Most brands STILL don’t get Social Media
“The pizza is late! Talk to them on Twitter and ask for a refund”. This has been my daily routine for the past years. I tend to classify my experience with brands into three categories: horrible, expected or incredible. My usual experience with brands tends to be classified as “expected”.
It’s surprising, though, how the notion of “expected” shifts depending on your personal experience. The more you know about a field or an industry, the more you expect. Still, most brands treat their consumers as inanimate objects. As static, immutable assets that they need to acquire at all cost. Worst, they ignore the fact that consumers are human beings that learn, adapt and evolve. Underestimating the consumer is one of the major failures of brands, one that comes up way to often. That said, companies are learning fast and are striving to deliver what is expected from them.
When the brand fails to deliver on the consumer’s expectation, two things might happen. Either the interaction was horrible and pisses you off, or it was mind blowing and you become a fan.
Prior to 2006, you would vent your frustrations by talking with friends. You would go to dinner and share with your friends the horror story you experienced. In return, you would get their side of the story, their own experiences with that same brand and some advice. This is an instance of what’s called, orality. The sharing of stories and experiences through the spoken language. This oral culture happens in real time, there is no delay between utterances. It’s instantaneous. Words are sound and action.
When those words get shared through writing, texts or printed media, we turn them into literacy. The rise of blogs has been the digital format of this literacy culture.
After 2006, this line between orality and literacy got, once again, blurred. In 2007, Twitter becomes a household name and changed the nascent Social Media space. Since then, thousands of brands have joined Twitter as part of their “Digital Transformation” efforts.
This has been akin to the Gold Rush but in digital format. As such, many brands have jump wagon without truly understanding the nature of such services. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram or even Facebook, have changed the very nature of communications.
Blogs and review sites dumped opinions, experiences and stories in writing. Twitter’s real-time feed allowed for people to put into writing their oral conversations, effectively collapsing the oral and literacy cultures into a new format. As Walter Ong said in the mid-1990s:
“Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ ”
The previous quote from Ong touches on two fundamental concepts about Twitter. The first one is the textualizing of a verbal exchange. The second is the perception of it being equal to an oral exchange.
Most brands that operate on Twitter or similar mediums haven’t grasped this simple but critical difference.
Twitter is all about a conversation, not a blog. It’s not a billboard, it’s not a one-way street and it’s not an a place to link to your CEO’s board letter.
Twitter is about a conversation. If you’re a brand, I’m expecting you to listen. To interact. To answer me when I’m talking to you. To help me when I’m in need.
Going back to consumer’s experiences and customer support with brands. More people are turning to Twitter to vent their feelings when frustrated with a brand. Either to talk about how bad the experience was or to praise them for incredible service.
It’s not only important to answer to angry comments. I sometimes find it surprising how most brands ignore praises and miss the golden opportunity of generating a great story about happy users. Many companies tell us that they don’t have stories. Truth is, they’re surrounded by stories. Good and bad. They just fail to take advantage of them and use them for their cause.
My own experience when trying to talk with brands on Twitter has been miserable. Very few companies respond to anything on their official accounts.
A study by Brandwatch in early 2015 reveals I’m not alone on this. Their research shows that only 46.6% of the brands responded to mentions on Twitter. Even more critical, only 11.2% of them responded within an hour.
The previous study just highlights several of the problems brands have with real-time communication channels. First, as stated before, while it’s writing, there is a conversation psychology behind it. This means that I expect the brands to listen to me, I expect them to address my questions and I expect them to do so in real-time.
Tracking real-time comments, questions and interactions IS hard. It’s a full-time job. It requires manpower and it requires technology to aid your team.
Most companies downplay the importance of covering such communication channels. They fail to see the growing power consumers hold over them.
Ignoring the problem only makes it worse. Acting on it but treating it lightly will translate into understaffed and resourceless teams. Such mild efforts won’t cut it anymore.
The current war isn’t being fought on the product feature side, but on the attention-grabbing battlefront. Anyone ignoring real-time communications will suffer gravely.
Make sure your company understands the new channels. Make sure the team has the right tools and staff. And make sure your content is aligned with the conversation. Anything else will risk the wrath of the empowered consumer and a final demise of the brand.
