Comcast has achieved renown for how they respond to customer service problems on Twitter. An interesting social media case study, until it happened to me.
9:45 AM. Internet and phone crash, just before a big client call. I'm a Comcast triple play customer. I got no data, only TV. Fortunately a colleague has a draft of the prezo so I'm able to call in changes from my iPhone and she sends it off before the meeting.
10:00 AM. Service is back. We start the call.
Over-the-next-hour AM Comcast service craps out twice more. Good thing for cell phones. They make everyone (including ISPs) think "land lines, who cares?"
11:00 AM I call Comcast to complain, asking elegantly "WTF?" Comcast informs me, "We can get to it in 48 hours. If you were a business customer, we could do it sooner. But you're not." Worse, until they send the repair guy out to investigate, they can't have their network people look into whether there is a problem in my neighborhood.
My response? "NOOOOOOOO." (Cue SFX: guy throwing a fit) "That's a terrible way to run a carrier. Even the phone company of yore was more on the ball." The customer service rep assures me TINMWCD (There Is Nothing More We Can Do. Why does Jarvis get all the nice acronyms?)
And then it dawns on me: I am An Empowered Consumer. In the Post Mass Media World. In the wake of the Jarvis Playbook I don't need to threaten to throw a stink, I already stink! I've got 1,132 Twitter followers . So I wonder, if I Tweet, will anything come of it?
What follows is tweets,with commentary in red.
hirshbergComcastFAIL: "Since ur a 'residential' subscriber, Comcast can't fix your internet/phone service for 48 hours." I feel so 2nd class!27 minutes agofrom web
Yikes That was fast! Less than a minute. And it wasn't automated, Bonnie was talking to me! But what she said didn't square at all with what Comcast told me on the phone.
Holy contradiction, phone man! How can you "not distinguish based on type of customer" and simultaneously serve "business accounts" better because they contract for good service? That's what I'm talking about. I'm feeling distinctly steerage about being a residential customer. Even AT&T didn't say this to me before I threw them out last year!
So in the space of a few tweets we've gone from the lofty possibility of customer service in the era of transparency to "Dude, don't you know, phone service can suck. Just call my mom. Help in today's world...."
My takeaways:
1. Its just amazing you can complain and they are on it so fast!
2. Comcast is in a world of hurt about what kind of service they guarantee mere residential customers. Beyond the "we can fix it in 48 hours," sillinessthere is the fact that residential customers can use only so much high speed data, or else. Or that if you actually transfer data for more than 15 minutes continuously at the maximum speed you signed up for, they'll put you in the slow lane
3. I heart transparency. Tell me what service level I do or don't get as a residential customer. When you tell me that triple play is such a deal, let me know that you are the cheap carrier with less service unless I'm a business customer. Tell me what I gotta pay for you not to cap my speed or throughput.
4. Of course we do have more transparency than before. When i was a kid in New York in the '70s both phone lines went out one day and mom had a fit! She looked at me, then outside (at manhattan, mind you) and yelled, "We've lost communication with the outside world!" Back then she had no one to complain to but me and the wall. I was sent down the street to call New York Telephone from a pay phone and then hope they'd show up. Which may explain why mom, in addition to using the phone more than anyone I know, is so damn curious about twitter.
On Monday we set a goal of 140 people using the Aspen Ideas Festival Tag #aif09. We put out the word, threw a tweetorial, published our how to tweet guide... and wondered what would happen.
It worked: We've blew through 269 unique people using our #aif09 tag (for detail, chick on the chart to the left), and as of
now there have been over 1500 tweets.
Crains Chicago Business took note, tweeting, "Wonky Ideas Festival gets sexy with Twitter." And wrote this article.
Today Lews Black recorded this urgent
message to Ideas Festival tweeters:
You can follow tweets in real time here via twazzup, and tweets by speaker here in a great page built for us by Adam Hertz at Tweebase.
Friday Morning I'll be giving the tweetorial talk again at 7:45 AM in the Greenwald Pavillion. Festival Attendees, please come! (Best comment on the first talk was from Gawker's Nick Denton, who in his best British Tabloid sensibility told me, "I came by to make fun of the Tweetorial, but you actually explained Twitter better than the Twitter guys.")
Friday's tweetorial is part tutorial and part tweetup. So #aif09 tweeters, please come! I'll spend the first part of the talk on why this unlikeliest of mediums works and run through some great use cases for our audience. I'll also look at how twitter has been been used here in Aspen, and then go through how-to's . Finally, we'll break into groups where the twitter activated (which probably means you, if this link reached you) can help teach the rest how it all works.
The last tweetorial was standing room only... I was amazed by how many people (many my mom's age) came out, learned, and tweeted.
