SMUG | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Thesis 10: Social Media Can’t Make Up for Bad Products or Poor Service

Social media are not the panacea for all that ails the relationship between organizations and their customers or other stakeholders.

If you treat people badly, they now have not only the opportunity to take the story public, which they always had, but also the ability to tell the story themselves instead of having to rely on third parties like the news media to spread the word.

And of course, as we saw this year in the case of Dave Carroll’s spat with United Airlines, sometimes the story can both go viral and lead to mainstream news media coverage.

The basic story, if you haven’t heard, is told in this United Breaks Guitars video. The customer service representative could have kept the video from being made by simply agreeing to Mr. Carroll’s request for $1,200 in flight vouchers to reimburse his expense for fixing is $3,500 Taylor guitar. It would have cost United nothing in cash, but when Ms. Irlwig said “no” he said something to the effect, “Fine, I will just make a series of three YouTube videos with my story.” Here’s the second installment. If you haven’t watched both of those, take a minute to do so now. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you’re back, here are a few lessons or observations from this saga:

This video didn’t happen because United had a YouTube channel. One of the fears some people have about engaging in social media is, “What if people say bad things about us?” But this video wasn’t posted to the United channel: it was on the SonsofMaxwell channel, which belonged to Mr. Carroll’s band.
This video resonated, which is why it went viral. Anyone who has traveled by air extensively likely has some kind of horror story about poor customer service. If the video didn’t fit built-in perceptions, it wouldn’t have gotten anything like this attention.
Treating the customer right is the solution. After nine months of haggling, Mr. Carroll was just looking for a way to recover what he had spent on guitar repairs. From his perspective, flight vouchers would have been almost as good as cash, as it would at least let him pay less out of pocket for future travel. If Ms. Irlwig agrees, the video doesn’t happen.

Social media can provide great listening tools to alert you to a problem that could blow up into a PR nightmare. But they don’t do any good if you don’t act based on what you hear. In this case, Mr. Carroll was right in Ms. Irlwig’s ear. No complicated listening tools needed. If you’re not going to do the right thing for your customers, social listening tools will be of little value.

As Amy Mengel put it at the time, the secret to avoiding a YouTube crisis is: “Don’t suck so much in the first place!“

6 Reasons Your Organization Should Get a Twitter Account

Nancy asks:

I’m trying to convince my boss we need to start a twitter account and she’s not convinced. My main argument has been that it would increase our exposure on the web through our links on twitter. Can you help me make a better case?

I saw your slide presentation on slide share on Making the Case for Social Media but it didn’t get to exactly what I need (or I missed it).

And on the slight chance that we do get to start twitter, what can I do to build a following?

Here are my top six reasons why organizations should have a branded Twitter account:

Brand Protection. If you claim your organization’s name on Twitter, others can’t. One headache you don’t want is having someone impersonating your organization on Twitter. Claiming your Twitter handle is a good step, even from a purely defensive perspective.

Scalability. You can have a Twitter account without putting a lot of human resources into it. It’s reasonable at first to use a service that converts the RSS feed of your news releases into tweets, without any additional human involvement. You do have RSS feeds, right? If not, see the Social Media 102 course, and also my third reason.

Serving stakeholders. A non-human Twitter account connected to an RSS feed isn’t ideal, but like RSS it does at least provide a way for people interested in your news to get it in a way that’s convenient for them. And as you become more familiar with Twitter, it can lead to a much better use, Listening and Engagement, which I list as my last reason.

Increased News Coverage. Journalists are increasingly involved in Twitter, and looking to it as a quick way to identify sources and story ideas. Here’s a portion of an email one of my colleagues got in late October from @KimPainter, a columnist with USA Today (click to enlarge):

Kim had seen one of our @MayoClinic tweets connected to our #mayoradio program called Mayo Clinic Medical Edge Weekend. We got her in touch with Dr. Richard Hurt, who was the guest on that program, and here is Kim’s column in USA Today in which he was featured.

It’s Free. Nothing I have mentioned above involves any cash. Your Twitter account is free. Twitterfeed to convert your RSS feed to tweets also is free. But even if you have to manually send tweets about your news, and including a link to your news releases, the time investment can be minimal. It doesn’t involve incremental cash outlays. If you’re like most organizations, you probably pay EurekAlert or PR Newswire or BusinessWire to distribute your news releases. If you are paying for those services, why wouldn’t you take advantage of a free tool like Twitter?

Listening and Engagement. The preceding reasons provide more than enough justification for getting a corporate Twitter account, but engaging stakeholders and listening to them is the best use for Twitter. For that reason, whether your boss approves a corporately branded Twitter account or not, I strongly suggest that you get your own personal Twitter account. Just dive in and start making connections. As you are using Twitter personally, you will see applications that are relevant to your work.

If you have questions about how to get started with Twitter, we have a whole Twitter curriculum here on SMUG to take you through the process. To answer your last question about building a following, see Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed, and Twitter 104: Four Steps to Building Your Personal Twitter Network.

Social Media 401: Vince Muzik Case Study

I’ve known Vince Muzik for nearly four decades, ever since I took piano lessons from his mother, Jan. (Yes, my piano teacher was Mrs. Muzik.) But it gets even better: Vince’s father, Conrad, was the Austin High School band instructor, so when I played trombone (until 9th grade) my instructor was… Mr. Muzik.

