Here are the top ten things we at Abraham Harrison remember every day as we engage online and deal with global bloggers, tweeters, and Facebookers in the thousands over many clients in half-a-dozen languages. They’re social media engagement tips we have sorted out together as a team, added to things I have learned online since 1983:
- Don’t play favorites in social media: everyone germane to your brand now has a platform and a voice online. The “A-list” is just one constituency, and not always the most influential. The “B-to-Z List” is enormous, active, and very influential to their audiences; treat them with full respect
- People are busy online so respect their time and respond to their requests immediately: respond to anyone who engages within the hour, no matter who they are, if possible. If they’re being neutral or positive, it shows respect; if they’re hostile or contentious, an immediate response can prevent a war and win them over
- Do not pour all of your resources into top influencers: find a way to engage through the long-tail
- Remember that you’re always in public when you’re online: not only your tweets and blog posts are public; whenever you email someone or connect with them via DM or via private message, it just takes a simple copy-and-paste for any and all of your correspondence to go public online. (always assume everything you do might very well end up on the front page of the New York Times)
- Always be responsive, timely, generous, and friendly: always engage horns with hugs. Irony and snark does not work. If you are every accused of anything untoward, accept, apologize, and move back to solving the issue
- Keep as much of the conversation online and in public as possible: while you may be tempted to bring the conversation offline, keep all of it online until the point you need to exchange personal data and account numbers
- The primary value of online customer support is being publicly generous and responsive: don’t just pop in and pull everyone who engages with you onto the phone, into email, or over to a private direct message but take the opportunity to spend as much time as you can having a public, open, friendly, and helpful conversational back and forth.
- Engage online and in the public eye for for as long as you can: great advice from Zappos’ Thomas Knoll: why rush the open ticket to closed? Why not spend the time to actually build rapport? This isn’t a call center proper. Why not keep folks chatting back and forth for as long as they’re interested?
- Never turf any question or query: never drop someone a link when you can write/talk them through it and please, never, ever, tell them to look it up on Google or send them to an FAQ. Each question is an opportunity to engage and teach (and also be seen engaging and teaching)
- “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”: this is a quote from the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD) that we at Abraham Harrison live by. When folks online snap, are mean, short or even angry, we know it is never really at us. Everyone’s busy and has a first life and we just wander into somebody else’s messes. Our only job is to be as helpful, responsive, nice, generous, patient, and friendly as humanly possible
The conversations over at Chris Abraham and at Olivier’s Blanchard‘s blog The BrandBuilder Blog, are driving me crazy because the debate is between two camps: the “you cannot outsource your online, social media, relationships to an agency, you need to keep them in-house, intimate, and authentic” and those who believe that people are less fussy and just want awesome customer service by anyone.
When I started Abraham PR in October 2006 — becoming Abraham Harrison in March 2007 — I was the result of over 15-years of online experience and three years in online marketing and PR and I knew better then, and I know even better now:
In general, people are too busy and too focused on their actual real lives to care about the “authentic” voice of a company they buy stuff from, to care about intimacy-building, or to really be interested in pursuing friendship relationships, they’re interested in finding a way to engage your brand quickly easily, simply, and conveniently; they’re interested in reaching out with their issue, concern, challenge, or questions; and they’re keen to get an immediate response and a timely, generous, and worthwhile solution.
That’s it. They primarily want service from your company – not love, not friendship. Service. Fast, effective, personal, competent service. Building relationship is not unimportant, but providing great service is primary if your relationship is a commercial one.
When we reach out to bloggers by the thousands every day, we win them over not by becoming their chums but through giving them what they need, when they need it, and with the sort of respect and promptness that is often reserved only for what are generally called A-list blogs, high-influencers, celebrities, and journalists — the so-called “worthies” with their high-end compete.com and Klout scores, with their mainstream media acumen and high UMV’s. Relationship builds over time with these bloggers, but first, foremost, and immediate is providing them information they want in the way they want it.
Every engagement online — be it a newbie blogger, a Facebook user with an average 80 friends, a tweeter with only a hundred followers — needs to be handled with the same kid gloves that are too often reserved for online royalty: the Wall Street or NY Times tech blogger, the tippy-top AllTop bloggers, and the majestic few with decade-old blogs, a million Twitter followers, and 5,000 friends.
The sort of behaviors traditional digital PR, digital marketing, and digital advertising agencies exhibit on a daily basis need to be harnessed and run further afield than just the Technorati, Tweeterati, Bloggerati, Facebookrati, and celebrities and to anyone and everyone.
What this means is that every single mention, ping, comment, discussion, debate, petition, unofficial page, wall post, tweet and retweet, blog post, blog comment, message board and forum discussion, and group chat needs to not only be monitored but considered for engagement. To be engaged openly, transparently, in plain sight, and also in a very timely manner — no matter who they turn out to be.