Here's text of the message we've shared with Ideas Festival Attendees just a couple days ago:
The Aspen 140 Engaging the World in 140 Characters at a time
The Aspen Ideas Festival gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them. In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen at The Aspen 140.
How does it work? The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using a number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The guide on the other side of this handout tells how. The Ideas Festival will present a Friday morning "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg on the hows and whys of Twitter. We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a twecap?) of the best.
Our request: join twitter and share your Ideas Festival experience. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation! More than ever tools exist to weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that's something each of us can do!
I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival working with the Aspen Institute and our Conversation Group team on a project to get great swaths of Ideas Festival attendees and speakers to tweet the festival and thus share the conversation broadly. The Festival hits many broad topics--- Media, Environment, Health Care, Science, International Relations--- of interest to many on line communities, and thus a real opportunity make this event more open and globally engaging than it has been before.
On Tuesday at 4:00 PM I'll be giving a Tweetorial with Jeff Jarvis to share the hows and whys of Twitter. Whats great about the Aspen community is they've all heard about Twtitter, see how its changing politics, news, brands, conferences... so there is a lot of interest in learning how to do it. And getting such a smart, connected group online really furthers the purpose of the Ideas Festival. We're also telling everyone to use our hashtag: #aif09
Here's the message we're sharing with Festival Attendees:
The Aspen 140
Engaging the World 140 Characters at a Time
The Aspen Ideas Festivals gathers leaders to do the best thing you can do with ideas: share them. In years past all the action was on campus, aided by media (and bloggers) who reported on what was said. This year we're adding a new dimension: extending our reach by tapping the community of speakers and attendees to participate in open conversation about the ideas that are generated and shared here. We call this the Open Ideas Project, and the people who will make it happen are The Aspen 140.
How does it work? The Aspen Ideas Festival is teaming up with The Conversation Group to recruit at least 140 attendees to participate in reporting the Festival using any number of social media tools, and linking and distributing the content via Twitter. The attached "how to tweet the conference" guide tells how. The Ideas Festival will present a Tuesday afternoon "tweetorial" with Peter Hirshberg and Jeff Jarvis on the hows and whys of Twitter. We'll be aggregating all of the content originating from the Ideas Festival and posting daily a recap (a tweecap") of the best .
Our request: join Twitter and share your experience of the Ideas Festival. Recruit your friends and speakers. Amp up the conversation. More than ever tools exist to weave the Aspen Institute Community into a global conversation. And that’s something each of us can do.
Download the pdf , above. Its fun. For those who are bandwidth challenged , the text of the how to guide is below:
The
Aspen 12-Step Great Ideas Program
Sharing the
Ideas Festival With The World
In 140
Characters or Less Using Twitter
1.
Admit there is a higher power: sign up for a free Twitter account:
www.twitter.com
2.
Tweets are (very) short messages: 140 characters or less.
3.
Always include #AIF09 in your tweet. That's our unique Ideas Festival tag
4.
Tweet from your laptop, Blackberry, iPhone ... or any phone that can text
5.
Full how-to instructions at www.www.aifestival.org/HowToTweet
6.
A good format: idea, speaker, where you are. As in an idea from a session:
Now
listening to @hirshberg at the Aspen Ideas Tweetorial. What a riot.#aif09
(a quote, the speaker, the conference)
7.
Tweet the essence of a session. Memorable quotes. Big ideas
8.
Tweet what moves you. What makes sense. What's bunk
9.
Tweet the sessions you're going to
10.
Tweet ideas from your conversations
11.
If you blog or upload video, be sure to tweet the link
12.
Learn more at the TWEETorial 4:00PM Tuesday, Mcnulty Room, Doerr-Hosier Center
Why
all this? Newsies, bloggers, people who follow ideas will see all these
thoughts coming from Aspen. They will take note. This will make the Ideas
Festival more open, more accessible, and more connected to more people.
Before the Social Media Revolution, before Twitter, before blogging, before even the internet itself there was the Iranian Revolution.
In 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was able to mobilize his supporters and fire the Islamic shot heard round the world with the subversive, emergent media of the day--- cassette tapes and the telephone. The Shah may have had complete control over mainstream media, but nobody was in charge of all the cassette machines that copied Khomeini's message of Islamic fundamentalism from France to Iran and ultimately into mosques across the country. So there is some irony that the revolutionaries of that era who now run the place are cast as today's reactionaries, on the receiving end of uncontrollable social media which relentlessly and inevitably are spreading the word, despite the state's desperate effort write history in its image and control the message. Honestly, Stalin would have been just as annoyed at Twitter and would have dispatched the KGB to shoot up the internet.
