The approach, and the comment aren’t unique this one retailer or retail at all but rather it’s just one example of the growing gap that exists between how companies operate at the point of interaction and the growing focus on customer experience in corporate.

As this discussion was taking place I could see the lines growing… and yet employees were visibly scampering around to other parts of the store, backrooms, and out the frontdoor for their current task. Some consumers waited and filed the experience away into their own head while others likely chatted about the long waits to whoever they were with on the spot or when they got home and then of course there are the few people who pulled out their smartphone and shared it with the world right then and there. But no matter how they acted, no matter what the, tickets / cashier or any other store KPI may have been, the perception of the store was impacted.

Just about every company has or is in the process of creating a team tasked with building reputation and yet these teams are often kept away from the process where impressions are actually made, left trying to leverage the good outcomes and mitigate the bad ones. For stores, call centers, even web teams, the focus is often on the same metrics they’ve known for years: items per basket, cashier efficiency, upsell dollars – drive the bottom line. It’s not the two sides are at odds with each other, it’s simply how they look at the world – social attacks experience to drive results while stores look at results to determine what to do in experience.

When the idea of social business first started to catch, we could only see as far as our team – how do we in corporate marketing get more people talking, how do we drive more reviews – agencies did this, brands did this, I did this, well did this – it was, at the time, the right way to go. But now we know better, we know that while we may say “social”, we don’t mean what happens at Facebook or Twitter, we mean what happens at the store, with the returns call center, during the tradeshow that creates the experience which will make it to Facebook.

So when we talk about bringing “social” to the entire company it doesn’t just [just] mean get everyone on Twitter to respond to questions, it’s about changing the culture, the metrics, the very way we do business. We have to think about what’s going to make our reputation against what we want out of our business – is our price point low enough to really be able to get away with long lines? Is our service really what we think it is?

Social should start in corporate, it should be managed by a team, defined and run as a part of everyday operations but that’s not where it ends.

Customers form their opinions at every interaction point and the impact of each positive or negative is huge – even if it’s never put out with a public comment that the corporate team can see. This requires a complete shift; we can’t assign reputation to a small team and leave those on the floor who actually make it ignorant of the realities of the market. To improve reviews, shares, likes – social, we have to improve the experience first.

The best way to increase your profits or your loyalty is not to make your customers worry about the next addon fee: doing that merely drives them to check the other guys and blog, tweet and bash everyone every over every dime. There’s a reason why people are using the shopping cart and then leaving it so frequently (71%): they have to get that far just to know the actual costs.

The implication of nickel and diming is direct to the bottom line when someone passes by and less obvious with implications to brand reputation, loyalty and repeat business.

One could argue that we as consumer are as much to blame for fees as sellers are: after all we’ve bought into and encourage price wars through our hyper-comparative shopping and we will go to extreme lengths to save what amounts to pennies [like a Starbucks run to prep for a long line at Costco for gas]. But consumers been frustrated with the fee system for years now and more and more brands are turning this into a major win:

- Southwest airlines: A favorite for many regional and infrequent travelers and even though they’re considered a low cost carrier, the truth is they’re often not the cheapest but they’ve baked in costs that others charge averaging the impact out and turning burdens like lugging a bag into a positive which lets them run more efficiently.

- Washington Mutual [now Chase]: Granted WaMu’s mortgage arm didn’t do so well but remember how fast people, especially students and those living paycheck to paycheck, moved over when they announce no fee checking? Everyone copied it and when BofA tried to buck the trend with a Debit card fee this year, it cost them the homepage of CNN.

- Disneyland: Tell someone the price of a ticket and there’s a moment of shock but compare it to other theme parks and its clear what is Disney is doing. Yes, you can buy a meal or a tshirt and even charge for a few fair style games now but they don’t charge you for rides or fast passes, they’ll let you bring in lunch and you can come and go as you please while their competitors take a smaller upfront cost and then hit your wallet all day long.

- Amazon: Sure their base price is at the bottom of the list to start with but that’s the point: their base price is their price for almost every customer. There’s no shipping, there’s no electronic waste fee – it’s all baked in… I’m mighty interested to see what they do when they end up with tax in the majority of states; last I checked it was just 6.

All these brands share a common attribute: they’re popular.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the businesses which buck the trends to cater consumer’s perceptions do well. Hardcore shoppers, the really frequent fliers, the uber geeks, they all find the actual cost differences and stir up the pot here and there but most people aren’t looking to dive that deep.

