Social Media is billed as a revolution for being connected with more people, reaching out to customers, and rolling up your sleeves and getting into the trenches of managing your own public relations. Large companies are slowing customer attrition by reaching out through Twitter. Small companies are finding new customers. Why wouldn’t you want to be in on “Social Media”?! Why wouldn’t you want to hire a new employee to handle all of this complex new communication? Here are some common arguments for Social Media, and why they’re bullshit:
Fallacy #1 – “If we don’t have Social Media, we’ll never know if people are unhappy with our brand or product!!”
Call me jaded, old fashioned, or any other slur you’d like to use to insinuate that I am “behind the times” but in my opinion, if a problem has made it to Twitter or Facebook, it’s really not the problem. If you sell a physical product, and somebody is unhappy with, they’ll usually look for a way to contact you. In the last 5-10 years there has been a trend towards giving “Support” email addresses and 1-800 numbers that lead to poorly trained personnel after long wait times. This is unacceptable.
Often times people turn to Twitter when they have no where else to turn. You should have prominent documentation written and illustrated by someone in the native language of the probable consumer. On the front of said documentation you should have something elegantly stating in BOLD with BIG print, “QUESTIONS? 1-800-YOUR-NUMBER”. Staff the phone number with people who understand the product, the problems, and have the power to solve them. They should be able to issue RMA’s, Refunds, Exchanges. Nobody wants to talk to a “handler”, they want to talk to someone who can help them right now. It’s disrespectful to have them talking to anyone else. Though The Oatmeal is hilarious in
this comic, he backs up my point.
It should never get so bad someone has to turn to Twitter. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t keep an eye on your brand via a column in Tweetdeck or pop on to search.twitter.com every once and a while, but instead of hiring someone to troll Twitter all day for you, or build Facebook friends, you should put another capable, talented person on the phone to answer customers more than 140 characters at a time. At the end of the day, Twitter is a gateway to a more robust communication medium: cut out the middle man......
