Negative Facebook Posts – Keep or Delete?

If you look at almost any brand or company Facebook page, you’ll see that the majority of the comments on the page are positive – compliments about the product or service, conversations about where to buy it, and discussions about why it’s a favorite brand.  After all, to comment on the page, you first have to ‘Like’ it, which means that you’re interested in the news the brand posts on their page.  However, it’s only a matter of time until one of your ‘fans’ has a bad experience with your product or service and takes to your Facebook page to talk about it.

With all the love that is on your Facebook page, you may be tempted to delete a comment from one of your fans that says, “I had a problem with this product I purchased.”  In most cases marketing controls your fan page, and they don’t want a comment like this sitting out there for everyone to see, so the initial thought may be to remove the comment from the page.  However, these kinds of comments can actually create raving fans for your brand.

No one said you had to air your dirty laundry on Facebook…you just need to publicly acknowledge that someone had an issue with your product and you want to fix it for them.  Even a short response to this comment will work, such as, “I’m so sorry this occurred, and I’d like to take care of it for you.  Please look in your inbox for a message from me so we can get this resolved.”  By responding to the post on your Wall, you’re not only sending the message that you care to this one consumer, all of your fans are able to see that you’re taking the time to respond to this concern. 

Responding publicly to less-than-positive comments about your products or brands can be a big win for you.  It shows your consumers that you’re listening and you do care, which helps to strengthen this community.  If people post comments on your Wall and you’re not responding, more than likely they’ll stop engaging with you.

While most of the time you don’t want to delete comments from your page, there are always exceptions to the rule.  Stay tuned for the next post on Rules of Engagement.

How are you handling complaints or negative comments on your page?  Share your experience in the comments.

Step 4 – Responding to Consumers

In the previous 3 posts, we’ve discussed the steps you should take before you begin responding to consumers via social media.  First, you need to monitor to find out where your consumers are.  Secondly, decide what comments you’re going to be responding to.  Then, decide who is going to be responding.  This post is about the final step, responding.

We’ve already talked about what comments you’re going to respond to, what paragraphs you’re going to use, and who should be responding.  The only thing left is to decide what accounts you are going to use to send responses.  You can respond as the brand via the existing accounts.  Some companies choose to create an account for ‘Company Consumer Affairs’ that they use to respond with so that consumers know they’re talking with customer service.  Still others create individual accounts for the people who will be responding so that consumers are interacting with a single person.

While you’re just getting your feet wet, you might want to use a company account.  With most of the companies I’ve worked with regarding social media, the management team handles everything at first before trickling the monitoring and responding down to their reps.  Since you’re not sure at first who will be handling your responses, become an admin of your company accounts or create a “Company Consumer Affairs” account to respond from.  This enables you to respond without the constant changing of personalities that consumers are used to interacting with.

The other option for responding is creating individual accounts for your social media agents.  I have found in my experience that you need to keep your communications at a personal level.  When consumers call your company, they talk to a person with a name – they make a personal connection.  It should be the same when you’re conversing with consumers via social media.  It’s not your brand that’s taking care of them; it’s the person behind the account that is making things happen.  Having individual accounts allow your brand to have personality and for consumers to connect with people.  After all, social media is all about building relationships.

I would like to offer a few tips for using individual accounts to respond on social media networks.  First, your users should create professional accounts separate from their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts.  You want to protect their privacy and make sure that they are interacting with consumers as professionals from your company.  You’ll also want to consider who owns an individual company account if the employee leaves.  Does the company control the account, especially if the company name is part of the account name, or does the employee get to retain control after leaving?  This is also important because if you delete the account, the username can become available again and someone else can use it to misrepresent your company.

These are the steps I followed as we worked through handling social media comments at Bob Evans Farms.  While the exact tactics that worked for me may not work for everyone, these steps are a good guideline to follow to set you up for social media success.

Next post: How to handle negative comments shared via social media.

Share your success stories! How is your company handling social media comments from your consumers?