So while so many businesses focus on how to out feature, out upgrade, out message, they’re missing the simple point that people want to feel like they got their money’s worth and that’s as much about the how the bill looks and what the social stigma of the brand is as the actual price they paid.

What it is that makes people line up 6, 12 even 24 hours in advance? Is it the deal? Being able to claim first in line?

Certainly price has always had a lot to do with it and even more so in this economy as evidenced by the degree of the deals being offered and the scrutiny they’re getting. But only a few get the $199 doorbuster TVs while hundreds more wait in line knowing they’ll be picking at far smaller deals – there has to be more. At the end of the day we’re talking about sacrificing personal comfort, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner [or at least a long conversation after it] for something that can often be matched online and savings that amount to just a few dozen dollars on items that are hardly necessities.

Great Deals + Sharing = The Black Friday Experience

If we put aside our brand / marketing hats for just a minute, pull out the social science degrees so many of us spent years working on, and put ourselves in the shoes of consumers I think we can see that the success of Black Friday it boils down to our social nature. No doubt the deal is essential but looking at the person to your right and left and realizing that you all share the same goal changes things from a deal into an experience, something you don’t have to quantify the measurable ROI from and are willing to do not just once but year after year. Add in the exclusivity — whether it’s a limited count doorbuster or making a “sacrifice” to just be there and it’s not surprising that many people find the whole event to be, well, fun.  Seeing how Black Friday checkins, social comments and posts have grown even faster than the lines is certainly a testament to our desire to participate with others about what really amounts to nothing more than shopping.

As I talked with people tonight and heard their excitement, even saw a few faces walk out the store after hours of waiting without a purchase or disappointed look, there’s no doubt that for businesses to thrive in this market means going beyond the price war and building on the sense of adventure, chance … of the Black Friday experience. In the race for the customer, the bottom price is not where you want to try and make your stand and yet without offering anything but a deal, its where so many have ended up to the point that 30% off no longer feels special.

As Black Friday Becomes an Event, Success Will Depend on More than Price

But this year with the big transition towards 12am openings, I saw new ideas being tested out there. Best Buy ran movies at select locations; Food Trucks were called in by malls, and straight giveaways like free water are becoming more and more common. It’s personal too: I watched security guards and store employees spend hours outside chatting and standing alongside the crowd when they could have just as easily remained inside their warm stores. All of these actions speak to the link between our customers and our brands – you can call it an incentive, a hook, but the result is that its building community and giving people a sense brands are relatable.

As we see more consumers take part in this communal shopping event, more stores will get into the early openings and offers will increase making it even more important to be seen in the right light, to be more than just a place looking to take people’s money but instead offering up a little empathy, some excitement and perhaps soon a free cup of coffee in exchange for 12 hours of someone’s time.

Of course 8 hours in line are quickly forgotten as the doors open and people rush as fast as they can “walk” towards that big offer – but as I watch people filtering out of this store and back to their cars, it’s clear that the experience is as much a part of their excitement as the savings that exist at 3:30am.

6 months after getting the iPhone 4 I took it rock climbing and put a nice big crack in the front. Everything worked but needless to say I’ve been counting down the days until the new version was announced… 5, 4s, 2011… As much as I wanted the curved design, the features were almost irrelevant.

But while my upgrade decision has been stable, my carrier choice, not so much… Not [just] for the usual AT&T complaints but because half of my new apartment flat out doesn’t get a bar of service. So, while my contract may not be up, it seemed worth the termination fee to make a jump.

And then came an [unexpected] great customer service moment

After reading tweets from @DannySullivan and some “unknown” friends, I prepared for a battle on the phone, to push through a wall of counter arguments from one of AT&T’s “resolution specialists” [seriously, that’s their I.V.R. greeting]  and all the usual drama you expect when calling a company. My experience has always been that these “service” battles actually make it easier to cancel out of sheer frustration, but none the less, it’s a painful experience to know you’re walking into.

But after a few minutes on hold and giving out all of my personal information again the rep didn’t fight me. Instead he merely asked what the issue was and when I explained the lack of signal coverage, he apologized. Rather than going into a pitch, he then told me the cancelation cost [$325 - $10 / month of service was $175 for me] and how to cancel to insure a smooth transition of my number, how to get a hold of AT&T after the change for any issues, etc. Only as he was finishing up did he finally throw in a “I realize this won’t fix your signal issues but if you want to stay I can offer you a small credit off your bill, if not…”

Attitude. That’s what good service is about.

