Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Paul Dervan has an interesting post about Southwest Airlines use of Twitter. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a bit of a mix between an Internet forum and Instant Messaging (watch this video for a better example.) Paul, the interested marketeer, points out that:

Southwest have 1,212 followers (like me) on twitter. While I’ve never actually flown with them, I suspect most of these people are Southwest customers. The interesting bit is they follow anybody that follows them. Yes, they follow the daily thoughts, ramblings and rants of these individuals - most of which have nothing to do with Southwest.

This sounds like a lot of effort, so why do it? Well, firstly it is a commitment to their customers. They are essentially saying “You are interested enough to follow us, then we are interested in you”. But this is also an excellent way to get under the skin of their customers and of course have a dialogue with them.

Does it work? I’d say so. I read a post (tweet) today from one of their followers which simply said “I hate Southwest”. They responded within a day on their page with the following “I’m sorry to hear that! What did we do, and how can we make it better?”

This is a extremely customer-centric brand that is using technology to get closer to customers and helping them serve them better.

Can you imagine an Irish bank, retailer or airline doing something like this?

I can.

This resonates with an observation that was made at a recent Edelman Digital meeting I attended:

A colleague raised an interesting point about the evolution of the role of a customer service agent. Why wait at the end of a phone, when you could be hunting down unhappy customers online and setting the ball rolling to solving their problem.

Sounds great in theory, but this requires a fundamental shift in how customer service departments are operated. Like Paul I can imagine an Irish bank, retailer or airline doing something like this, but I can’t see it happening it tomorrow. This is the future of customer service, more importantly though it fundamentally increases the importance of customer service in future product/service development. A few bloggers have recently been pointing out how certain brands fair when you look at their tag cloud (here’s a definition.) In the case of negative attributes, if these aren’t addressed it shows up the lack of connection between the company and its customer. Hardly a healthy relationship in the long term.

One important point I want to make on this is that online monitoring of customer feedback underlines the fact that this type of engagement belongs in house. It (is) will be a 24/7 commitment so let’s skip past the old chestnut of which discipline ‘owns’ the social media space. You pay consultancies for their insight and their devil’s advocate advice. In the long run you won’t pay them to do this for you 24/7.

So whose responsibility is it to engage with an organisation’s audiences online? It is something that Damien Mulley has been pondering also, he believes that the role belongs to a community manager:

My definition of a community manager is someone that looks after the community that can develop around the company blog, wiki, social networking profile or discussion forum and also go out further than that onto the net and (if the company permits) engage with people on their personal spaces. Gone is the time when you must wait for the email or phonecall to engage with a customer. A community managers is the point person for the company for the company’s public facing endeavours on the wild wild web. In a hotel analogy the PR people are like the front desk while the community manager is, in a way, like the concierge, able to route around officialdom and get the customer what they want. A concierge that again can also go walkabout.

Damien’s post makes for interesting reading. My only observation is that we’re increasingly getting too bogged down in differentiating between mediums when interacting with customers, when ultimately the end result is the same. Seriously are we advocating that we should only listen to consumers’ thoughts online. You do have to question how many organisations take the good old fashioned suggestion box seriously. With this in mind, I’ll point to Paul Isakson’s excellent PowerPoint on ‘What’s Next in Advertising & Marketing?‘ again.

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With Paul’s PowerPoint in mind, I’d advocate something more along the approach of Nike who increasingly looking to build 360 degree experiences for communities that offer multiple points of intereaction, such as the third floor of the Nike Store in New York, dubbed the ‘Nike Running Club’, where according to the New York Times, “runners can map out running routes, receive training advice and attend an evening speaker series — all free, even if they trot in wearing Adidas or Brooks sneakers.”

This is the future of marketing. Don’t believe me, John Grant puts it best in his book ‘New Marketing Manifesto’:

If Nike as a brand was grounded in local community sports clubs and activities people would have had to give up exercise and friends to leave it behind, rather than just giving up on a badge. Communities of interest make brands less disposable. The old marketing relied on identifying passive target audiences whose only connection with the brand and each other was purchasing. New marketing aims to form a much more active and bonded community of interest.