When I give presentations about social media, a frequent question is, “What can we do when we see someone kicking up a fuss online?” I assure them that it is identical to any other customer service complaint. Most people with a beef want the problem fixed, but they also — short of that — want to be heard. Really heard.
Further evidence comes from iStrategyLabs’ post about monitoring positive and negative comments. They write the following:
We’ve found that 80% of the time we can easily turn a brand terrorist into a brand evangelist just by letting them know that they’ve been heard, or by directing them to a resource they’re looking for (you could call this customer service).
The other 15% of the time we need to talk internally with our team to see what can be done with more complex issues and the last 5% ends up being something client side teams need to handle directly (i.e. reaching out from senior leadership, or product features need to be changed etc.).
It’s a good post, and further validation for a technique that I’ve seen used countless times to good results. Here, by the way, is how iStrategyLabs measures share-of-voice, both for positive and negative comments:
Thanks for the information Jeff – it’s a great distillation of a very common client fear. And as a pseudo-brand-terrorist, or at least a part-time brand annoyance, I can qualitatively validate the findings. Most of the time, yes, we just want to be heard. After all, isn’t that why we’re all here to begin with?
“Brand annoyance” only in the best way, Sue. 🙂
For those not familiar with her blog, her latest act of brand agitation was to call on the carpet a beloved brand of bicycle.
It’s a spot-on post by an astute marketing pro.