When he was senior director-national customer operations at Comcast Corp. before moving to Citi this past summer, Eliason was well known for pioneering the use of Twitter for quick customer service via @comcastcares. He urges marketers to quickly address online comments.
“If [the comment] is not accurate, be clear about the inaccuracy and provide the correct information,” he said. “If it is accurate, then you want to listen to their perspective, provide additional thoughts they might not be aware of and share with the right decision-makers.”
The ability to respond is a powerful advantage of social media, said Todd Vernon, founder and CEO of social media search optimization company Lijit Networks. “Negativity is worse when the mainstream media does it,” he said. “If it's in the Washington Post, that's not a great channel to change the writer's mind or engage in a dialogue.”
With social media, Vernon said, you can “re-engage the author, tweet on top of it and actually change the whole landscape of what transpired.” He said he's had to do this himself at times, when the Lijit website was down and the issue was whipping around the blogosphere.
“By engaging as a company, you can actually come up with more positive relationships than if things had worked right the first time,” he said. “It's an opportunity for you to impress with your customer-service skills.”
Vernon noted two social practices that “absolutely don't work.” The first is turning over social media responses to an agency or public relations firm that merely posts promotional items. “People don't use social media that way,” he said. “They want information about a company that makes it seem more human and emotional about its brands.”
The second mistake, Vernon said, is not providing the internal social media manager with the authority to address customer complaints or issues.
“You don't want your social monitor to have to clear things through someone else and let hours go by,” Vernon said. “If a customer tweets something about a brand and doesn't hear back from the company in an hour, that brand is not engaged.”
Jeanette Gibson, director-social media marketing at Cisco Systems, advises companies to take a wait-and-see approach before addressing social negativity.
“A lot of times if a company builds up community support on Facebook or Twitter, the community itself often comes to its aid in support of the brand,” Gibson said. “At Cisco, we look first to see how the community reacts and comes to our aid before jumping in and really being aggressive about it.”
