Talk It Up!

How do you get to be the worst at customer service?

In a recent Telegraph article, BT was named the worst customer service provider. We hear a lot about formulas for good customer service; what's the formula for bad customer service?

And I don't mean a little, the-rep-you-ended-up-with-was-just-having-a-bad-day bad. This study rates the majority of interactions as consistently unpleasant and ineffective for the customer.

How? The criteria seem to be these:

• Consistently rude staff
• Taking several minutes to get to an agent
• Being passed around to different agents
• Having to repeat one's request several times (lack of communication among agents or between the IVR system and the agents)
• Staff whose accents are hard to understand
• Long hold times
• Having to answer more than one security question

If you're the company, how do you rate with each of these? (Hint: if you don't know, try doing random customer satisfaction surveys at the end of calls. Trust me; they'll tell you how you rate.) If you're the customer, what would you add to this list?

[Cross-posted from the Spoken Communications blog]

Testing AudioBoo

AudioBoo is one of the newer tools in the social media storm of late, and some podfaders have gravitated towards it as an easy, on-the-go alternative to the sometimes labor-intensive audio podcast.

Thanks to the likes of Neville Hobson over at For Immediate Release podcast, who has been raving about AudioBoo's ease of use, I downloaded the iPhone app and gave it a try.

What is AudioBoo?
AudioBoo is basically Seesmic for audio recordings, with the added benefit of recording directly from the iPhone via the iPhone app. To get started, download the free app from the App store. The interface is three-button, no-nonsense.

 

Push Record to record an audio message. This could be a Twitter-like comment or something longer, like an interview, with two people speaking into the application. After reviewing your Boo, just hit upload to post the message, and message posts to the public timeline at AudioBoo.fm.

The site works like most other social networking sites, with a public timeline so you can discover friends with similar interests, the ability to tag posts for more discoverability and the ability to friend and follow others.

Another nice added feature is the ability to create different account and link each one to the iPhone app--great for community managers like myself who might want to post from different accounts on behalf of clients.

The big benefit of AudioBoo is its ease of use, hands-down. If you've discovered that you don't have time to orchestrate a full-on podcast but still want to connect orally with friends, fans and followers, AudioBoo can basically act as an easy, three-button, instant podcast. At the next event, try hitting Record to capture an interview with a speaker or attendee immediately after a session and posting right away.

It's the instantaneous nature of Twitter combined with the more personal connectivity of audio via the human voice. This could be powerful. And yes, it's now integrated with Twitter so that you can tweet your Boos, so no worries about having to manage two micromedia platforms simultaneously. For a more detailed explanation, this video is excellent:

Have you tried AudioBoo? What do you think? More importantly, how do you anticipate using it?

How does the customer define "more"?

[Cross-posted from the Spoken Communications group blog]

If you go to any seminar on customer service, ask any expert or read any book on the topic, you'll get one basic, rather tired message:

Go the extra mile.

Even a Google blogsearch turns up over 24,00 results. And there are some great examples of going the extra mile, to be sure, but I can't help but wonder, what does that really mean? Who decides what customer expectations are to begin with and what falls into the "extra" category? What if customer expectations are unrealistically high? Or low?

Harvard Business writer Scott Anthony asked this question as part of a 10-part series on customer service. In particular, he addresses the issue of cost-cutting: when a company considers cutting costs for customers, how does it determine what to cut?

In short, when you not only can't go the extra mile, but the company is going to have to stop at 5,000 feet, how do you decide which 280 feet to cut out?

Instead of starting with the balance book, Scott suggests a customer-focused approach: um... ask the customer. It's a crazy idea. Listen to what customers really want and need, not just to decide what new products to develop but also what to cut when times get tough:

A far better approach is to develop a deep understanding of how the customer defines quality. There might actually be elements where a company is providing performance that actually overshoots a customer's needs — a natural target for cost cutting.

(Emphasis mine.) In the social media sphere, we always suggest listening first. We always recommend monitoring for weeks or even months before making any commitments to any type of active social media participation. The same is true for for any type of customer service--even when it's making a decision about cutting down on service. If your customers are rave about your phone agents, don't cut the call center budget. If customers don't like or use the online chat, ask them why or why not; an inexpensive fix might maximize that usage. Or you might discover that your customers just don't like that medium, and it can indeed be cut.

