SXSW 2013 Sampler

How to Flip Off Your Customers 9
After sending the e-mail, I immediately got a reply back and
thought, ‘‘Wow, being a big deal on Twitter rules!’’ but it turned out to
be an autoresponder, thanking me for my e-mail and warning me that
it would be about 10 business days before I would hear back from them.
Ten. Business. Days. Not even 10 days. They needed to take weekends
into account. So it would take about two weeks to reply back to me. I
understand managing expectations, but unless you are writing out each
e-mail in chalk and running the slate to somebody up a mountain,
it should never take 10 business days to reply to a customer. I then
decided to phone in my complaint, and let’s just say I would have had
a better chance running my complaint up said mountain than talking
to anybody with a reasonable amount of intelligence or concern.
This is the problem when we get excited about social media but
then drop the brand ball in other departments. Being great in social
media and only mediocre or terrible in the rest of your customer
service channels is a bad move. Every part of the machine needs to be
running at the same level. This is why I don’t think social media is
the immediate answer for many large companies; first they need to fix
their existing customer service issues.
It gets even worse when brands outsource social platforms to
a powerless PR agency. I have no problem delegating social media
to another company that handles your current communications, but
when they have no knowledge, say, or influence over anything outside
of a press release, they’re a virtual talking head—and one that can’t
say much.
An example of this is what happened online with the now discontinued
Flip video camera. The awesome Chris Farias, who is the
Yoda of design, unicorn influencer, 2 and partner at Kitestring Creative
Branding Studio, 3 the ones who are responsible for unmarketing.com,
decided to tweet the Flip video Canada account about an issue with his
camera. You should know that Chris and the entire agency staff were
huge fans of the product, but they had a problem with an apparent
common fault and decided to tweet about it, because Twitter is their
preferred method of communication.
2 Seriously, go check him out on Klout.com.
3 http://www.kitestring.ca.