
(Frank Eliason of Comcast addresses the audience at WOMMA 2008)
It’s so easy to get caught up in the buzz isn’t it? Social this, social that. I’m sick of it. From this point on, I am making a vow to talk in more simple terms (I try to do this already, but I want to improve). So here’s something you should know. Chances are that your organization can’t move as quickly as consumers can, and that needs to change. I’ve met Frank Eliason, the man behind @comcastcares several times now and he knows a few things about this. I fired up our beta-cam at the WOMMA Summit (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) and recorded his talk (view video). Frank talks about building a culture of “rapid response” and he’s right.
Here’s what it means. It means that you need to be able to move as quickly as your consumers. When Motrin inadvertently upset some moms, the moms reacted in minutes and organized in hours. Don’t like what the moms had to say? Tough. That’s the digital world we live in. In contrast, Motrin.com went down for nearly a day, before updating with a message on their homepage. Sure, an e-mail went out very quickly, but I was there and witnessed first-hand as people flocked to Mortrin.com for an official update.
As consumers, customers and users of the Web, we are being re-trained as I write this. We expect immediate responses, (not necessarily decisions), but we are being conditioned to expect some type of response immediately. We’re also making the assumption that conversations are public. To reference the Motrin example again, when the first e-mail went out it of course was copied and pasted on dozens of blogs. Anything you say, can and will be uploaded, screen-grabbed and re-published. Get used to it.
So forget social, forget networks, forget mobile—it’s all about the end customer/user experience. Think like a real person. We don’t draw the line between them. In the end, out interactions with people, brands, and companies will either be either extraordinary, good, ok, terrible, offensive or not worth talking about at all. Social or no social. The line is dissolving and in the end it’s how we feel about what we just experienced that matters. Creating a rapid response culture will be critical to organizations because if they can’t respond at the same pace that their consumers can, it starts the interaction loop off on the wrong foot. I recently said that an organization’s website will now need to be as easy to update as a blog. I stand behind that. Regardless of all things social, when something is going down around your organization, people will still fire up their browser and go to “www.company-x.com” as a starting point. Sure, the best experience anyone can have lies within the actual service or product produced by a brand, but increasingly the first interaction at major touch points plays a significant role when it comes to perception. Social or not, wouldn’t it be remarkable if you could meet people where they are at, when they want it? What if your brand could move as rapidly as your customer?
Written by David Armano
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