How Twitter transformed customer service

Technology support is notorious for its poor quality. Early on in the history of the Internet management decided that customer relations was not a core function of a company and that it could be outsourced. The consequence of this was that customer service was reduced to statistics, how many calls were handled and how quickly were issues resolved. Much hung upon the definition of resolved.

Whether technical support of billing issues, customers were confronted with telephone trees that were as time consuming as they were confusing. Technical support became the subject of bitter humor. Everybody knew it was bad, but since everyone had horrible customer support companies could get away with it.

Until Twitter.

All of a sudden your company's horrible customer service became a public embarrassment. At first PR people where hired to handle customer service issues on Twitter, until companies figured out that Twitter had to be integrated into their customer service response.

But what companies have still failed to comprehend is that customer service is a core function of any company. Customer service is public relations, it is how your company relates to the public and how the public experiences your brand. If customer service is poor your brand suffers.

When your company outsources customer service, and makes clear that customer service is a dead end job for employees with no future in the company, you are saying that customers are not important. The larger implications of Twitter customer service issues have yet to be understood.

Wrong channel miscommunications

By now we are all familiar with the unfortunate person on Twitter who accidentally uses the company account when they meant to use their personal account to say something. To reduce the chance of this happening I always use a different browser for client work, that way you are clear in your mind on what you are working on.

Just one of those tips that makes online life easier.

When control gets out of control

Having a PR C risis? There's Probably an App for That

Indeed, brands want more control over what appears on franchisees’ Facebook and Twitter pages. Ray Wert, co-founder of automotive marketing agency Tiny Toy Car, said rogue messaging often damages brands in his space. 

"Many crisis communications issues are caused on the sales front," Wert said. "Carmakers are looking for tools to help dealerships be good social media actors." Software providers, take note.

As a PR pro, I am not enthusiastic about centralized control. Time is one of the most important element in crisis management. Letting a situation simmer while senior management decides how to respond gives a minor discussion in social media snow ball into a major PR disaster. Sometimes a swift response from a worker bee is the best way to calm a social storm. I am trying to think of a major PR crisis that was caused by a rogue franchisee or low level employee, and I cannot think of one. However, I can easily name a hundred PR disasters precipitated by the actions of senior management. It is difficult to believe that trying to control the social media of franchisees it going to enhance engagement with one's customers.

Advertising is cheaper than comment spam

Now that I have begun to post more regularly to this blog I have seen a surge of comment spam. Sigh.

Sadly it appears to be coming from humans rather than bots. So someone is paying for humans to do this, or has purchased fancy bots.

You know what would be cheaper and actually effective? Would generate site traffic to your website and generate good will? Paid advertising.

You can buy a week's worth of advertising on low traffic blogs from Blogads for as little as $1000. Or you can purchase a sponsored post on Reddit, which will appear on the top of the sub-Reddit you select, prices begin at $20. Or you can purchase some keywords on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Pre-fab online presence

Have you noticed those manipulative Facebook posts, "like" if you hate cancer and so forth? It seems that the more "likes" your posts receive, the higher your EdgeRank. What is EdgeRank you ask?

EdgeRank is an algorithm developed by Facebook to govern what is displayed—and how high—on the News Feed.

Just because someone has "friended" you, it does not follow that you will get to see their posts. Facebook has a complicated algorithim that decides what goes into your feed. You don't see all the material that has been posted by your friends and the pages you have "liked." Facebook, not you, decides what you really like.

So, if you want to build a page with a very high EdgeRank, you post manipulative posts asking readers to support a cure for cancer.

All about those Facebook "like" scam posts

Businesses worldwide are trying to figure out how to best utilise platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus (haha, na I’m just kidding about Google Plus). They know that EdgeRank, likes, brand exposure and followers are important, even if they don’t know exactly why or what to do with it.

So a social media consultant manufactures a page with a high edgerank and sells it to some business who wants a page with high EdgeRank, but does not know how to build it. You know what would be cheaper and more effective than buying a pre-fab fan page from a social media consultant? Building a page on Facebook, putting interesting content on that page, and then buying advertising from Facebook to generate traffic, and ultimately EdgeRank. Sometimes paying the Facebook toll is the superior solution.

How not to recruit your sock puppets

First of all, don't use sock puppets. Cultivate your human online supporters.

Second of all, don't use Craigslist. You will get caught.

Use LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That is what they are there for.

Also, don't use sock puppets, human or bots. It is just pathetic.

Cheap shot dot com

The Guardian

A new website promises to shine a spotlight on "churnalism" by exposing the extent to which news articles have been directly copied from press releases.

The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.

First of all, congrats to the PR team at Churnalism for such a great story placement.