The rep offering me $75 wasn’t a deal breaker; heck that’s well less than a month of service between my minutes, texting and data + tethering package. Verizon’s service doesn’t work great here either [why there’s poor coverage in a “upscale” apartment community with 750+ units is beyond me] but between their trade-in programs, a better service reputation, and just being a different experience I was willing to jump ship despite the added cost until the rep, and thus AT&T, demonstrated commitment to me as a customer. Sadly commitment has become a rare thing these days.

The rep did everything other than what I expected. He was polite and legitimately apologetic. He provided the information I wanted first, an offer last. And when I took him up on it, he made the process seamless, taking the order, getting the right information, providing the little details [like the fact that the phone may just show up after the 14^th despite what websites say]. As icing on the cake, he also noticed that – for a reason which he didn’t know – I’m getting another $75 credit from AT&T in a few months for having an iPhone with my particular history… a retention bonus… we all know keeping a customer is far cheaper than replacing them.

iPhone ordering makes for great case studies because, between millions of experiences, you have the best and worst service scenarios all coming together around one constant. The apple website should be a prime example to every single etailer of how you make a shopping experience – the selection process is about a solution, not a shopping cart; the up-sells appear as value-adds and never stand in your way; the form fields are minimal and rarely error on a legitimate entry [like a special password or unique address]; and between split payments, multiple-financing options, and gift cards, it’s just as flexible as shopping in store. On the other hand you’ve got stories from the carriers of nightmare hold times, conflicting upgrade information, insanely high costs, near arguments over account features, discrepancies in warranty offerings & information… all in one ordering experience.

I didn’t expect to have a blog-worthy experience in upgrading a phone but what AT&T did goes beyond their service, iPhones or the cell industry – the sad reality is that we, as consumers, have come to expect our opinions to be practically ignored, to be hard-sold by someone reading off a script with 3 different levels of service and to be brushed aside with generic response. Despite all the talk of being social & transparent, most of customer service is still about getting the issue to a “closed” status rather than actually engaging to understand, acknowledge and learn from the issue.

The truth is you can’t always fix the root problem a customer is having but when you allow your reps to be honest, friendly, informative, and let them decide how to handle a negative based on their expertise doing this hour after hour, you do what customers don’t expect… care.

——————

Unfortunately I didn’t get the rep’s name; but if anyone from AT&T reads this, email me and I’ll give you the order number as he deserves a thanks.

So while my first post was really about empowering your ground-level employees to avoid bad customer experiences, whether they go viral or not, Delta has turned this into a great example of how you should handle social incidents.

While nothing can erase the negative impact this will leave, Delta’s social [and business] teams have been on their toes and acting quick to avoid making this into a “United Airlines Breaks Guitar” hit. Sure the PR will continue against them, more articles will come, it won’t be good but for an organization of this site and legacy, they’re playing their cards well. Let’s take a look…

1. Yesterday a video was posted about an issue costing 38 soldiers $2800 in fees. As quick as the video became shared, Delta was in the mix with a response from “Rachel” apologizing & reaffirming the policy just before midnight EST.
2. This morning Delta wakes up to see it’s full-blown-viral with major social network and media coverage creating over 200,000 YouTube views.
3. By 1pm EST Rachel has an updated post with an updated policy: 4 checked bags for military traveling in economy on orders. The post reaffirms Delta’s involvement & programs for the military. And Rachel also threw in a personal statement as an Army wife and 12 year employee of Delta.

It’s been less than 24 hours and Delta has out two blog posts, has changed a world-wide policy and has allowed a personal message to float into the middle of it.

Like I said, this won’t end the problem and frankly, adjusting one policy does not fix the underlying issue where the system often prevents employee from making the “right” decision but Delta has taken a strong step to mitigating the issue and, more importantly, having a voice in the spread of it every step of the way.

By moving quickly blogs, tweets, mainstream media are all adjusting their story to mention Delta’s response and changes while the story is hot. As hard as it is, this is critical and very well executed by Delta… The longer you wait, the colder the issue and the less your response is seen so, from a social crises management perspective, kudos to their social team for being on top of the video, their business for being flexible enough to run and make a decision when one needed to be made — even if it’s just one gesture it’s a big one at the right time.

