Eggblogg

On robots, road rage and why faces matter on Twitter

I saw a TV ad last night that got me thinking. The ad, for AXA Insurance, features people barging into each other on the street, pushing each other out the way and yelling abuse at strangers. The idea is 'you wouldn't behave this way on foot, so why would you do it when you're driving?'

Now I don't think I'm the sort of person to behave rudely on the road, and I've never suffered from road rage. But I do get 'customer service rage' from time to time - and it's invariably brought on by the feeling that I'm not dealing with a real person. I suppose that's what happens to drivers who get angry with others - perhaps they see the vehicles but don't connect them with actual people, and the anonymity that the cars provide is a kind of cushion. ("I don't care what they think, they don't know me and I'll never meet them face to face.")

When it comes to email, customer service replies are quite often automated, or near enough (to a standard template with 'insert case number here'.) People working in call centres abide by a script and are often unempowered to deviate from that. Although I know that it's real people who answer the phones or (sometimes) trigger the emails, I am enraged by their anonymity, their inflexibility, and, if I'm honest, the whole cultural premise that the standardisation of customer service and the reduction of humans to little more than robots is a desirable thing.

There was an example of this today on Twitter. I noticed an argument brewing between O2 and @bengillam who claimed they didn't adequately respond to tweets. I joined in the discussion - having contacted O2 through Twitter several times over the Christmas period to complain that their '12 Days of Christmas' promotion included an invalid 'opt out' number, and having had no reply.

O2's position was that they can't be expected to respond to all the tweets they receive, as there are so many. Why not? Is that also their attitude when a customer writes them a letter? Why isn't a company the size of O2 employing enough people to 'man the Twitter deck' - Dell can do it, and so according to Ben Gillam can Vodaphone and even BTCare.

I do think that if you're going to use Twitter you need to be prepared for what it will unleash. Alternatively you could make it clear that your twittering staff aren't there to perform customer service, but rather to broadcast offers, information or updates. If you state what you're able to cover and are honest about it, that's surely less aggravating than saying "Let's talk - we're happy to help where we can!" as O2 say on their Twitter profile.

Another way of diffusing disgruntled customers is to personalise it. Drop the anonymity, forget the scripts and the 'is there anything else we can help you with?' bullshit. Remove the 'corporate' veneer, show faces, use real names, listen, do something to show you're human, and it's surprising how less inclined people are to get bolshy in public. Because that's what these conversations are on Twitter - visible to all.

Large companies CAN do this - look at the twitter page of Frank Eliason, Senior Director of National Customer Service Operations for Comcast. Now I don't give too hoots whether it's actually Frank replying to everyone, or even whether that's Frank in the photo (although I'd be a bit sad if it wasn't). My point is that it looks and feels like real, human customer service.

Am I being over-sensitive? Is it unreasonable to expect corporates to have got their act together when Twitter is still such a new tool and we're all still figuring it out? Are employers requiring humans to behave more like robots and if so, isn't that ironic given the amount of time being spent on trying to create robots that have even a fraction of the intelligence of a human being?

Social media marketing isn't about the numbers game

One of those marketing tenets I often still hear is that people typically have to see your marketing message nine times before they'll act on it.

I've never been entirely happy with this. If a marketing message comes at me nine times (and I still haven't bought), all I can think is that the company concerned hasn't bothered to get its targeting right. And in the case of email, I'll have unsubscribed by then anyway.

It all reeks of the old-style numbers-game marketing that says the more people you hit, the more often, the better - because then you only need 1% of them to succumb and you're laughing. Imagine a huge upside-down pyramid - millions of 'prospects' at the top and a handful of conversions at the bottom. Which is of course how spammers operate.

I wonder if social media marketing is turning the old pyramid on its head. Better to have one conversation with someone who's interested in what you're selling, then allow/encourage/enable her to talk about it in her network, and her friends in theirs.... than to tell her nine times about something irrelevant. (And have THAT talked about.)