In short, if you can't go the extra mile, don't take shots in the dark on shortcuts based on the balance sheet. Make it a habit to take the time to ask customers what they want, over and over again. Develop that deep understanding of what the customer needs and wants today. And if you're not sure? Ask. The shortcut you take just may end up looking to the customer like that cliched extra mile.

How personal is your persona--on Facebook?

With the explosion of social media into the public space (even my mother has discovered Facebook), there is now a constantly-burning question, especially for those who use social media to highlight their professional accomplishments: how personal is too personal?

HarvardBusiness published an article last month asking the question, What does your Facebook profile say about you? and delves into the constantly blurring line between the personal and the professional. When companies first started blocking Facebook in 2007, business blogger and podcaster Shel Holtz criticized the move, citing (among other) objections the now-emerged trend of work-life integration. He argues against the productivity objection, saying:

Most employees will not risk their jobs to screw around online. If they spend an hour online for non-work-related purposes, they’ll put in an extra hour to get the job done. That hour may be spent doing work at home, but on the other hand, employees are routinely expected to take work home with them. That’s the nature of work-life integration: If you expect me to do work at home, then I expect the employer to tolerate me engaging in non-work activities at work. The measure of productivity is the amount of output created.

And the Harvard article asks the question: why would offer personal information online, anyway?, quickly followed by the salient answer: "Sharing personal information further humanized people whose roles may otherwise make them seem remote or inaccessible." Just look at Frank Eliaison's Twitter team humanizing customer service for Comcast or GM's Fastlane blog to find out how big business can reach out to the public in a real and transparent way and succeed in chipping away at its monolithic image.

Still, this is inevitably the first question I'll field from participants at a Facebook for Business session: isn't that just for your family and friends? And this will be followed by: how much personal information should we disclose? how personal is too personal? is it OK to post pictures of my dog?

Image by zedzap via Flickr

The answer: work and life are becoming integrated. More and more, in the office we show ourselves as complete human beings, with both a passion for our work and a passion for our hobbies and family life. And as "workplace" is becoming defined no longer just as the office cubicle but also as the seat in the airport terminal, the table at the local coffee shop, the iPhone in the car before the meeting, the home office and the Tweetup networking event, the line between the professional profile and the personal profile has grayed as well.

General advice for your Facebook profile:

• Be yourself. Show your hobbies. Post your photography, your dog winning the second place ribbon at the dog show, your favorite campsite at Yellowstone.
• Have an opinion. Whitewashing is for fences. You don't have to be a jerk to give an opinion; if you create a space that invites and engenders informed discussions, you're more likely to build an engaged network than to make real enemies.
• Share your passion for your work (without giving away company secrets). Let your passion for your work show in a real and daily way. Passion begets passion, and as the Harvard article points out, "Seeing a more rounded person can't help but extend and develop professional relationships, furthering the trust that's crucial to collaborative knowledge creation--the lifeblood of innovation"
• Don't post anything you wouldn't want your grandmother, boss or shareholders to see. An open-door policy doesn't mean everyone gets to root around in your closet. Post photos from the company picnic, but leave out the one where the boss looks a bit tipsy. Mention you are enjoying client challenges, but don't mention the client by name. Share video of your family trip to the Poconos, but keep the second honeymoon to Bermuda private.

What about you? What advice would you give to professionals looking to Facebook as a way to reach out and get engaged?

Information overload

First, apologies for the radio silence. It turns out that two weeks before my move to Seattle, I was hospitalized for a week and took a week to recover--just in time to see off the movers and pack the car for the cross-country trip! Well now, thank you, but the illness was serious enough to warrant a hiatus from blogging and Twittering.

Pictures from the cross-country trek are on Facebook as well as some video. Everyone should see Mount Rushmore in his/her lifetime; glad I can cross that off my list!

For today, a fascinating video I ran across that is a five-minute explanation of Information Overload. It's a cross between Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded and your RSS reader. Annoyed that the question of what it all means is left up to the viewer to decide, but also a bit relieved to know that I'm not alone in the daily battle of organizing and evaluating the tidal wave of information that comes to me via iPhone and MacBook:

Book Review: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge teamed up earlier this year to create this book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR. Even for those of us not "officially" in the PR field, the book is a good resource on the nature of conversations and expectations that take place online today.