There is nothing wrong with using a press release in a news article. The test should be the information in the press release news; that is, is the material accurate, new, interesting, relevant, and compelling. If so an editor should use it; it not an editor should discard it.

UPDATE: Shel Holtz said this so much better.

Prank phone calls

It seems a pro-union activist, pretending to be David Koch, called Gov. Scott Walker and recorded the result. How much of an embarrassment this will be I cannot say; but it demonstrates the range of activities open to online activists and the sort of thing we need to prepare our clients for.

I believe that it is illegal in Maryland and a few other states to record a phone conversation without the consent of both parties.

The power of social media and the Internet

Clearly social media is extremely powerful, otherwise the Egyptian government would not have cut access to the internet, neither would the US government put out solicitations to subvert it.

Honestly, astroturf is for amateurs.

The digital mob

Shel Israel is calling for Mark Zuckerberg to step down. I have heard this sentiment expressed elsewhere and I don't understand it. Sure, Zuckerberg failed to appreciate the privacy controversy until it had reached the firestorm stage, but in terms of CEO misconduct others have done so much worse.

For example, why do any of the CEO's who were TARP recipients still have their jobs, never mind their bonuses. Why does the head of BP still have his job?

It is difficult to understand why one CEO becomes the focus of digital anger and not others.

My unvarnished opinion

From Thursday's For Immediate Release we learn about Unvarnished, a social media site that lets anyone say anything about anybody. Create an account, create a profile on any acquaintance, and say what you want.

Did someone create a profile about you that was derogatory? Well, just create an account and refute what was said. Persuade your friends to create accounts so that they can defend you. What a terrific business model, what a terrific way to build site traffic.

It would be nice to think that this would be a way for Dilbert, Wally, and Alice to tell the unvarnished truth about their pointy haired boss. It is just as likely as to give the pointy haired boss a chance to trash the reputations of Dilbert, Wally, and Alice so that they can't get jobs at better companies.

Let me bring my very Washington, DC perspective on this; this will quickly degenerate into a cesspool of partisan smear jobs which will go much further down the food chain than is presently the case. I mean if you can damage the careers of every precinct captain of the rival party, or at least the ward chairs, you can go a long way to destroying most of your prospective opposition candidates before they even think about running for office.

The possibilities of dirty tricks are endless. Are you a company who has been attacked in the press? Just create a profile of the reporter and allege that he is the office boor. Is your company being threatened with a product liability suit? Don't just smear the lawyer and the plaintiff, smear all the potential witnesses in the case.

Are you an oil company? Is there an assistant professor at some community college somewhere getting locals all riled up about global warming? Create a negative profile and prevent him from getting tenure.

Are you a hostile intelligence agency? Is there an engineer who is working on a breakthrough weapon that your country is not ready to counter yet? Create a smear profile on Unvarnished and see if you can get his security clearance yanked.

Did someone create a negative profile on you? Presto Vivace's advice would be to create an account and use the facts to refute the negative remarks that were made. Then ask your online friends to write something nice about you, on their blogs, relevant Ning communities, any online community that would be visible to your professional milieu and ignore Unvarnished. Don't give it more online visibility, don't build its site traffic. With any luck the site will fade away as one of those Web 2.0 projects that just did not work out.

Edit -

Todd Defren has a somewhat different perspective, but takes a very similar view of Unvarnished.

Play by the rules

Buzz Bin as a good post on the new FTC rules for bloggers.:

While we don’t have a Sarbanes-Oxley-like law that codifies much of this for “endorsers,” the FTC has greatly expanded the things over which it will exercise influence. Endorsers (and influencers of endorsements) beware!

Beware indeed. Failure to observe the new rules will bring a Sarbanes-Oxley-like law down upon our industry's head.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Kool Aide

UPDATE - As of this morning 95% of poll participants think the verdict was unfair, it seems it took a while for the Boing Boing vote to come in.

Have supporters of Pirate Bay been living in a dream world? Boing Boing alerts us to an online poll in the Guardian where, as of this posting, 86% of the participants support the verdict. You could argue that the industry is gaming the poll, but is it less likely that file sharers are doing the same?

Your call may be monitored for quality assurance

For years companies have been recording customer services calls. Now customers are recording calls and in some cases posting the result.

One more reason to pay attention to customer service before it gets online.

Astro-Slime

It has come to my attention that some bloggers are descending into astro-slime. We are familiar with astroturfing, where instead of building a relationship with the public, a PR firm merely creates an astroturf front group to create the illusion of public support. Now it seems that some are hiring online character assassins.

