Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott, Kevin Nalty, Steve Garfield - Страница 55

Social networking allows companies to communicate instantly with their existing and potential customers. That Canada Tourism built an entire awareness campaign around real-time strategies shows the power of instant communications. Yet many organizations don’t respond to people quickly on social networks.

I’m a “Pro” user of the Hightail file sharing and storage service. I’ve been a loyal customer since January 2009, paying more than $100 a year for my premium services. I received an email offer from Hightail with the subject line “Complete your list with our great discount.” The offer promised if I would “Upgrade to Hightail Professional” that day, I’d get 50 percent off the annual subscription price. Hightail subscription plans had confusing names: Hightail Professional is an upgrade from the Hightail Pro service I was using at the time.

The offer sounded good, so I clicked the “Get the deal” button.

However, when I logged into my Hightail account to complete the transaction, I got a nasty error message: “Your account does not meet the prerequisites for using this SKU code.”

This was frustrating, so I tweeted a message to Hightail (@HightailHQ) and waited for a response. And I waited some more. When I didn’t hear from them for three days, I chose to look into competing product offerings from other companies.

When responding to a negative comment in a social network, it is best to reply quickly, honestly, and in the same medium.

Not responding quickly is a huge missed opportunity. When you reply to user messages in real time, not only do you keep the customer up to date, but you also show the world through your public feed that you’re engaged. When customers are happy, they keep their product longer, they spend more money over time, and they share their happiness with others, either in person or on social networks. Hightail missed an opportunity to engage with me. And there’s no doubt that some of my more than 125,000 Twitter followers noticed Hightail’s lack of interest in responding to a customer.

The team at Hightail did finally get back to me and worked with me to solve the problem. I remain a customer, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Contrast the long delay at Hightail with an experience around the same time with @JetBlue. In this case, I received a reply in just two minutes. Talk about speed! No wonder JetBlue has nearly two million followers on Twitter—it communicates in real time.