Part I, The Tue Value of New PR, is an expanded, updated version of the theses in the Cluetrain Manifesto, laying out the differences between what our clients and audiences expect now versus just a few years ago. The fuzzy lines between journalism and blogging are explored, and the idea that no matter what tools you use to communicate, the most important aspect of PR is the "relations" part--it is (and always has been) about establishing and nurturing relationships with your friends, fans, enemies and consumers:

"It's survival not only of the fittest, but also of the most capable and sincere."

Brian and Deirdre argue for the aspects of good Web 2.0 we've all come to tout: transparency, engagement, flexibility, openness, communication with not to and speaking in a real human voice instead of in corporate messages. And they support those arguments with blog posts from the best formative voices in social media: Chris Anderson, Erick Shonfeld, Charlene Li, Chris Heuer, Jay Rosen, Robert Scoble, Todd Defren and others.

Part II covers more theory on this art of reaching out within the social media space, starting with language and attitude and covering how to reach out to bloggers and create a social media press release. (Corporate blogging is in this section, too). Their advice on creating a profile for a social networking/media tool:

"Your profile is an expression of the real you or your 'real' brand--the voice of the person or company who reveals a very human side through conversations."

For approaching social media in general:

"There is no one tool, one release, or one story that willmotivate your customers to take action. it all starts with becoming the person (and different people) you're trying to reach and then reverse-engineering the process. Listen. Read. Learn."

With respect to blogger relations, Brian and Deirdre argue against shooting only for A-list bloggers and advise targeting instead the more relevant influencers, the "magic middle":

"Although there is an A-list for every market, and the A-list helps with the credibility of a brand, it does very little for geeration new customers or enhancing brand loyalty. The true influencers are the peers of your customers... This group is often referred to as the magic middle, a group of passionat epeople dedicated to writign about topics and issues relevant to them personally."

They define the "magic middle" as blogs with 20 to 1,000 inbound active links and argue that these are the bloggers that inspire real people to try new products.

If you write press releases, read chapter 8. Your recipients will thank you.

Part III dives into the how of participating in social media, beginning with the exortation that "technology does not override the social sciences." That's right; you still have to be real, sincere and human. Participation in tools like Facebook and Twitter are in this section, BTW.

Part IV looks into the future of PR 2.0, including the new title Community Manager (yes, that's me!), the customer service possibilities with social media and metrics.

And finally, Part V (I'll admit I haven't got to it yet) speculates on the future of PR.

Overall, this book is a useful resource, whether you're in PR or just looking at starting a corporate blog or Twitter account. It's been incredibly valuable to me as I've been making the arguments to clients for starting a corporate blog or taking the time to participate in social media at all--rich in sources and case studies, it gives me great ammunition to make the case for social media in the business world.

Customer service on Twitter: Zoom H2 and SweetwaterSound

Will Twitter solve all your customer service issues? No. But it can help.

Let's face it; a lot of customers will never call in and tell you they're disappointed in their product. Unless they're absolutely furious and want their money back, most customers are too busy to worry about being a bit disappointed. They're more likely to tell their friends the product wasn't that great.

And that's the point: as Cluetrain Manifesto pointed out back in 2000, conversations about your product are going on with or without you: markets are conversations. And tools like Twitter and Facebook are just that--tools that consumers use to share their ideas, opinions and complaints about products.

It's what I did. When Sweetwater called a few weeks ago to ask how I liked the Zoom H2 I'd purchased six months before, I let them know honestly that I wasn't all that happy with it. The Zoom tends to pick up a lot of background noise, and when I plug in my Giant Squid dual lapel mics, the Zoom wasn't getting any feed from them. And finally, when I plug the Zoom into my MacBook via USB, every few minutes, the signal would record deafening distortion, both in my headset and on the recording.

The representative was great--he transferred me to a tech person to solve the second issue (the mics need a trickle of power, so under Menu, choose "Plug-In" and set "Plug-In Power" to on) and gave me a link to download a patch for the latest Mac OS to try to fix the third issue. (From what I can gather, the Zoom H2 just picks up an extraordinary amount of background noise, so that issue remains unadressed).

