Joan is frequently late for lunch, which has a fair bit to do with her busy job managing social media for a large bank. There are a lot of urgent things in social media. On a recent day, she huffed into the room looking more frazzled than usual. “Sorry, had a Code Red on Twitter,” she said.
It would seem that a customer had tweeted that she liked the food at a recent commercial banking customer event. Well we certainly can’t be having that. “What did you do? Call in her line of credit? Take back the swell calendar you sent her?”, I asked. It turns out the urgent thing was the bit of the tweet where she noted the room was stuffy.
“Stuffy is a very emotionally charged word,” Joan explained. Not really, but it was ambiguous enough to deploy Seal Team Six. Every company has one. In the case of marketing’s urgent things they involve the usual Hand-wringers (lawyers, corporate communications, human resources), a collection of consultants and a project manager to write things down.
We used to reserve such teams for existential threats like strikes, bomb threats, hostile takeovers, earthquakes and philandering CEOs. That was before social media. These days, it would seem, every negative or ambiguous social mention, every logo infraction and every LinkedIn group post is suddenly an emergency.
Friends, there are no emergencies in marketing. There is only a lack of planning, perspective or both.
Here’s another example: a while back my buddy was approached by a trade publication to contribute an article about something technical. He called someone technical who agreed to put their name on the article, provided my buddy clarified a couple of release dates with The Mother Ship in California.
Enter Seal Team Six. Within a day, my poor friend was on a conference call with the chief legal counsel, the global head of PR, investor relations and the chief technology officer, who now wanted to byline the piece, despite a readership of about 68 people. My friend ended up declining the opportunity because it was just too many calories for the limited benefit and uncomfortable scrutiny. Naturally, a competitor was happy to grab it.
This would be the lack of perspective thing at work. A lack of preparation looks a bit like the 10th floor ladies’ room. Stay with me.
One time the ladies’ room on the 10th floor ran out of paper towel. After a day or so of drying my hands on cardigans conveniently left on chair backs, I decided to see if the Toilet Problem Reporting Number on the back of the door actually worked so I called and left a message.
Not ten minutes later, the tranquility of the marketing department was shattered when two maintenance carts converged on women’s toilet like Rubbermaid squad cars. Walkie talkies crackled, yellow caution signs went up, perimeters were secured. Seal Team Six was on the job.
With ruthless efficiency, towel dispensers were filled, checked for mechanical defect and wiped off. I received both a phone call and an email thanking me for doing my civic duty and urging me to report other suspicious activity.
Now all of this would have been fine if I had found a body or a Nile Monitor in the loo. But it was mostly a noisy demonstration of what happens when a predictable thing is left unmanaged. Worse, it turned into Customer Service Theatre that wasted all kinds of time and resources without fooling anyone.
Back to Joan. What started out as a wonderful chance to engage customers and brand in the Great Public Conversation has turned into a hyper-vigilant paranoid regime pointing an electron microscope at its own navel. I’m fairly sure that was not what they had in mind when they created the Twitter account.
Marketing, PR and customer service need to get in there and start spraying a little more perspective and a lot less ass covering. We’ve been evaluating customer feedback, restocking paper towels and even writing articles for years without an armed escort. Sometimes we screw it up. Mostly we don’t. If we are prepared for the likely scenarios and have an understanding of what constitutes a crisis, then I believe we can be trusted to get on with it.
Related Posts:
Social Media is the Lighter Fluid, Not the Barbeque
Fight Them in the Cafés, Not on the Beaches
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
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