Back in the day the United States was on the wrong side of history as we watched the Shah's power crumble and then endured revolutionaries occupying our embassy and holding Americans hostage. Today things are flipped as the Iranians are outraged at a regime backed by Fundamentalists Gone Wild. Or to quote the 1968 Chicago Yippies who were the media influence for the 1979 Iranian radicals, "the whole world is watching" as the credibility of the Iranian state and its elections are challenged. Which raises a tempting question: are the forces that led to Islamic fundamentalism in the first place now about to self-organize once again and begin to lead to its undoing? After all, the first great manifestation of the Fundamentalist Islamic state was Iran 30 years ago. Al Queda and the Taliban simply open-sourced the Khomeini idea and extended it. The greatest challenge to fundamentalist Islam ever seen is being witnessed right now, in Iran as its people question the legitimacy of their ruling regime.
Well, almost. After 9/11 the USA mounted he greatest, most intense challenge to Islamic fundimentlaism ever. But that took untold billions of dollars, thousands of lives and ultimately ended up picking a fight with a non-fundamentalist regime that wasn't responsible for 9/11 in the first place. Which hurt us at home, hurt us in the eyes of many people of the Middle East, and will take us years to clean up. One could argue that what has been accomplished in the name of self determination , freedom and the power of democracy in the last 100 hours by the thoroughly pissed-off and energized people of Iran is more leveraged, sustainable and likely to spread virally that the efforts of the USA over the past 100 months in its endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq by force. This is not to diminish the valiant effort of our armed forces or our diplomatic successes. But it does point out that the top down, were gonna impose it approach we took is incredibly expensive and has a lot of annoying side effects that you don't have to worry about in bottoms-up people led movement. Many a CEO might note that top down imposed change in a corporation is a lot tougher to make stick effectively than engendering a bottoms-up movement among employees. This seems to be part of the fundamental grammar of the distribution media of our day.
President Ahmadinejad would like the world to believe that the forces opposing him are so much American and western hooligan meddling (Has any state that blamed hooliganism for its woes ever been anything other than a bad joke?) Its true that we Americans are contributing to the Iranian proto-revolution, but not in the state led manner that Ahmadinejad imagines. His problems stem from the modern version of the cassette tape. A set of thoroughly western, nee American, nee practically Northern Californian innovations: Twitter, the blogosphere and the Internet. There is a certain symmetry that the very nation that ushered in the Islamic revolution a generation ago with bits of subversive western technology may be returning to their playbook to remake themselves today. So, viva la revolution! Viva open media! And viva the first mass self-determination movement made possible by APIs! ( Okay, Obama used a lot of these techniques last year. But he had the advantage of operating on the home turf of a great Democracy. So watching all this play out in Iran is particularly stunning. )
I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today. Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.
So I decided to write a job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."
I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap Craig's List joke that comes to mind...) So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the newest of all:
Personal Brand Assistant Can you help make this brand fabulous?
Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief: in order to be me, to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance. As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report on parties and post embarrassing photos. Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook. You'll make my twitter followers feel special, because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic.
And because authenticity is so important in this era of social media, you'll receive ongoing training on the finer points of being me. Training that will serve you well for the rest of your life, even offline. Whatever that is.
You'll work in programming, content development and partnerships helping to insure that I not only don't forget to eat breakfast, but that I remain relevant to today's audiences and delight sponsors. Over time, you'll drive strategy monitoring the blogosphere 24/7, refreshing and refining the brand to meet the changing tastes and requirements of my followers.
Is this necessary you ask? As necessary as the air we breathe. Vital for our species development. A couple million years ago humans didn't even exist. All we had was Homo Erectus. He walked, but didn't friend. A half million years ago humans were born: Homo Sapien, man the wise. Just like your parents. Today we, you, I are beyond that. Today we are all individual brands, connected, in need of brand management and ongoing global engagement. Homo Brandus, man the brand. Only we're evolving so quickly we can't quite do it alone. Which is why I look forward to interviewing you as my personal brand assistant.
At the Google Zeitgeist conference this September I interviewed Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson about his efforts to
accelerate the company’s growth strategies through the use of social media. We
often think of social networks, wikis and the like as impacting onlymarketing or the media, but Best Buy is
a great example of how they can fundamentally transform the enterprise and the
art of management. And in so doing unleash new productivity, creativity and a
smarter customer experience. I think Best Buy is a leading indicator what
businesses will start to look like in the near future, which is why I found Anderson's insights so relevant.
I’ve been fortunate to have a front row seat to many of these
developments: our company, The Conversation Group, has worked closely with Best
Buy’s VP of Internet Strategy Michele Azar over the last year on implementing some of these changes and fostering an open, collaborative approach to partners,
employees, customers and developers. The talk with Brad opened with a short
video highlighting much of what Best Buy has been up to: click on the player
below to view my entire conversation with Brad Anderson, starting with “the company as Wiki.”