Step 3 – Deciding Who is Going to Respond

In this post, I’m continuing on with the Steps to Social Media Success.  Last week’s post focused on what comments you should respond to, and this week we’ll turn our attention to who will be responding to consumer comments.

As you’ve likely experienced as you’ve been monitoring your company’s social media channels, Consumer Affairs is not the only department that’s involved in social media.  If you have a company Facebook or Twitter page, more than likely your marketing department is in charge of it.  Social media is widely used as a marketing tool, so it’s not surprising that marketing will be involved – their responsibility is to continue to attract new customers.  However, social media marketing is nothing like traditional media marketing such as TV commercials and print ads.  Consumers are now able to interact with your brand versus your message being pushed at them.  And that’s where you come in.

It is the responsibility of Consumer Affairs to take care of the consumer and respond to their questions and comments.  You have been their link to the company for decades, and this new communication method will be no different.  It needs to be your responsibility to answer questions and take care of issues that are brought up via social media.  You already have the agents experienced in talking to consumers, and the responses to their questions and issues.

Communication, cooperation, and clearly defined rules of engagement are key when you’re responding to a social media comment because there may be several people from your company involved.  Some of the questions posed by consumers are going to be ones where you might need marketing or PR to provide you with an answer.  Consumer Affairs is trained to handle all types of communication, which makes this department the most natural choice for responding to social media comments.  

Next week: Finishing up the steps to social media success with Step 4 – Responding and capturing your social media conversation 

If you’re already responding to consumers, feel free to share your learnings in the comment section!

Step 2 – Deciding What Comments to Respond To

In this post, I’m continuing on with the Steps to Social Media Success.  Last week’s post focused on monitoring social media, and this week we’ll turn our attention to what comments you should respond to.

So you’ve been monitoring some social media channels for a little while now and you have an idea of where your consumers are and where you want to focus your attention.  Today’s consumer is extremely active on social media sites, and you’ve likely seen that by the number of comments on your social media profiles.  Before you start actively responding to consumers, you need to decide which comments you’re going to respond to.

First of all, no one expects that you’re going to respond to every comment, especially if you’re responsible for multiple products or brands.  Responding to every comment would be too time consuming for most companies.  In my personal experience, customers actually give you a lot more compliments than complaints on Facebook.  Out of the contact methods you have (contact us form, phone, and email), it’s a much easier and quicker way to praise you.  I know we all love that, but it’s not necessary to thank everyone individually for their compliments.  You don’t want to set this precedent and then not be able to keep up as your social media traffic grows.

Obviously, you want to make sure you’re paying attention to negative comments.  Just like your other methods of contact, you want to make sure that you’re taking care of your customers that have issues with your product.  This is really where you make a difference and show people that you care and want to make things right.  Not only will the person with the issue notice, but so will your other social media followers.  I recall many times when consumers were so surprised that I responded to them that they thanked the company publicly for the customer service they received.  Talk about a great feeling!

Responding to other comments and questions is also a good idea.  You may receive questions regarding coupons, where to buy your products, advertising, and any number of other things your consumers are interested in.  Also, saying ‘Thanks’ every once in a while to a raving fan is great.  It’s not necessary to respond on every positive comment you receive, just from time to time to let these customers know you hear them as well.  You should take these questions and comments as a compliment – they’re showing interest in your brand!

Ultimately, your goal is to build relationships with your consumers. Your response shows people that you are listening to what they’re saying, and they’ll continue to interact with your brand via social media.

Next week: Step 3 – Who in your company is going to respond and how are they going to do it? 

Have anything to add?  Use the comments section to talk about what comments you respond to and what social media channels you’re active in.

Step 1 – Start Monitoring

The first thing you have to do is monitor social media channels to find out where your consumers are.  There’s no sense in monitoring the millions of blogs on the internet if your customers aren’t bloggers.  If you have company sponsored profiles on Facebook or Twitter, or a company blog, that’s where you should start.  When your consumers are interacting with a company account, they expect that you’re listening, so that’s where you can first focus your attention.  Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to monitor every last comment on the web.  Once you have an online presence and feel comfortable with what you’re doing, you can expand your search.

