Thursday, April 10th, 2008
Social Media & Customer Service Lessons from the Cable Giant
Prior to joining SEER, I spent almost six years working for Comcast. The instant anyone found that out, I would be bombarded with questions and (too often) complaints about the service they’d received previously. To this day, I still get calls from friends asking why their DVR no longer records their favorite program. People just want to know that someone’s listening.
When I read about a Comcast employee reaching out to fellow blogger Michael Arrington over the weekend, I thought it was absolutely brilliant. For anyone not familiar with the story, Michael had an outage and started posting about it on Twitter, just to rant about the problems he was dealing with. Imagine his surprise when Comcast actually called him twenty minutes later to help fix the problem he was having. It turns out a manager at Comcast, Frank Eliason aka @comcastcares, has taken to monitoring mentions of Comcast on Twitter and has slowly and quietly been responding to people for the past six months â a revolutionary idea and a brilliant way to actively connect with customers. This was picked up all over the blogosphere, and was even written about in one of my favorite sites – The Consumerist.
I spoke to Frank about the work he was doing and how he was changing the customer service industry. The most amazing thing for me to hear is that he’s manually tracking, reading, and responding to these Twitters on his own, as Comcast didn’t expect this service to become public knowledge for some time. Frank explained that “the challenge to the publicity is that we must be seen, when in the past we were a little more quiet reaching out when we could. We know we need to improve, and this is a small part of that effort.”
So what can you, as a company owner, learn from Comcast’s example?
- Create a Twitter account â Not only can you connect with people quickly, but you may have access to people in your industry that you never expected to get to communicate with.
- Set up Twitter tracking â This can be done in several ways. Through your Twitter account, you can set up tracking on IM or SMS with a simple “track @rachael823” command. You can also use sites like http://www.tweetscan.com to show you history of the term you’re searching for.
- Smart business owners would track their personal name, company name, domains, competitors’ names, and even top keywords for their industry to see who’s talking about anything related to them.
- Do this across all social media sites and blogs.
- Set up Google Alerts to notify you when any of these terms come up.
- If anyone is talking about you, positive or negative, it’s such an easy task to reach out to them, especially on Twitter. How long does it take you to type 140 characters? The effect that effort has on the recipient is well worth it.
Media Bullseye had a great question: Where is everyone else? Is anyone out there already taking action to monitor their reputation online through social media channels?
Posted in business thoughts, social media | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Warning, unedited post forthcoming:
You know after seeing SEO just get crapped on by Amex, and reading this SEOMOZ post, This SEOMOZ list, the recent work by SEM compare & hearing the number of people mention how often they get phone calls from crappy SEO companies almost weekly, combined with the spam that even I get. I am going to do whatever I can to pitch in and help.
It is pretty obvious that I’ve always tried to do what I could to clean up the space in my own little way, whether it is the conversation I had last week with a prospect who didn’t fit SEER’s model, but I told – Hey, call me before you pick someone I’ll make sure you don’t get hosed to posts & I try to write about the issues that plague our industry when time allows.
But today I am asking for help, this idea is totally off the cuff, from the gut but help me round it out.
I was thinking, can we as SEO/SEM professionals do unbiased audits on companies? NOT because we want the business ourselves, but because we want to clean up the industry? I was thinking could we have a group of SEO professionals who fit the following criteria:
- Has 4+ years experience
- Is in-house or works for a company that does little to NO advertising
- If you are asking why to little/no advertising, I think SEO companies who advertise HEAVILY are needy for new clients, if so I think that adds to the likelihood that they’ll “pitch” people they should be doing unbiased audits for
- Can devote 2 hours per month to review proposals submitted for review (proposals would have to be over 25k for now)
- Has an existing track record of trying to provide unbiased information and help the industry along
So far that is all I got, but remember I am writing this from the gut.
I can tear apart a proposal from an SEO company in 30 minutes, which means if I devote 2 hours a month I can hopefully help up to 4 people do one of two things:
- Feel more confident about whom they selected
- Realize some more questions they should ask before moving forward (or leaving the company altogether)
So the problems I see:
- People pitching instead of helping
- Confidential proposals shared with outsiders would be problematic (see below)
- Companies wanting to sue instead of fixing the problems that cause them to not cut it (Looks like iCrossing filed a suit against marketingsherpa)
- Involvement / time commitment – many of the people I would hope would come along to help are BUSY, but either way I’ll go this alone if I have to and find a way to tip toe around the landmines.
In theory if we could get 50 SEO’s each able to do 4 reviews a month that is 200 companies reviewed, and maybe privately we can rate the companies so that going forward we’d not have to waste our time. I know this is hairy, but I just am sick of the complaints about SEO, but they are warranted, SEO companies are shady and I for one want to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.
Any idea on how to keep myself out of the courtroom before I start taking requests?
Thanks!
–Wil
Posted in business thoughts, SEO | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Warning, unedited post forthcoming:
You know after seeing SEO just get crapped on by Amex, and reading this SEOMOZ post, This SEOMOZ list, the recent work by SEM compare & hearing the number of people mention how often they get phone calls from crappy SEO companies almost weekly, combined with the spam that even I get. I am going to do whatever I can to pitch in and help.
It is pretty obvious that I’ve always tried to do what I could to clean up the space in my own little way, whether it is the conversation I had last week with a prospect who didn’t fit SEER’s model, but I told – Hey, call me before you pick someone I’ll make sure you don’t get hosed to posts & I try to write about the issues that plague our industry when time allows.
But today I am asking for help, this idea is totally off the cuff, from the gut but help me round it out.
I was thinking, can we as SEO/SEM professionals do unbiased audits on companies? NOT because we want the business ourselves, but because we want to clean up the industry? I was thinking could we have a group of SEO professionals who fit the following criteria:
- Has 4+ years experience
- Is in-house or works for a company that does little to NO advertising
- If you are asking why to little/no advertising, I think SEO companies who advertise HEAVILY are needy for new clients, if so I think that adds to the likelihood that they’ll “pitch” people they should be doing unbiased audits for
- Can devote 2 hours per month to review proposals submitted for review (proposals would have to be over 25k for now)
- Has an existing track record of trying to provide unbiased information and help the industry along
So far that is all I got, but remember I am writing this from the gut.
I can tear apart a proposal from an SEO company in 30 minutes, which means if I devote 2 hours a month I can hopefully help up to 4 people do one of two things:
- Feel more confident about whom they selected
- Realize some more questions they should ask before moving forward (or leaving the company altogether)
So the problems I see:
- People pitching instead of helping
- Confidential proposals shared with outsiders would be problematic (see below)
- Companies wanting to sue instead of fixing the problems that cause them to not cut it (Looks like iCrossing filed a suit against marketingsherpa)
- Involvement / time commitment – many of the people I would hope would come along to help are BUSY, but either way I’ll go this alone if I have to and find a way to tip toe around the landmines.
In theory if we could get 50 SEO’s each able to do 4 reviews a month that is 200 companies reviewed, and maybe privately we can rate the companies so that going forward we’d not have to waste our time. I know this is hairy, but I just am sick of the complaints about SEO, but they are warranted, SEO companies are shady and I for one want to be a part of the solution instead of the problem.
Any idea on how to keep myself out of the courtroom before I start taking requests?
Thanks!
–Wil
Posted in business thoughts, SEO | 4 Comments »