Wanna Talk? Chat? Email? Text? Tweet? Message? Post? Comment? We need guidance on how to use these tools properly. While they’ve been designed to make it easier to communicate, many of us find it adding to our stress. The toughest part is choosing which tool, method, medium or device. I say, go for it, use em all…but here’s a few of my ideas on each:

1. Email for conversations where tracking, history and detail is important and if you wish to forward to another and the best sales tool of them all
2. Text for lighter convos, i.e. directions, shout outs, etc., but try to avoid for anything substantive as they often disappear or are hard to search
3. Twitter direct message (DM) is something I avoid for the most part, but some use it to communicate with those that won’t respond otherwise or because they “live” in Twitter  (also good for soliciting)
4. Twitter mention for global thought sharing with no need for response, tracking or quality search (conversation)
5. Facebook post similar to #4 but great for tracking conversations
6. Facebook message (private) is similar to #3
7. Facebook chat is invasive and I turn it off but it’s a good way to access your FB friends instantly, assuming they want you to
8. Chat for quick questions and one on one back and forth where immediate is necessary
9. Phone when emotion or tone is needed, hands are not free or I just feel like it…but I really dislike voicemails
10. FaceTime or Skype in place of phone when applicable and if you did your hair
11. Fax is the best way to solicit sales as we all run to our fax machines when something arrives but this usually an email with an attachment nowadays!
12. Carrier pigeon, snail mail, tin cans and string…life was simpler back then, but not nearly as fun!…I’m on roll here…maybe a TED Talk in the making!

Communication has become more and more complicated. From a customer service perspective, this can be a great asset to your organization or, if improperly managed, a true nightmare. Be careful. If you use any of the above, use them wisely and thoroughly, or simply slim down to the methods that serve you best.

Please provide your additional communication technique in the comments. I will update the blog post as they come in.

We needed an efficient and simple way to explain our various services at Make It Work, so we made this:

Then, our customers asked us to make some for them too.

So we created http://www.handymation.com. Want one?

http://www.radioink.com/convergence

http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-M3-Meetup/calendar/13506730/

Using social media to increase your company’s touch and reach with each of your customers may be the most important reason to jump in to this game changing strategy. Social media can help bridge a long standing gap between customers and the companies they trust with their hard earned cash. There are many ways to use social media for this purpose, but the main thing to keep in mind is to make sure you are using the tools to listen and engage, while considering making changes to how your company operates based on the precious feedback you will certainly receive. That said, when a customer posts on Facebook that you should lower your prices by 50%, perhaps this is not something you should spend too much time on. However, if your customers don’t post anything at all, good or bad, perhaps your pricing is too high overall. There are many signs to look for when receiving candid feedback from your customers, here’s a few examples of things Make It Work customers say and what we are doing about it:

Customer (from a Delight Survey email): Why don’t you offer billing as an option, rather than require payment on demand at the end of the appointment?

MIW: We offer our pre-paid support option to satisfy this need. While it does require you to pay in advance, we provide a great deal of value for doing so and an anytime refund of the balance, no questions asked. We require payment in these two methods to ensure our ability to provide focus on responsive call center operations and extraordinary abilities from our technicians in the field, instead of building a accounts receivable department complete with collections and mounds of paperwork that deters us from what we do really well.

Customer: I absolutely love doing business with Make It Work, but why are you late sometimes?

MIW (Facebook message): Our business is like surgery, you just cannot predict to any certainty how long each appointment will last. That said, we have extra technicans (surgeons) standing by to overlap and take over appointments to alleviate this problem. More importantly, while you may sit in the hospital waiting room or the airport and have really no idea when your loved one will be out of harm’s way or your plane will truly arrive, at MIW we call you, often more than once, immediately and the conversation usually goes like, “…our technician is on the 405, traveling 11.5 mph and he is 12 minutes from your house. Can we stop and grab you a cup a coffee on the way?”

I could go on and on with stories like this, but this is the type of feedback that we have received over the years and while we must remain fiscally responsible, we always try to tweak our business to be more aligned with our customers needs.