However, the patch didn't work, so I emailed Todd, the tech support representative, to let him know, along with a test recording showing the distortion. Apparently, the Zoom folks didn't respond to him, and a few weeks passed. The next time I tried to use the Zoom and it didn't work well, I Twittered the experience.

Zoom (@zoomfx) jumped right in:

 
And Sweetwater (@sweetwatersound) did, too, leading to another phone call and Zoom and Sweetwater working together to deal with the issue:

In the end, I got a call from Sweetwater. It seems the distortion issue baffled both them and Zoom, so Zoom agreed to send me a new unit, and I'll send the old one back. This led to this Tweet from me:

And the positive conversation continued on Twitter as well, with others sounding in:

Could this service have happened without Twitter? Possibly. But it didn't. When email and phone calls fail, I, along with many other users, turn to Twitter to express my views on a product. Using new social media tools like Twitter won't replace your existing customer service. And if your customer service is bad to begin with, using Twitter most likely won't improve it (or at least, not much).

However, engaging customers and users in the social media space can help with the ones who might otherwise slip through the cracks. Zoom and Sweetwater followed up via Twitter when traditional modes of communication failed. They joined the conversation where it was taking place: on Twitter. And because of that, an issue that otherwise would have gone unresolved got adressed in a positive way. And a product that would have gone unrecommended now has a bit more positive press.

If you don't have time to be on Twitter constantly, here's a tip: set up Twitter searches for your company and product names so that you can be alerted to mentions of your products as they occur.

Other advice you'd give to companies considering using Twitter for customer service?

In Chicago, Domino's @DPZRamon gets it

[Thanks, Amy, for verifying the facts of the original delivery!]

The Domino's Pizza kerfuffle that blazed its way across the blogosphere and Twittersphere last week had hordes of social media folks asking why Domino's didn't respond sooner--or at least select a less clunky Twitter ID when they did. And the rapid awareness of "Boogergate" will undoubtedly be a case study for months to come.

But here in Chicago, one Domino's operator gets its. Ramon, who uses the Twitter ID @dpzramon and operates Domino's Pizza joints in Chicago at 3103 N. Clark, 2455 W. Fullerton, 2231 N. Lincoln, 4039 W. 26th, 1234 S. Canal, and 143 W. Division, jumped into the Domino's kerfuffle in Chicago by replying to local Tweets and directing Twitter inquiries to Patrick Doyle's YouTube video (once it was created). And he's not new to social media: his Twitter profile sports links to his blog as well as to his YouTube, Viddler, Facebook and Flickr accounts, all with content dating back months, not days.

But that's not all. When Amy Korin (@interactiveamy) called one of his Domino's stores and waited nearly two hours [correction: over an hour] for her pizza [addendum: that was not the pizza she'd ordered], she Twittered about it. And Ramon didn't just respond; he responded via Twitter. And he did her one better: he contacted Junior, the manager of the Lincoln Park Domino's that delayed Amy's pizza. Together, they posted a video to make a personal apology for the delay:

Domino's national, take a lesson from Ramon. Note that he apologizes for taking an hour to respond to her Tweet; that's the immediacy expected within today's social media sphere. Response  is measured in hours, not days. Also note that Ramon looked at the camera and spoke from his heart without a script. He spoke directly and personally to the customer, taking the first steps to forge a relationship.

And what a step it was! At last night's Social Media Club gathering, Amy reported that that Viddler video had been embedded nearly 12,000 times. Keep in mind that refers to embeds, not views--12,000 bloggers embedded the video in their own post, just like this one. And to do her one better, Ramon provided Domino's pizza for last night's entire Social Media Club gathering--that was over 350 people!

This is where the power of social media lies: in immediate, personal response bent on building a relationship with others.

