymore. One foul-up and you’re an incompetent hack who deserves to be standing on a street corner begging for some spare change. What has happened to giving space to learn from mistakes? Fewer and fewer executives and brands are going to try to be innovative if they think their efforts are going lambasted by anyone with a Twitter account or blog. So instead, I suggest we be a bit more constructive, offer a bit more feedback, try to act as part of the solution.  Yeah, it may mean we have to try to be a little less cynical. Hell, you might just be able to chalk it up to your one-good-deed-for-the-day. That’ll feel good.

Perhaps the hardest of act of all is not giving in to the pressure of instant judgment. Yes, this means going against the grain and choosing a different perspective in a hypermobilized social media world. But look at it this way: in an increasingly homogenized world where everyone is seeking a way to be unique, your decision to withhold criticism until all the facts are known could be a critical personal differentiator. So, next time Amazon deletes a book from a Kindle, let’s help them learn from this action because they’re maneuvering in uncharted waters. Or next time the CMO from a retailer forgets he’s still responsible for customer satisfaction, let’s offer not only some constructive feedback, but acknowledge that she or he is actually a fallible human being capable of forgiveness.

I’m game for making the attempt if you are. What do you say?

From Marketing Vox comes Half of Communicators Think Twitter’s a Fad. Actually, I would wager that you could substitute just about any business-related profession in place of “Communicators.” It happens every time a evolutionary shift takes place and individuals are confronted with the need to change. The data behind this latest article comes from Ragan Communications and PollStream. And for more commentary on the study, definitely read blogposts from MarketingCharts and Ragan (the comments are insightful, as well).

For me, here’s what the study drives home.

1. A shift from the masses to the micro.
Here’s a quote from Bob Hirschfeld, senior public information officer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

“[Twitter’s a fad] because everybody’s doing it. Ashton Kutcher and CNN have a steady supply of fans who want to know what they do. People like us, people with a job to do, every so often we do something of interest to the general public [but] we don’t have that steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.”

I think this viewpoint spotlights how professionals are struggling to overcome the old focus on how to speak to the masses. If you can’t speak to as many people as possible, then the effort is futile. You see this every time someone uses generalized words like “public”; in this case, Hirschfeld is concerned there’s just not a “steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.” I’ll submit that aiming for the masses is no longer an efficient or productive action. The individuals and organizations who will succeed in the new world of business will be the ones who know their power niches and can communicate with them in a personally relevant way.

2. Broadcasting might not be dying, but it’s no longer the sole answer.
With that said, I don’t believe that broadcasting is dying. There’s still a place for it as a communications vehicle. Websites such as CNN, BBC News, ESPN, etc. still serve up broadcasted information. But the critical difference is that broadcasting is no longer the only mechanism for communicating with your audience. Most of the better sites understand this and allow visitors to personalize their delivery (see BBC News for a good example).

Other sites build around smaller, more interest-focused communities, which takes the micro to deeper level (see what Sony has done with their Backstage 101 or what DadLabs.com is doing with fathers). Someone tied to the old ways of viewing business might see this as a negative fracturing of their audience base. They’re liking thinking, “Crap, now I have to have multiple talking points for all these different audiences.” And again, that thinking exposes the mass approach that is no longer viable.

But rather than freaking out and seeing this as yet another sign of the apocalypse, consider what incredible advantages the micro-level offers to business. Rather than taking the shotgun approach that tries to hit as many people as possible (with the inherent dilution of overall message), communicators can approach each community and audience niche as a tailor-made occasion to develop messages that are relevant to the individual.

3. The future will require changes to your business thinking and operations.
We’re in the midst of a huge shift away from one way communication (at both mass and micro levels) and toward multi-vocal dialogue. And yes…this will require some changes to the way organizations think and operate, as well as to the way they communicate internally and with customers. As Josh McColough, a communicator at Sherman Health, notes: “The trick is to keep information coming and conversation active.”

Effective business is going to be about building relationships and personally-relevant dialogue rather than continuing the old trick of blindly bludgeoning a public with broadcasted communications. The only question is: Which side of this divide do you want to find yourself on?

In David Armano’s post for the Harvard Business blog, Debunking Social Media Myths, he writes:

It’s worth noting that seeding, feeding, and weeding all take place after any social initiative has been launched. But not taking into account the manpower that’s involved in these as you develop your social business design strategy can lead to a lack of adoption or participation–essential elements to any social initiative. Ignoring these realities will continue to propagate the myth that social media is fast, cheap and easy. As organizations look to grow or scale their current initiatives, it’s proving to be anything but. (emphasis added)

This post brought to mind something I thought about this past weekend: that social media is serving as a leverage point for guiding businesses away from the industrial/post-industrial practices that guided them in the twentieth-century. The new way forward is in the comment I made to David’s post:

David, I think what you’re noting here is one significant aspect of the upheaval social media tools have put into play. Thinking back to when the internet first caught fire around 10 years ago as a business tool, most of the activity was centered around doing what organizations had been doing for decades – just faster and more efficient with less overhead. The early internet held incredible promise to enterprises wanting to continue to operate with their industrial/post-industrial practices of engineering the human out of the service and delivery equation.

Now, enter social media which puts the human back in the center of the equation and these same organizations now are confronted with a problem: try to continue with legacy operational thinking or enter a strange (though somewhat familiar) environment that means changing some core processes.

There’s going to be a sort of cognitive dissonance that propagates the myth that “social media is fast, cheap and easy.” It’s because it tramples on the promises of an industrial/post-industrial age that’s passed. We’re entering a whole new territory where business growth isn’t the hare, it’s the tortoise who knows that relationships (which, at times, can be slow to evolve and challenging to maintain) between people are always at the core of every single transaction.

Habitat, a UK-based home furnishings company, received a lesson this week on how NOT to market its brand. Turns out whoever is minding their Twitter account decided to take advantage of all the buzz surrounding Iran and use related hashtags such as #MOUSAVI to peddle their wares.

Shameless? Yep. Brainless? Yep, again. And it’s not just isolated to piggybacking on #Iran – apparently, Habitat has been riding other trending tags such as #apple and #phone. I’m still a bit mystified by who actually thought this was a good idea. The company has deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology, but the damage is done.

A quote from the BBC News article:

“The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that has been caused.”

The BBC writer is quick to pick up on what is easily inferred from this statement: that a third-party agency is responsible for Habitat’s online marketing strategy and – perhaps more interesting – their Twitter writing. Letting someone outside your organization write your tweets and post to social media shows is a quick way to get into some seriously hot water. If your organization is thinking of using Twitter and other social media tools to engage with customers, for heaven’s sake, don’t let someone else do it for you. This is a DIY initiative.