Who Should Wear Your Corporate Speedo®?

Last week we looked at the terrifying beachfront property known as social media. This is where not-so-happy customers are busy telling the world how much their B2B suppliers suck. And it’s where most B2B companies try to pick off the whiners from the cliff tops or shell the beach the relentlessly so they can’t come ashore.

Here at Bizmarketer, we recommend a kinder, less martial approach, preferring instead to wade into the surf and rescue rather than confront our critics: kind of like Baywatch only less tanned.

So what does a Corporate Baywatch cast member look like? Well their physical attributes are your problem, as are any liability issues involving Lycra® . But the skill set here is important. They need to be able to swim quite well, meaning they can carry on a coherent conversation with a grown-up, make their subjects and verbs agree most of the time and speak on behalf of the company.

Ah, you say, let’s get the PR department into those tight little Speedos! Well that’s  just disturbing on a bunch of levels. But the one I’m concerned with is that PR people are not there to fix your product and service issues; they are there to extract executive feet from executive mouths and to spin messages high above our heads.  What about the marketing team? They may pull off a swimsuit a little better than their PR friends but given their focus on revenue, there’s a risk they’ll be picking pockets in between chest compressions.

You also need people who can actually save a drowning Porcupine. PR and marketing are not going to be at the top of that list. Sales, perhaps? Well they’re good with people and with problems but by the time they get changed and have the car (among other things) waxed on the way to the beach, things are going to end poorly.

This is why you need the Voices of the Deep. Those sturdy people who chip away at your churn and retention quotas in the damp caverns of your customer service departments and technical support call centres. Not just any lantern-carrying, pick-axe-wielding subterranean being will do. You need the best ones. The ones who can both swim and defibrillate.  If they look good in a tank top, that’s just a bonus. They need to be articulate, experienced, skilled and, this is very important, actually empowered by your Corporate Overlords to fix things.

When you’re setting this up, it’s important to remember what this team can do and what it must not become. First, they aren’t a referral service for their former colleagues in the Customer Abuse Department, just as lifeguards aren’t there to drive personal watercraft idiots to the hospital; these people need to be able to process credits, issue return authorizations, placate unruly billing systems and all the empowered things necessary to send the customer home alive and happily tweeting about their day at the beach.

One thing this group can help with is monitoring the oceanfront. What’s that? Your agency is already doing that? And how’s that working out? I will just bet you’ve got reams of paper that even your agency doesn’t understand. This is because they went and set up an account on GoogleAlerts,  socialmention  or Monitter, stuck an intern in front of the analytics screen and marked the whole thing up 20 percent.  It’s like asking an air traffic controller in Des Moines to watch the kids for a second while you put on more sunscreen in Nantucket.

Stick your hewers of corporate happy up on those tall white chairs, hand them some binoculars, like a good social media tracker, and let them find both the flailing and the strong out there beyond the breakwater.  Give them clear guidelines on what to do with both and I promise you’ll be much further ahead than if you left it to your agency. Helpful hint: ask them to track your competitors as well. You probably don’t suck as much as you think, relatively speaking.

They will also need some other specialized gear. Like a great product forum or support blog where answers needing more than 149 characters can be found. Speaking of 149 characters, it might not hurt to get your marketing folks to write standard responses to common questions that agents can cut and paste into a Twitter response. Mostly these can be links to longer answers.

When it comes to blogs and forums, your little Baywatch team can help there too. When things are quiet, why not set them to reviewing all your technical blather for opportunities to expand, update or correct it? Ask the more articulate among them to post to the blog. For a great guide on setting up a product forum, check out this post by The Association of International Product Marketing and Management.

So where to start? I’d start by paying a visit to the Voices of the Deep foremen and seeing who is a good candidate for beach duty. Hand pick a few of them, give them a raise, a whistle and a spray-on tan and send them blinking onto the hot sand. They’ll figure it out.

But before you do, you make sure you have your SLAs on response times sorted out and a clear escalation path to hustle those sputtering Porcupines off the beach and into the café.

And just in case you were wondering whether to take any of this stuff seriously, consider that Avaya  recently closed a sweet six-figure deal after a GenG P-cuber tweeted they were looking for a new phone system.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help organizations build their brands through great conversations with employees and customers

Drop me a line at ewilliams(at)candlerchase.com
Follow me @bizmkter