Best Practices for Twitter, part deux

A while back, I wrote up a post on Best Practices for Twitter, both for those starting out and for those who've been Twittering for a while but perhaps wondering why their following is growing so slowly. In the wake of the Domino's Pizza kerfuffle (now affectionately known by some as Boogergate) and the Ashton Kutcher/CNN race and Oprah's Twitter debut, a few more practices have come to light for the list:

• Complete your Twitter profile with a photo that looks like you. Don't put a photo of an umbrella or of your pet. You're expecting folks to relate to you, so post a photo of you. It doesn't have to be professional; a flattering webcam shot is fine.
• Complete your Twitter profile with a link to your website. If you follow someone, make it easy for her to find out who you are and whether you are worth following back by providing a link to your best/most representative website on your profile.
• Download a Twitter app to your internet-enabled phone. Using a mobile device to Twitter will enable you to live Twitter from events, which gives your followers the feeling that they are there, having fun and learning with you. (Try Twitterfon, Twitterific, Twittelator or Tweetie for the iPhone; my current favorite it Tweetie for managing multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously.)
• If you are Twittering as a business or corporation, specify the human being who is Twittering under that auspice. When Domino's created @dpzinfo two days into the recent kerfuffle, it was useful, but it would have been better if we'd had any idea who was doing the Twittering--was it one marketing guy? A team? Were the Tweets one person's opinion that we could relate to and form a relationship with, or were they all corporate-approved? Your followers need a "who" to relate to. So, for example, when Kristen Taylor Twitters for @knightfdn, she specifies that she (@kthread) is doing the Twittering:

• Please don't use all caps anywhere, ever. It's just not user-friendly. Who wants to read this?

• Don't use automation to thank your followers. Either thank followers individually by hand, or just don't thank them.
• Don't put a link to your money-making, life-changing website in your auto-thank message. It's just tacky, as if someone came to your party expecting a great converstion, and you greeted him at the door by trying to sell him a timeshare. 
• Use TwitPic to Twitter photos of the people you're with, the speakers you're hearing, the conference you're attending, the funny sign you saw, even the lovely sunset you're witnessing. Bring us into the moment and into your life.

I'm sure there will be a Best Practices for Twitter, part trois. In the meantime, what would you add to these lists?

Nielsen reports social networking usage up

Nielsen has just release a new report, this one on how the economy has affected use of the internet, including video viewing, internet ads and social networking sites.

It's probably not too much of a surprise that Nielsen reports use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are up 73% over the last year; 883% since 2003. The San Francisco Gate  quotes Charles Buchwalter, a senior vice president with Nielsen Online, as saying that "the research shows is a fundamental shift from shopping directories and search tools as people seek more 'personalized relationships' when they go online."

In short, what social media hawks have been saying for years is true: people are yearning to connect with people like themselves. They are yearning for real conversations with real human beings. They want to be engaged, and they want to spend time in online communities both for the information exchanged and for the sense of community provided. (Did I manage to use all the social media buzzwords for that one?) People are no longer using the internet just to buy a pair of shoes; they are joining communities to find other shoe enthusiasts; they are finding shoe-shopping buddies; they are subscribing to feeds to find out about the latest shoe styles; they are Twittering about shoe news and sales; they are forming Tweetups with their shoe community buddies.

And very little of that interaction and engagement is actually about buying shoes; it's more about finding, creating and participating in a community that shares a person's interests.

Buchwalter continues, advising internet marketers to online marketers to "create more meaningful relationships with customers."

That's right. It's no longer enough to market to customers; we want to be engaged with as human beings in a living, breathing community.

In a YouTube video (what else?), Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank tells more:

In it, he reflects on the impact of the economy on the online media landscape. He reports:

• while categories like auto and financial services are spending less, pharma and others are increasing spending
• he challenges the industry to change the way the internet uses advertising
• YouTube doesn't cannibalize television; both TV and YouTube viewing trends are going up

The good news seems to be that marketers and advertisers have more options and more chances to engage consumers than ever before online. Question is, will they?

Susan Mernit to launch Oakland Local with New Voices grant

My good colleague and friend, Susan Mernit, has some great news to share. She has been awarded one of the eight 2009 New Voices grants awarded by J Lab with Knight Foundation support this year! Considering the grants fielded applications from over 300 applicants, she is thrilled to have gotten this two-year grant support.

So what's the funding for? It's to kick start Oakland Local, a new site for Oakland. Says Susan, "Oakland Local will be a daily-updated web site and mobile service with a focus on environment, climate, transportation, housing, local government and community activism in Downtown, Uptown, North Oakland, West Oakland, Fruitvale, Lake Merritt, and the Dimond District."

She plans to have an editor, a publisher and three paid part-time reporters who will produce content, along with community contributors. And of course, the site will be mobile-friendly as well, given current trends towards news distribution via mobile devices.