Recently, I invited all of Make It Work’s customers (approx. 40,000) to join me on Facebook. My message to them was this:

A few months ago, I used social media to interact with In-N-Out Burger, one of the most loved restaurants in the West. I hunted for their Twitter handle and their Facebook page. I couldn’t find either, or at least one that appeared to be legitimate. So I switched to the old-school means of communication and emailed them asking for them. It took almost two days, but here’s the response I got:

Dear Mr. Eric Greenspan:

Thank you for your e-mail and interest in In-N-Out Burger®.  Our customers have made us the Company we are today, and we appreciate hearing from you!  In response to your inquiry, we do not have an official Facebook or Twitter.

Thanks again for your e-mail.

Sincerely,

Brian P
Customer Service Representative

I responded back immediately asking them why and to elaborate. Another 23 hours later, I got this:

Dear Mr. Eric Greenspan:

Thank you again for contacting us.

In response to your question, it is nothing we are currently participating in, but I will be happy to share your comments with our management team.  We appreciate your consideration.

Thank you again for your e-mail.

Sincerely,

Marianne S.
Customer Service Representative

Ok, I get it, they’re either not interested in discussing it, they truly have no interest or they simply haven’t figured it out yet. Whatever it is, I’m going to continue eating there (once a month at most, too fattening) but I can’t stop thinking about how a company that truly has “fans” wouldn’t be interested in a Fan page on Facebook.

Actual fan pictures of their In-N-Out Burgers

Now, suppose the number of people willing to eat a delicious but fattening cheeseburger is in decline due to awareness by Jamie Oliver and the rest of the die-hard healthy food proponents. These same people love In-N-Out, as I do, but simply can no longer eat a burger a week (yes, I’m referring to me) as they have realized the harm this can do to their health. A person thinking this way may seek a healthier alternative and if In-N-Out Burger is not aware of this shift in the paradigm, how will they keep growing? My point is they will learn about people’s perspective on this and other matters through their interaction on social networking sites like Facebook. I for one would eat at In-N-Out more often if they had a healthier alternative but they aren’t listening. Remember when this happened to McDonalds and they saw the first decline in sales growth in their existence? While In-N-Out is one of the best tasting, most well run, and cleanest restaurants I’ve ever experienced, they are not exempt from change in consumer sentiment.

Recently my son was Jackson Greenspan was born, as many of you already know by my repeated postings of his pics on Facebook. As a father of a newborn, I’m a diaper buyer now. Of course, my diaper of choice was the same they used in the hospital, Pampers Swaddlers. I liked the diaper and this new drymax technology was supposed to be the biggest breakthrough in diaper technology in the last decade. Great, except the technology is too good–apparently, parents are complaining about the brand “chemically burning the bums of babies” causing them to turn very red and sometimes even more severe symptoms. I noticed a red bum when using these diapers, but never thought much about it. Then, I visited the Pampers website to learn more about their products and see if they had a more bio-friendly version (very important to think green). I couldn’t find anything, so I used Google and eventually ended up on the Pampers Facebook page. There, I learned about the “burning problem” as one after another mom was posting frustrating comments about the product and demanding that the company fix the problem. The conversation was often one sided and Pampers really didn’t seem overly concerned. I asked a few questions on the site and I wasn’t happy with the responses, so I simply stopped buying their product, regardless if the claims were substantiated. I switched to Earth’s Best bio-friendly product and guess what happened next? The diapers fit him better, they were $.01/diaper cheaper and they had no dangerous chemicals to burn my baby’s bum. Thanks to Facebook, I’m reducing the risk to my baby, saving money and reducing the landfill. Social networking is powerful huh? If I were Pampers, I’d listen.

Our grandparents bought Jackson an Orbit Baby G2 stroller with infant car seat. First, I LOVE this product. It’s revolutionary, brilliant in its design, incredibly functional and takes everything into consideration possible. After test-driving and researching many brands, I bought an Orbit Baby G2 ultimately because my interaction with the company through social networking led me to believe they really cared about their customers, their products and the most important part, our children.