I first asked Andersonhow a company that grew up in the distribution and product availability
world came to adopt social networks, predictive markets, and an open approach
to innovation and cooperation. Traditionally, we associate companies like this
with classic top-down management approaches. Brad points out that as their
business challenge shifted from simply distributing product to insuring
customer delight under countless usage scenarios, only a method that tapped the
wisdom of everybody made sense.
Next we discussed the impact all this had on traditional
management and managers. Brad told me that it “absolutely flips the role
leadership” since great ideas often come from the edge, not the brass. And, all
this “ can be murder on middle management”
One reason Best Buy provides insight into management to come is
the perfect storm of a workforce and business challenge faced by Best Buy.The company has 170,000
employees, most of them of the under 30 net-generation that grew up with
collaborative technology. They go to work every day solving technology problems
for customers, where they are all potential experts. In retail, Brad told me,
“You are exactly as motivated to deliver service as you feel like you are
engaged in the work… so if you can create your job, you’re a lot better off!”
Next we discussed some specific projects:the “Loop Marketplace” which replaces
the suggestion box with a market where employees can submit and share ideas…and
often get them funded. And a prediction market (like a stock market simulation)
that was dead-on in predicating Christmas sales because, “It reveals insights
in the system that aren’t captured by the hierarchy.”
Here we discuss Blue Shirt Nation…the employee social
network which was build by Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling in the advertising
department to garner customer insight from employees. But from the moment it
was turned on it was clear that employees would call the shots on this system
and define how it wouldbe
used.
One of the most dramatic examples of using a social network
like Blue Shirt Nation to surface employee talents and enthusiasm is the case
of The Employee Tooklit. When the IT system that employees used in store was
getting tired and old, six employees (who turned out to be very talented computer
geeks and coders) came to corporate and rewrote the system themselves in six week for a couple hundred thousand dollars (spent on pizza, coke, and hotel
rooms.) All to the astonishment of the company’s IT consultant who said the
project should cost $6,000,000 and take the better part of a year. Talk about
unearthing hidden talent and creating new career paths for your employees!
Brad talks about the fact that when you start using social technology to connect employees, everyone become a lot more aware of each individuals talents and stories. And this can lead to a lot more productivity and creativity. This has become something of a mantra at the company, under the mantle of I Am Best Buy. This thinking is beginning to affect strategy company wide. For example, this year's Holiday TV campaign is all about the highlighting the individual stories of Best Buy employees. It was shot by documentary film maker Errol Morris and blogged about here by Best Buy CMO Barry Judge. This is a direct example of how the "Company as Wiki" thinking is impacting the company's brand. By making the brand a lot more about people, it opens up up avenues for more social marketing in the future.
This theme of using the social network to tap unexpected
employee talents shows up repeatedly. When employee participation in the
company’s 401k plan wassub par, it
was the employees themselves who took on the problem in a way that an HR
department never could.
This has all lead to half the employee turnover
Best Buy used to experience, and its also highlighted the importance of culture and values in management. In
the days of top-down command and control, you could get away with telling
employees what to do via procedures. When so many employees are collaborating,
creating content, and inventing things only a shared culture to can deliver
aligned behavior. Now, corporate values serve as boundaries and management tools the way process used to.
The same activities that are being used internally, are now driving external customer experience, growth, and revenue generating activities. Best Buy employee Ben Hedrington articulates how the company's mobile strategy might evolve, and Brad comments on why Best Buy is increasingly in the customer experience business.
Brad observed that while Best Buy is just at the beginning of deploying systems that tap the networked wisdom of its people, this is clearly one of the most powerful growth strategies he's ever encountered. The collective knowledge of customers, suppliers, and employees can lead to both a more informed customer support and relationship experience, as well as a better retail experience. The company initially grew by opening several thousand stores. Now there is the opportunity to open thousands of virtual stores, tapping the experiences, networks, and insights of its many people.
As we wrapped up, I showed brad a clip an employee at the Best Buy call center as she used Twitter to monitor the lousy experience a customer was having at a competitor, and how Best Buy intervened. Brad talks about the future and about how much more fun and productive enterprises will become as they move from top down, command and control to actually tapping the capabilities and networks of employees and customers.
In spending time with Best Buy over the last year, its been interesting to watch how consciously they've been wrestling with the meaning and impact of collaborative technologies. They've realized that the best ideas bubble up, emergently.So management doesn't dictate what's gonna work, it has to listen for it. And then nurture it. There is also a darwinian aspect to all this: Best Buy has allowed for a large number of experiments to happen and then resources the ones that work. Not quite ever having enough resources forces collaboration between the various teams working on projects as they need to come together in a broader strategy. And the CEO himself has been recognizing and highlighting this success, which creates a culture if innovation even in a company facing the incredible challenges of today's retail environment.