The site will also geotag content to an XML data map, encourage users to interact via cell phones and employ a range of social networking tools to surface, share and make discoverable so much of the amazing organizing and activism in Oakland.

Susan says:

"For me, the Oscar Grant shooting were a transformative factor in applying for this grant. I saw that there was a gap in reporting that none of the blogs or local news outlets, as good as they might be, actually filled--and that lots of the best discussion was happening in smaller groups, on the margins, where people new to Oakland (like myself) or people who were not part of a particular community, might not have access to that information.  The vision here is to marry a deeper aggregation of community and non-profit content with more considered, analytical coverage of a narrow set of issues that have huge resonance for so many people in the O--and see what we can learn from the mix."

Susan co-created New Jersey Online with Jeff Jarvis back in 1995 and, with this new project, hopes to offer an opportunity to provide so many groups working on issues in Oakland an opportunity to have their work and views be heard and seen.

This is a very exciting project to those of us interested in the gaps in information needs on a local level. Personally, Susan, I wish you the best in this new endeavor!

Biz Stone answers Twitter questions

Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin of HubSpot sit down with Twitter co-developer Biz Stone to compare Twitter with blogging.

Biz compares Twitter with blogging and comments on the Oprah phenomenon, the Ashton Kutcher/CNN Race to a Million, how to grow a community on Twitter:

Biz' best advice for community building:

"The key is listening... a little bit of that goes a long way."

So true. Every good social media strategy begins with paying attention to the existing community and its members. Begin by finding out what the current members are saying, what they are complaining about, what they are laughing over, what they are passionate about, what they are rolling their eyes over. Listen first, and you're already miles ahead of the yokel who thinks that Twitter is a strategy, not a tool.

Four best tools for organizing life and getting things done

Life gets busy. Scratch that. Life gets absolutely, crazy, cat-jugglingly insane. Tasks and projects pile up every day, and some great ideas simply slip through the cracks for lack of capture. If you're like me, you have about 14 projects going on right now, at least five of which are super-high priority for clients.

Sound familiar?

On a recent  Marketing over Coffee podcast, John Wall and Chris Penn asked about "swipe files"--that is, how do you keep track of ideas, tasks and projects so that nothing gets lost in the mix?

Great question, guys. Here's what I do:

Situation 1: at my desk
If I'm at my desk, my computer is nearby, which makes this super easy. For new tasks (pick up mascara at Walgreen's, have navy pants altered, post Seesmic video for client, research Facebook for upcoming class), I use TOOL #1: OmniFocus' Inbox.

You guys know I'm a huge OmniFocus fan (full disclosure: I did work with the OmniGroup earlier this year), and this is one reason why: you can easily dump every task into the Inbox, and then sort them into their respective projects later.

So eventually, "pick up mascara at Walgreen's" and "have navy pants altered" will go into the Errands context; "post Seesmic video for client" will go into that client's Project, and "research Facebook" will go into the Social Media Boot Camp Project.

Also, TOOL #2, Zenbe lists iPhone app, is great for keeping running lists. So "pick up mascara at Walgreen's" would be translated into "mascara" on the Walgreen's list--at which point, I'd see that I have three other things to pick up there, so I should stop by today. Zenbe also has online synching and sharing, so you can sync the list and call your sweetie to pick up the four things you need from Walgreen's today.

What if it's more informational or idea-oriented?

Use TOOL #3: a Google doc for ongoing brain dumps. When I was putting together my latest Twitter class, I kept running across ideas and articles I wanted to include, so I created a Google doc to harness all the links, ideas and "oh, you have to remember to include THIS"'s. Google docs also work great for dumping content and potential content for upcoming podcasts: for each podcast, I keep a Google doc and drop in links, listener emails, reminders to play promos, etc. in the doc. Then, when I'm ready to podcast, I simply pick and choose the content, arrange it in a logical way, open up any links in tabs on Firefox, and voila! An organized podcast.

Situation 2: on the road
For all those great ideas that only seem to come when in the car listening to a podcast, try TOOL #4: iTalk for the iPhone. Use it to verbally record to-do items, new project ideas, and books to download/order and read. Then, once at destination, listen to the brief recordings and throw each item either into OmniFocus, Zenbe lists or a Google doc.