For more thoughts on crises communication management in a social world, check out my previous post about the Urban Outfitters social media incident.

But this isn’t just about Delta. It’s about how we as “corporate” set policies that potentially lock thousands of our employees into a position where they are forced to do things that get our brand to the front page of major news outlets in a social media disaster.

Without a little trust and room for flexibility, your employees can become your enemies.

Now that’s not to say Delta was wrong here. As they’re social team said in their response [good job being upfront on this on Delta, apologizing and publishing your facts]: they’ve got an agreement and a policy and have to think about scale. Similarly, just because someone has a video camera or threatens to blog or tweet or cause you negative PR, that doesn’t mean you should bend the rules in the least. When I hear about PR or Social activity as a threat my reaction is always to follow the letter of the rule… but what if the rule is bad? What if the video camera isn’t a threat but capturing a policy that reflects a brand who doesn’t get it? Can your employees act to do the right thing?

Airlines are an easy example because things so often go wrong, both in and out of their control. Rough for their social media managers, good for blogging on.

I can recall one instance where a flight I was going to take was clearly going to be rerouted [the airline we were going too closes at 11pm night, at 10 we hadn’t taken off]. When I suggested they call the shuttles in advance, the response was a very friendly, very polite: we’re not allowed… The rest of the line was irrelevant: good, smart employees without power may as well be replaced with… well kiosks.

This doesn’t end with bending rules either. How about creation? Just last night I was talking with a good friend about his job managing a profitable store in the retail service sector and what digital could do for them. Here you have a smart, dedicated manager looking push his brand forward and yet he’s afraid that growing the business will actually hurt him. Again there’s nothing wrong with corporate setting digital or social policies, running programs and centralizing – that’s a good thing. But when the supervising store manager has been given no social program, no idea who to contact about one and is fearful of just trying things, you’re losing opportunity.

We’ve all got bottom lines and scale to think about but sometimes the decision made at 30,000 feet doesn’t reflect what’s necessary right on the ground. Sometimes the desire to get all of the experts in a room and talk over the corporate strategy is stifling the local branch that is ready to act now and doesn’t know if they can.

It boils down to simple thing: trust. We ask a lot of our employees but don’t want to trust them with discretion and whether it’s the frontpage of one of the world’s largest news outlets or just an upset customer who tells their 135 Facebook friends, a lack of latitude can go a long way in hurting business.

As social has gone from something the business world laughs at [anyone who pitched the value of a user community before 2006 knows what I’m talking about] to the place where everyone has to be we’ve lost a little clarity in the middle – [corporate] social doesn’t fix your underlying problem, it merely treats the symptoms.

• Got a defective product? The one you replaced for Sally via twitter is just going to break again.
• Service keeps going out? Facebook updates don’t make your 2 million fans any happier, just wise enough to know to head to a friend’s house to use their alternative provider.
• Activists don’t think you’re up to par on ethical values? A couple blog comments won’t reverse that

What social can do, and does a great job of, is allowing you to bandaid the issues. If you’re  lucky the cut is small enough that the bandaid holds it back and let it heal back up. You can’t increase product quality via twitter but you can issue a recall, troubleshoot issues and resolve them in near real time. That’s a great and thanks to 1:1 interaction earns you back some of the credibility you lost – the scar however does not go away.

But for every customer who tweets, facebooks, yelps, blogs or posts openly many more complain in “social silence” – that is to say, they post or share a comment to a network you can’t see, can’t measure and can’t touch.  That’s where the problem festers and eventually grows from a couple bad experiences to a bad perception.

What Time Warner’s social team is doing should be applauded. It’s the right step for their support / marketing department to help upset customers on their own terms and something I wish more brands I used did; but it only helps as far as a bandaid can.

Many of us, probably all of us, are guilty of driving social programs that try to mask a deeper problem. I’ve certainly done it. And why not? It’s a direct solution, something we can do fast, and justify back with engagement counts and posts. In a world where executives and shareholders want to see us all using the latest and greatest social media is what gets the funding, the attention. But you can’t scale responding to problems. You can’t hire enough nice people or give out enough coupons to make up for a problem that won’t go away.

