Angry Facebook Live is the New Angry Twitter

Watch out companies: We customers have a new way to complain … live … with an audience … in video … with proof. An angry video is worth a thousand angry tweets.

That big head above is The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur after waiting, waiting, waiting and then being kicked off an American Airlines flight because he dared complain. He documented the entire sad saga on Facebook Live.

And people watched.

So now, when a company screws with a customer, expect that to happen before an audience. No longer can one nice person stuck at a desk in Dubuque answering angry tweets handle a shit storm. Certainly, a robot can’t do the job. (Cenk tweeted his video and the robot response: “We’re sorry for the unexpected delay. Please DM additional details so we can take a closer look at what’s going on.”) Now every “customer service” employee in a company will have to be ready for his or her closeup on Facebook Live. Smile, stone-faced “supervisor,” you’re on Facebook!

It’s perfect that Cenk demonstrates the power of Angry Facebook Live. He knows how to rant before a camera; he has made a career of it. So he took to Facebook Live like a bear to a salmon stream. He uses it to stump for Bernie (love ya, Cenk, but Hillary’s the winner!). He gets into hotel rooms and shares his anger at having only one bar of soap. It helps that he does have that big head that fills the screen and demands your attention. But Cenk doesn’t succeed in Facebook Live because he’s a TV pro. No, to the contrary, he succeeds because he does what we all can do now: just talk to people.

I think back to the customer service shitstorm I ended up starting more than a decade ago in what became known as Dell Hell. That saga played out in slow motion. From the time I wrote my first whiny blog post to the moment when Michael Dell turned his company around and vaulted it from worst to first in online customer service took a year. Then came Twitter and even the worst company in customer service anywhere — Comcast, right? — learned that it had to resolve public customer complaints quickly.

But the difference with Facebook Live is that the front-line employee dealing with a customer will be the one seen around the world. I say that’s a good thing. It will force employees and companies to treat customers decently. It will force companies to train employees to do so — for it will no longer be possible for the person who’s job description is to be nice to show up on the scene and smooth things over. There’s also a benefit in this for companies: When it’s the customer who’s the jerk, then the audience can judge for itself. Note also in the videos below that Cenk lavishly praises the one good employee.

Facebook Live is a big deal for media. It’s also a big deal for every company that has customers.

Note well that Facebook Live won’t be used just to complain about companies. I just had my hair cut (try Hair Studio 101) and brainstormed with the owner, James, about how Facebook Live could be used for patrons to get advice from friends, to show off techniques, to give classes, and to build relationships with friends of friends. It helps if you have friends. That is the real lesson of this story to companies of any kind.