Forresters reported on this over two years ago, questioning the received wisdom of the purchase funnel and noting that the internet was making engagement into the new key metric for marketers. And this well before the current social web frenzy took hold. But you'd hardly know it - as recently as last week, Mark Ritson in Marketing magazine blustered about 'pointless' name-changing and how we need to get back to 'the four Ps', as if the last 10 years never took place.

Ritson is well-respected and influential - in his own words he 'trains the next generation of MBA students who aspire to a career in marketing'. But how are marketing qualifications to be taken seriously if they are still based almost entirely on theories from pre-internet days?

List mania

Twitter recently launched its 'lists' feature and already the lists are accumulating. My first reaction, I admit, was 'ooh ... lists! what lists can I make? what lists should I be on?'

There's something compelling about lists, and they're a mainstay of the print media. No real news today? Let's cook up a list! The Sunday Times annual 'Rich List', The Guardian with its regular supplements featuring the country's best pubs/restaurants/organic food shops or whatever, those lists of 'top ten best countries to live in' or 'top ten worst cities for crime', or whatever simple numbers can be distilled from the latest survey.

And now Twitter lists, the latest driver, according to Ian Aspin, of 'status anxiety' - alongside follower counts and the #followfriday trend. Reading his recent post on the subject made me rethink my attitude to Twitter lists and made me determined not to get sucked into worrying about them!

I was also inspired by Ian's suggestions of more meaningful lists, such as people you care about, problems you've overcome (and how), things that have worked for you. I for one would be interested in reading people's lists on those subjects. How about you?

PS If you find yourself on a list that you'd rather not be on, you can remove yourself by blocking the person who created the list, according to Robert Scoble

More good news about email marketing - any accountants listening?

A recent blog post from Email Insider highlights the fact that, despite email marketing delivering a return on investment (ROI) that's probably way beyond what the measurable stats suggest, many companies are still reluctant to allocate resources to email marketing.

Why not? Because just isn't sexy any more? Because they think no-one uses it? Or because email is so far 'below the line' that few agencies will suggest it to a client, let alone put their best creatives on it?

No, it's because ROI isn't a factor when calculating the next year's marketing budget. If that's true, it's a bit depressing that even in the current economic climate there are plenty of companies content to just up the budget by 5% or whatever and assume the 'tried and tested' stuff will do the trick.

Whatever happened to a belief in that Anthony Robbins quote "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got."

Interesting stuff I've seen recently on Twitter

Several times over the last week or so I've found myself in the position of being asked, in fact almost bombarded, with questions about Twitter. At a workshop on PR (where I was a participant), at a dinner party, in the pub.

What is it? What's it for? Is it like Facebook? What's the point of it for businesses? Isn't it just people saying what they just had for breakfast?

Clearly the broadcast media has fuelled a Twitter frenzy, but it has very few answers to the questions on people's lips.

One of the things I always tell people is that Twitter is very much in-the-moment. It's like a conversation that passes very quickly, and if you weren't there when something happened or was said, it's easy to miss it. I found that out the hard way on Friday morning, after I'd spent the previous evening at an event and hadn't been online since midday. When I got to work and caught site of a tweet about Michael Jackson, without pausing to check out the story I tweeted 'Did MJ really die or is it an Internet rumour?"

Within minutes I'd been inundated with replies, ranging from the straightforward ("yes, he'd dead") the ironic ("well it's on the BBC so I guess it's probably true") to the condemnatory ("Don't you read the papers/watch TV or listen to radio?")

It has since occurred to me that not everyone is 'in the room' when a story, question or discussion takes place, and therefore quite a lot of good stuff probably gets missed on Twitter. OK, so no-one in the entire universe could now be in any doubt as to the sad demise of Michael Jackson, but here are a few interesting stories I retweeted that you may have missed this week.

- About the death of local newspapers, interesting piece by Jonathan Guthrie in the FT
- Excellent article from @marketingwizdom: If you're in business you must read this: The forgotten cost of discounting
- Retweeted by @chriskeene: the Guardian on library uses of twitter
- How @msofficeus plans to carry on using Word to render emails in Outlook, killing standards support. See http://fixoutlook.org
- Tweeted by @journalismnews Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail poll
- Tweeted by @getshust: A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009  <--useful for presentations, pitches