As you’re beginning to monitor, there are several free tools (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Hootsuite are just a few) that you can use to pull in comments from a variety of social media channels.  Some of these applications allow you to set up Twitter searches so you don’t have to manually search Twitter to find comments.  You can also pull in posts from Facebook so that you can see everything on one screen.  Google Alerts is another great tool you can use to search the web for keywords related to your brand or products.  The benefit of using these tools is that they do the work for you by bringing comments to you, instead of you having to go out and find them.

While these free tools are great for beginning your social media journey, you’ll find as you move forward that you’ll need more sophisticated tools in order to track, respond to, and report on consumer comments – software similar to your current CRM system.  As we talk through the next three steps, I’ll go into more detail about the tools that will help you engage with your customers most effectively and efficiently.

Next week: Discussion around Step 2 – What comments are you going to respond to? 

In the meantime, care to share?  What have you learned while monitoring for mentions about your company?  Do you have questions about monitoring that aren’t answered here?  Let’s use the comments section to start a dialogue.

The Steps to Social Media Success

So you’ve decided you need to be active in the social media space – now what?  Here are four things you need to consider while developing your tactics for handling social media comments from consumers.  1) start monitoring, 2) Decide what comments you’re going to respond to, 3) Decide who is going to respond and how they’re going to do it, 4) Start responding and capturing the information into your consumer database.  Over the next four posts, I’ll take you through each step in some detail to help you move towards your goal of being actively involved in social media with your consumers.

Social Media Strategy – You Already Have One!

With the increased usage of social media and the pressure companies are under to have a social media presence, you hear a lot of talk about developing a ‘social media strategy’ before you actually do anything social media related.  In this post, I’m going to show you why you don’t need to spend time developing a social media strategy, because you already have one.

First, let’s talk specifically about the customer service strategy.  No matter what company you work for, the strategy for handling consumers is basically the same: respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner in order to make them happy, repeat customers.  This strategy applies to all contact methods – letter, phone, and email.  You don’t have a separate strategy for each channel that consumers use to contact you, so why do you need a separate social media strategy?  What consumer relations departments have is an engagement strategy – a plan for how they’re going to respond and react to consumer feedback.  You already have representatives that are skilled in speaking with your customers.  You have ways to capture consumer comments and pre-formed responses to reply with.  Consumers are still saying the same things via social media that they say in an email or phone call, it’s just a different way of getting information to you.  You already have a strategy for engaging with consumers, and that’s still what you’re doing in social media channels.

While your strategy as a customer service department is the same no matter how consumers contact you, the tactics you use are going to be different.  When people say that they’re developing their ‘social media strategy’, what they’re really doing is figuring out the tactics – are we going to respond to everything that’s out there, or are we going to focus on one or two channels, like Facebook and Twitter?  Who is going to monitor and respond?  What departments need to be involved? 

However, before you can go there, you need to know where your consumers are in the social media space.  As the Cheshire Cat informs Alice, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”  If you try to plan tactics for every channel without knowing where your consumers are active, you’re wasting your time.  Because social media is always changing, your tactics will change frequently as well.  There are plenty of free tools that will assist you in monitoring social media channels, and you need to take advantage of them to find out where you can interact with the majority of your customers.  Maybe you have a company Facebook fan page where your consumers leave comments.  Begin monitoring and learning the ‘rules’ of that channel so that you can prepare the tactics you’re going to use to achieve your engagement strategy.

In the end, your job is to take care of consumers.  While you have different tactics for each method they use to contact you, you only have one strategy for engaging with them.  You’ve got to get your hands dirty before you can truly develop strong tactics to begin conversing with your consumers via social media.  Don’t get caught up in talk about ‘social media strategy’ – you have a strategy and it’s been effective for you for decades.