So far the phenomenon appears to be confined to politics. I am not talking about Democratic bloggers going after Republicans or vicé versa, I am talking about online vendettas that appear to have been bought and paid for. It won’t be long before this leaches out beyond political blogosphere. I predict the first commercial astro-slime will be part of a fight over weapons systems, but it will seep into every part of blogosphere.

Just part of the Pandora’s Box that is social media.

Edit -
Strategies for Curbing Internet Defamation

Internet stukachi

Students Competing For Slots At Elite Colleges Resorting To "Facebook Sabotage"

Students competing to get into the nation's most elite colleges and universities have begun to use sneaky, under-handed tactics involving Facebook, according to a new report from the Chicago Tribune. Via anonymous letters mailed to college admission offices, applicants suggest to admission officers that they check out the photos on a rival's Facebook page before determining whether or not to accept them into the institution. With competition for spots fiercer than ever, the experts cited in that article believe this marks the beginning of a new trend: "Facebook sabotage."

If our institutions of higher learning are permitting themselves to be guided by the Linda Tripps of this world, we are in very serious trouble.

How not to use FaceBook

Aaron Brazell

The spam is a nifty little trick where you publish an event, group or picture of a product, service or event. Pretty typical Facebook activity, really.

Spamming PR people then use Facebook’s “tag” feature, something that is more in context for photos where you can tag someone that is in the photo and they receive a notification that they’ve been tagged. People like me are tagged in Facebook content where we have no context with the expectation that we will be notified of the content (event, whatever) and will click through and maybe cover their product.

So. Not. Cool.

This flack doesn't have a FaceBook account; but as I am in the custom of aggressively tagging things on every topic on which they could conceiveably be searched, this is the sort of error I might have made. Not now. Thank you Brazell for explaining why this is not such a hot idea.

The public relations of high profile litigation

This blog has been on record for years that the growth sectors of our profession will be those which cope with the aftermath of the misconduct, political and financial, of the past eight years.

While this blogger has no personal experience in legal public relations, some things are clear. The ideal is to fight your case in court; the reality is that what happens in the courthouse is greatly affected by the larger debate. Indeed, which controversies explode into full scale legal investigations, and which deflate will, in part, be driven by public relations. No one should think that aggressive PR can fend off potential prosecution, but it can avert fishing expeditions. In the event of investigations, or high profile congressional inquiries, good PR can minimize the damage. Console yourself with the thought that there will be so many controversies in the future that yours may be relegated to sideshow status.

First, do an internal review. What part of your present operation is likely to attract unwelcome attention? Those of the things that need to change before Henry Waxman hauls you before the cameras to berate you. Review your records management policy and be sure it can cope with the revised rules of civil procedure. It is probably advisable that you set up a meeting with your internal PR spokesman, corporate council, and CIO.

Make your friends before you need them. This blogger assumes you have a PR effort that is cultivating the reporters in your field; be sure to include a social media component to that. I recommend encouraging your employees to blog, Tweet, or participate in whatever social media attracts them. The role of house PR should be to monitor social media along with the traditional media to spot relevant trends and discussion lines.

In the event of controversy your first job is to get the facts out as soon as is consistent with accuracy. Your corporate website has a news section doesn’t it? You do post your press releases in HTML as opposed to PDF right? You do have an RSS feed on the news section of your corporate website? All these things will be critical in the event of a high profile controversy.

In the event of litigation, consider establishing an online library of the public documents connected to the case. If you choose this route you must include all the public documents in the case as a carefully edited selection will invite ridicule. A comprehensive collection of the documents tells the general public that you consider the facts to support your company.

XBRL and investor relations

SEC to Junk Paper Filings, Require Interactive Online Reports

Within two years, the SEC will require all corporations and mutual funds to file using a technology called XBRL (extensible business reporting language) with the first wave beginning in December. This transition coincides with the agency's plan to replace its document-based system, for collecting, analyzing and retrieving data, known as EDGAR, with an Internet-based platform, IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. ...

... To illustrate the system during a recent interview, Blaszkowsky sifted through volumes of financial information with a few clicks of his mouse, extracting data from several companies and creating a multicolor bar graph to compare the figures. Then he exported the data into an Excel spreadsheet. What took Blaszkowsky only seconds could have cost hours for a reader of current SEC filings.

"The centerpiece of our regulatory approach is giving investors the information they need to make wise decisions," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "We have an opportunity to exponentially improve the way we perform that mission."

This will make it much easier to understand SEC filings and far easier for financial reporters and bloggers to report on it. Far more data will be publicly available in a form that is easily comprehended by the general public. Investor Relations practioners would be well advised to explain all this to management.

The cardinal rule of rumor-debunking

When you're fighting a lie, don't repeat it.