What about you? How to you keep the juggling to a minimum; what are your best tools for juggling cats?

Domino's responds to hard-learned social media lesson

Over the weekend, a YouTube video created by two erstwhile Domino's employees made its rounds online, hitting nearly one million viewings at last count. (I wrote about it here). Once Domino's was alerted to the video of two of its employees doing unsanitary (and rather disgusting) things to food ostensibly to be served to customers, they acted swiftly by firing the two employees in question, Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer.

However, until yesterday, no response from Domino's was available online; the videos unflattering to the company brand went viral in a matter of days, while Domino's was still forming its response.

By yesterday evening, Domino's had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to stem the tide of outrage in the Twittersphere, posted a short notice to its site (however not on the home page), and, more importantly, Patrick Doyle, Domino's CEO, created his own YouTube video, condemning the former employee's actions as "sickening" and announcing that warrants had been issued for their arrest:

An excellent response in general. It would have been better if it had been issued Monday. To date, this video has been viewed 18,423 times, versus the original videos' near-one-million stats. A swifter response might have stemmed the Twitter tide or the over 200,000 Google Blogsearch results with headlines such as Domino's YouTube Nightmare , Mashable's Domino's YouTube Video: YouTube Can Get You Fired, Too and Brian Solis' catchy PR 2.0: The Domino's Effect.

As Solis points out in Putting the Public Back in Public Relations, there is such a thing as bad publicity:

PR contributes to the brand personaltiy, perception and resonance of a company. It is the voice. It shapes the company's personality. It helsp keep companies, products and services on the radar screens of their customers.

When you think of things in this light, you can quickly understand why "bad PR" isn't "good PR."

If Domino's had been prepared with a Twitter ID and YouTube presence before the advent of this now-infamous video, dealing with this bad PR would have been a snap. If Domino's had already established relationships with bloggers and Twitter followers prior to the release of the former employee's video, the communication for this crisis wouldn't have taken nearly four days to construct; it could have been addressed within a matter of minutes.

This is the value of social media, in participating in conversations with your public before the PR nightmare hits your brand. Start building those relationships now, and any brand-busting video, blog post or Tweet that hits the web won't be able to make a dent in your credibility or your brand.

Word to Domino's: respond swiftly, publicly, humbly and right now

Update 4-16-09: Domino's CEO condemns the original video with his own YouTube video; Domino's has started a Twitter account @dpzinfo for customer concerns; the site now addresses the issue and the New York Times studies the kerfuffle

This afternoon, Neville Hobson and Barbara Nixon alerted me to one of the more disgusting videos on YouTube. Over the weekend, two employees of Domino's decided to have a little fun. They shot videos of themselves preparing food in various ways that would be considered less than sanitary and posted them to YouTube under the name Whiteair2.

Never minding the fact that this would be the number one way to guarantee firing (I wonder if they could try any harder to lose their jobs any faster). The employees have indeed been fired and the videos removed, but Domino's site still has no mention of which location sported the contaminated food or indeed any sort of official corporate statement condemning the employee's actions and assuring the public that this type of behavior is not typical or accepted at Domino's.

The Consumerist reports that some citizens managed to track down the location where the videos were shot, but shouldn't Domino's have a voice here? As the days and hours tick away, the social media space is exploding with customers (and no doubt, former customers) expressing their disgust and outrage at the employee's behavior. Where is Domino's voice in all this? Silent. As their brand is now associated with giggling employees flagrantly putting food to nose, the brand itself is remaining mute while customers shift and form opinions and loyalties.

Domino's, are you paying attention? Give customers a bit of confidence in your brand after this shaking. Don't take your time; respond NOW. Swiftly, publicly, humbly, and everywhere you can. Make a statement on your site. Refute the YouTube video. Send out some Tweets. Take Shel Holtz' advice and get out in front of this situation. Or Brian Solis' wisdom that

 Amplifying the voices and the faces of trustworthy employees, customers, and managers can help us convey a believable and sympathetic persona that offers something or someone to connect to for those open to the other side of the story

The damage to the Domino's brand will not be contained to that one Domino's location--now every time a consumer orders a pizza, she might be wondering if she should call Pappa John's instead, recalling the etched-in-your-brain image of the employee relishing the idea of making the food as unsanitary as possible.

Domino's, are you listening?