Instead of building up autonomous social support teams with the blessing of the C-levels, that momentum and interest needs to be taken into improving the full experience. Product to fulfillment to marketing to support. Only then can a company really expect their social support team to be empowered enough to be able to help grow the business, otherwise we’re just stuck with bandaids and eventually those fall off.

Related reading (aka others have said something like this before me)

Social Media & customer service: Are you scalable? – Smart Blogs

Are You Using Social Media as a Band-Aid for Poor Customer Service? – Right Place Marketing

The social media band aid mentality – The Email Guide

If you were a typical consumer reading the news right now I’d bet you would think that the web had turned into one giant privacy problem in need of a very big piece of legislation to save your identity. And that’s exactly the problem – people don’t understand the issue.

No doubt there are bad marketers, bad services and bad uses of very personal information out there. There is almost always some baseline truth to legislation, a real issue that needs to be solved. But data has been collected and used long before the web and in much greater and potentially scarier ways. Grocery store chains don’t scan club cards for fun. Direct marketers didn’t randomly get lucky and find your new address to keep sending “junk mail” too. When you call a utility company and are asked to provide the last four digits of your social security number that you provide are not being given to someone who spent 4 years in ethics courses and risks a long career by doing anything bad. Data has needed rules for a long, long time.

So why now? Why regulation for the web?

I studied politics & society extensively in college [finally a good link between my degrees and work] but I’m no expert in this field so I can only assume that the decision for action “now” comes down to visibility of the issue, driven likely by the web its self. Hopefully it is a desire to protect people, rather than an attempt to catch the eye of the media [and voters], that spawned the laws we are seeing hit the committee rooms of the Senate but regardless the result is the same.

We have politicians trying to in-act a law to police something which few of them use [Obama’s Facebook townhall meeting being the first web-tech event I recall ever seeing a president, past or present] and which is, all things said, still in its relative infancy. Not a good combination when the web industry just begun to extol the benefits of the very thing that people are looking for us to stop.  

Marketers are not doing a good job marketing privacy.

The vast majority of sites, especially the ones that people actually like (and therefore have most of the data) are run by people who I would call ethical, or at least smart enough to know that there’s no real benefit in being unethical.

Dan Rowinski said it simply in a recent RWW article on this very subject, “Data is the lifeblood of the Web”. We all know this and we all know that while critical, data is just that – data: millions of records and entries that can seem highly targeted and relevant but are in fact so voluminous that how any individual fits, or doesn’t fit into it is virtually irrelevant. It’s not about the individual; it’s about the characteristics of a random identifier an individual poses. There’s no money in caring who Sally is versus serving ads to id 8cEfd342kA0zK. And that’s good for privacy.

We all know this but the populous (politicians and consumers) don’t. To many, data is something being misused at every turn in a space where marketers are running around without rules or consequences.

Education can turn potential negatives into positives.

I can recall a hundred experiences watching TV or Sports with friends where some irrelevant ad comes on and the whole room complains or flips the channel. Before any more news articles hit further condemning our industry to an immediate fate, we need to step out and look at privacy just like we look at conversion or retention and start optimizing our sites, our marketing and get in front of the issue.

There are real benefits to data but we’re not doing a good job of reminding people of them, or of the steps we take to protect that data.

1. Explain the benefits of data to the experience. If you’re mint.com or facebook people use you because of the data you collect. They want intelligent services that make suggestions, find friends, show you what’s happening in your world and as a result we’re just starting to get into web 3.0 and the era of data driven services. In turn users know they give data and while they may comment that the suggestions are a bit creepy at time, they rave about the systems. But do they realize the correlation? We have to remind them that to get personal you have to have an identity, even if it’s just a few attributes.

Facebook’s 3^rd party permission popups are a bit ominous but the idea is solid. Here’s what we have on you, here’s what you’re sharing with some application, do you want to do it? Not every site needs to go this far but if we explain what we capture and how it makes the experience; people can make an intelligent choice along the way and see the upsides. If they choose not to share then they don’t get to play with the same toys – that’s life.

2. Offer a relevant ad or an irrelevant one. People rave about Amazon’s suggestions despite the fact that they are ads because they’re relevant. The same people say they don’t click ads and at less than a quarter of a percent they don’t click them – much – but when the ad fits it stops being so much of an ad and becomes useful which is why conversion rates on targeting prove that this model works. Whether they click or ignore, relevant is [generally] preferred.  