Next week’s post: What do you need to consider when developing tactics for dealing with social media comments?

The Role of Social Media in Consumer Affairs

Social media has been an important topic in the Consumer Affairs world for the past couple of years.  When we first started talking about it, social media was still new and unfamiliar to the majority of people.  Most of the users were early adopters, and social media sites and networks were changing daily.  There were a few unfortunate incidents involving consumers and social media (like the AOL guy) that made consumer affairs professionals take notice of these emerging communication channels.

Customer service professionals, with the help of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP), have spent much time learning about social media and why it’s important to be involved in social media channels.  It’s where our customers are today; carrying on a conversation about us, but not necessarily with us.  SOCAP has planned conference sessions around social media channels and why companies should be involved in them.  We all fully understand the importance of being in the social media space.  The next question is: What do we do in it?

First of all, let’s get one thing straight; social media is not going to change the face of consumer affairs.  Ultimately, it’s still all about taking care of our customers.  Social media is just another vehicle today’s consumers are using to get our attention.  As technology has evolved, it has enabled us to receive feedback more and more quickly.  When the consumer affairs industry began, we received letters, and replied back to consumers in writing.  Then came the 800 number – a way for consumers to contact us quicker than writing and mailing a letter and waiting for a response.  After that, email was available and gave consumers the ability to contact us on their own time and receive an even quicker response.  Then chat was available, offering consumers to talk with a company representative live to answer their questions or hear their complaints.  Now, social media is all the rage.  But if you look back on the evolution of communication in consumer affairs, social media is just the newest (and quickest) way for consumers to talk with us.

As with everything else new, there’s a learning curve.  We have to understand how each channel works – how Facebook is different from Twitter is different from You Tube.  Plus, consumers are not only engaging with us on company sponsored channels, they’re just spouting off comments and complaints into space!  We need to figure out what tools to use to capture information and handle it efficiently and effectively, without having to do individual searches within each channel.  It’s also easier for word to spread via social media channels – just ask Motrin.   You need to have a social media policy in place and be on the same page with others in your company involved in social media channels before you begin responding to consumers.

The bottom line is this: consumer affairs needs to take an active role in social media monitoring and responding because it comes down to taking care of our consumers, which we’ve been doing for decades.  There is no department within your company that knows more about your consumers than you do.  Consumers are still saying the same things; they’re just using a different communication channel to say them.  Don’t let the novelty of a new communication channel make you forget your role as the voice of the customer.

Next week, we’ll discuss how you can begin monitoring social media for mentions related to your brands!

Welcome To Sarah Cares!

Welcome to my blog!  I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself and give you a little background information about me.

I was most recently the Guest and Consumer Relations Manager at Bob Evans Farms, Inc.  While there, I was responsible for customer care across all brands, including Bob Evans Restaurants, Mimi’s Cafe, and Bob Evans food products.  In my role there, I was involved in the company’s social media initiatives and regularly communicated with customers through these channels.  I found that our customers were surprised and delighted when I contacted them regarding an experience they spoke about via social media.

Also, I have been a member of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP) since 2007, and was the Ohio Chapter President in 2009.  I have spoken about my use of social media in consumer relations at local and national SOCAP events.

Currently, I am using my background in consumer affairs at Wilke/Thornton, Inc. assisting our clients with our customer service applications, including our new Social Media Analysis and Response Tool (SMART).

In this blog, I will share information about incorporating information from social media channels into your consumer relations department.  I am passionate about helping other consumer relations professionals understand social media and how to handle it effectively and efficiently.  Taking care of our consumers and creating loyal fans of our brands is what customer service is all about.  What better way than to reach out to consumers before they reach out to us?  I hope that you will be able to use information from this blog to create and execute an effective social media strategy for your company.

In my next post, you’ll see why social media is not the end of consumer affairs as we know it! Stay tuned…

- Sarah Meenach