Vince’s love was photography, though, and particularly relating to sports. He got his first chance to shoot a big statewide event when he was a teenager, and the Austin Daily Herald got him press credentials for our basketball team’s trip to the state high basketball tournament in 1981. We were 22-0 going into the tournament, but faced the also-unbeaten (and defending champion) Minneapolis North in the first round. Here’s a photo Vince took at that game (can you tell which one is me?)

Although I didn’t get that rebound, we did come back to win the game after being down 31-24 at halftime. We beat another undefeated team, Chaska, in the semifinals, before losing to Anoka in the championship game. Here’s my admittedly self-serving highlight video from that experience, which is only available thanks to another friend whose brother was one of the few consumers who had a VCR at the time:

Vince has stayed interested in sports, and has gotten opportunities to shoot some much bigger events with much better athletes. We reconnected this year when he heard about what I was doing in social media at Mayo Clinic and about SMUG, and he asked me for advice about a really exciting project he had in mind. Now that he’s getting it off the ground, I want to highlight it as a great example of using social media tools to tell a story.

Vince lives in the Twin Cities now, and has made some good connections with Cretin-Derham Hall, where American League MVP Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins went to high school. Other notable alums include hall-of-famer Paul Molitor, 2000 Heisman Trophy winner Chris Weinke, Baltimore Ravens All-Pro Center Matt Birk and current Notre Dame star receiver Michael Floyd.

This year, CDH has the consensus number one football recruit in the nation, Seantrel Henderson, and Vince’s great idea was to tell the story of what it’s like to be that guy, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the recruiting process.

Vince is a great storyteller, but his niche has been photography. And sometimes a niche can become a pigeonhole. But with social media, he can break out of that niche. He’s getting video of Seantrel talking about his experiences, and sending a Flip video camera with his parents as they go along on official visits. Here’s the video Vince posted of Seantrel’s Ohio State visit and his conversation with former Buckeye Chris Carter and with coach Jim Tressel:

This video has already been picked up by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and SportsIllustrated.com also asked Vince to send it to be embedded there.

I don’t know where this will end up, and neither does Vince, but one thing it shows is how the low cost and easy availability of social media tools make it possible for someone with a good idea to just make it happen instead of needing to pitch it in advance to a mainstream media outlet. As he says:

I suppose you could say this is part of a social media documentary project I’m doing on Seantrel about recruiting and his life as the No. 1 recruit in the country. If it works out, someday you’ll be able to download it and watch it on your computer or iPhone or Blackberry. Or I may just keep following him until he gets to the NFL. We’ll see.

When he was a teenager back in Austin, Vince had to get the local newspaper to bless his photography project before he could do it. Now he is using YouTube, Twitter (@VMuzikman) and a WordPress.com blog as his publishing platform, with a Flip camera as his main video source. His first video is up to about 12,000 views as of this writing.

Vince is a star SMUGgle who is putting the MacGyver mindset into action.

I hope you will follow what he’s doing and help spread the word about his #Seantrel project, and if you have suggestions for how he can improve, give him feedback.

More than that, I hope you will follow his example and just dive in and start using social media tools creatively in your projects.

SMUG Textbook: What the Dog Saw

Malcolm Gladwell is a great writer, which is why he has his own section among the SMUG textbooks. His latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, is unlike the others I’ve reviewed in that it’s not “about” a single topic. It’s rather a compilation of his previously published columns in The New Yorker.

I listened to What the Dog Saw over the Thanksgiving weekend, and here are a few snippets of his provocative thinking:

It’s almost impossible to predict which college quarterbacks will make it in the NFL because there is nothing “like” being an NFL quarterback. The defensive players are so much faster in the NFL, and therefore the offensive schemes must be so different, that success in college isn’t a good predictor of pro prowess. A college star can be a complete bust. This, Gladwell says, is “The Quarterback problem.”

There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.

Thus, Gladwell observes, advanced teaching certificates (or Master’s degrees) don’t correlate at all with student outcomes. And yet, there is enormous variability in teacher performance: the best teachers can get through a year and a half of content in one year, while those at the bottom end of the curve only cover a half-year’s worth of material. Gladwell suggests that the reason why “book smarts” don’t guarantee good outcomes is that there’s nothing “like” being a teacher. And he has some interesting ideas for how teacher hiring and compensation could be changed if we were really serious about striving for excellence in our education system.

Among Gladwell’s strengths is that he questions commonly accepted truisms and brings research data to bear on the issues. In another of the essays, he looks at proponents of the so-called “War for Talent” and asks, “Are smart people overrated?”

The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest—and it is now in bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are complex, needless to say. But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?

…

The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems. In a way, that’s understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don’t write great novels, and a committee didn’t come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don’t just create; they execute and compete and coördinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star.

I would just add from personal experience that I work in just such an organization, at Mayo Clinic. Don’t get me wrong: we have a lot of really smart people working at Mayo. But it’s the way we work together in teams, and the systems that enable us to do so, that set Mayo apart. As Gladwell says, the system is the star.

In other essays, Gladwell examines FBI profiling, the Popeil family of pitchmen, why Grey Poupon mustard was able to make inroads into the French’s mustard market while Heinz continues to dominate ketchup, and several other interesting issues. You can read much of Gladwell’s New Yorker archive here (including the one Seth Godin and I disagree with), but I strongly suggest you go ahead and buy the book. It will be one of the best investments you’ll make in improving your critical thinking skills.

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I’d like your help with this. What position does this university have in your Google results for smug? First page? If so, what position?

Here are my top six reasons why organizations should have a branded Twitter account:

Vince is a star SMUGgle who is putting the MacGyver mindset into action.