Rather than running the current PSA’s on unused inventory how about a small campaign to extol the benefit s of targeting to giving the user something relevant, something they could on occasion discover. The same goes for those advertising with these methods – put a tag on the landing page, explain the campaign and why it works. 1/100^th or 1/1000^th of 1% of all internet advertising is nothing to sneeze at; we have the audience and the tools.

3.   Privacy policies in their current form have to go or at the very least be replaced by human readable explanations of what we are doing. What is captured? Where does it go? Who can see it? And how can the user opt-out? 3 page, 10-point font documents hidden in the footer do not make people feel secure. Infographics, Tooltips in registration, FAQs, video and all the other things we use to sell people show value in sharing. A for B.

4.   Anonymity, policies and control must be the norm. Most companies can find ways to get back from a profile to a person, through multiple databases or by storing information that’s freeform enough to allow for personality identity but we don’t. This is where it’s critical that people, especially those in office, understand what the industry is doing to keep the secrets locked away. We have industry policies, certifications like TRUSTe and PCI, but these are being skipped over in commentary so you can bet they are being ignored behind the doors in D.C.  

Regulation will come we know that, and should embrace it as there are unscrupulous people out there but we should be the ones painting a picture of what it is we do, why we do it, and enable people to choose what they want just as we have a choice right now, sit back and see what comes, or step out and have a say in the issue .

Relevant reading:

Storm Brewing: Commercial Data Bill Of Rights Introduced - ReadWriteWeb

Another privacy bill is introduced in Congress - Internet Retailer

When daily deals first launched,  hitting the minimum participants to “activate” the deal wasn’t a given and that made them social as people would have to bring friends in to get things going. Years later Groupon, LivingSocial and other leaders have too many users to have to worry about “qualifying” thus the social aspect is gone & deals have become glorified coupons that you just buy into.

Now don’t get me wrong. I may have critiqued the relevancy of daily deals in the past and am now joining others in questioning their business viability but I don’t doubt the potential of deals as a gateway for discovery, and value service to consumers – they just need a little network power to get to exciting. So as we watch Facebook prepare to roll out its deal offering, Google move into social & deals and Groupon and LivingSocial battle for control of the current market, I thought I’d take a crack at what the future could look like.

Deals are better when they’re done together [rhyming not intended]

Late one evening, a few weeks back I got a text from a friend (let’s call her “Sally”) asking if I wanted to jump in on a LivingSocial deal for White Water Rafting. Sally, knowing I raft frequently, wanted to put together a group trip and saw the deal as as great opportunity. To me that’s exactly what daily deals are for: great offers on services that people were considering, and now have a tipping point to take action on — together.

Problem is, it was 10pm, the deal expired in 2 hours and we all had to commit to make it work – no one wanted to take the first plunge and the deal was missed.

Risk stops purchases; but what if you could remove it?

What if, rather than a mass text, followed by a lot of hoping and messaging back, my friend, had been able to set the whole thing up as a group deal contingent on her network participating:

- Sally decides this deal is for her, looks at the calendar, picks an available date, creates an event and invites 20 people who she’d like to have show up… It hits their email, sms, facebook wall or twitter handle, their call.

-The threshold on the deal is also set based on the offer type. For white water rafting its one full boat – 6 heads. More can join but without 6 the deal is not on. Other services could have a threshold as low as 2 for a spa day or 4 for dinner out, but always a group.

-Sally’s friends get an alert that there’s a deal expiring in a few hours with the right details – the time, the place and the cost. Since they already have accounts they can confirm it right from their iphones but there’s no risk, the deal only goes if the threshold is hit.

-5 people are excited to try out rafting and convince #6 to join via a Facebook group message. The deal is on. Go Sally!

Whether it’s white water rafting, learning to rock climb, or a spa day, deals are overwhelmingly for services people do together but the current systems drive individual purchase and does nothing to address the fear of being the only one to go in.

By flipping the model back to its roots and enforcing a commitment minimum, not from all participants, but from a network of friends the risk is gone and there’s a whole new motivation for people to buy.

————–

Update: as of 8/26/2011 Facebook has announced they are closing down their deal service. In my opinion they had the best shot at truly creating a discovery tool by leveraging what no other deal site really has: relationships. But ultimately it’s a peripheral service and without enough attention, likely never got the legs to have a fair shot.

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours  to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.