Recently, I posted a comment on the Orbit Baby Facebook page. I asked them for an accessory to attach the handles of the G2 to form a single bar for one-handed pushing. I assumed this would be better. Here’s their amazing response:

The best case for our relatively superior one-handed strolling is the fact that I routinely stroll two G2 Strollers (the few perks of being the founder) with one in each hand, which is the ultimate test of one-handed steering. There’s just no way a Bugaboo, or any other stroller really, could pull off this 2-at-once test as well. Of course, this is a relative standard, as I’m not saying our stroller strolls extremely easily with one hand, just that it performs better in this regard than our competitors.

The longer and more involved explanation: with loop handlebars like Bugaboo’s, it intuitively seems better because you can push with one hand along the center-line of the stroller; in reality though, since the stroller needs constant steering corrections in order to track straight, placing your hand in the center actually works less well. These constant, sometimes small and sometimes big, steering corrections result from weight imbalance, road irregularities, or just slight differences in the force used for pushing the stroller. The ‘uni-bar’ handles work less well because the only leverage you have to make the steering corrections is across your one hand. (They do, however, work great on jogging strollers with a fixed front wheel.)

By contrast, the key to why our stroller is designed to steer better with one hand is a combination of factors:

1. handlebars not too close to the center: again, in contrast to the ‘uni-bars’, our handlebars have enough distance from the center-line to give you adequate leverage for making steering corrections.

2. handlebars not too wide: unlike say a Maclaren though, our handlebars are not too wide such that pushing on only one would itself cause the stroller to not go where intended; the other key to this is that our handlebars are in-line with our in-board front steering wheels, and farther in than the rear wheels.

3. ergonomically shaped handlebars: the shape and angle of our handlebars allows steering corrections to be made more easily than the shape of uni-bar handlebars; loop handlebars are shaped entirely according to manufacturing limitations, I say this as a fact as tubes have minimum bend radii and such; by separating our handlebars out, we were much more free to design them fit a natural orientation that your hand would fall into.

Thanks for listening,

Joseph Hei (their CEO)

In hindsight, he was right and the fact that he took the time to respond to my comment on Facebook in this way…well, you get it.

After writing this blog post, I found this on Facebook. Another great example of the power of social media and customer service.

In conclusion, we can see the power of social media in action in our everyday lives. Never before has information about products and the sentiment of our customers been more accessible. The days of waiting on a customer service phone call are over. 24 hour email responses are ok, but losing steam too. What consumers want is instant, open feedback. Social media and social networking make this possible. While some companies may choose to avoid it, their competitors have an advantage. For me, if you don’t care enough to make yourself available to my questions in a truly timely manner, I will choose another. Or, if you choose to ignore my concerns…

]]> http://www.ericgreenspan.com/me/social-media-the-customer-service-spectator-or-superstar/feed/ 0 http://www.ericgreenspan.com/me/the-convergence-of-social-media-traditional-radio/ http://www.ericgreenspan.com/me/the-convergence-of-social-media-traditional-radio/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 01:48:41 +0000 Eric Greenspan http://www.ericgreenspan.com/?p=1215

As I prepare for my role as emcee in June for Convergence 2010, I began to look back at how I got involved in radio. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started buying live endorsement radio ads back in 2005. I spent a lot of money on Mark Germain (Mr. K), Leo Laporte and Jeff Levy, to name a few. Today, we don’t buy radio, we make it and we don’t just make it, we make it work. While my play on words may lead many of those that know me to chuckle, I’m very serious when I say we “make radio work.” What I mean by this is we do radio better by building it around the web, social media and traditional marketing strategies alongside, behind and wrapped around our radio shows. We track and record every call, email, post and tweet and we constantly bring our sponsors into the mix to share in the exposure. We’ve recently launched a video series called T3:Today’s Tech Trends to further support our shows by adding a video component that can be shared directly from YouTube, our blog or embedded in the radio show website, blog or any other website/blog willing to carry the free content. We’re even allowing our listeners to watch our radio shows by providing a webcam view of our talent in the studio. Our shows have Make It Work in their title, our call-in number is 877.MAKEITWORK, our Twitter handle is @makeitwork, our website is makeitwork.com and our facebook page is of course facebook.com/makeitwork.

Tech News, powered by Make It Work on CBS’s KNX1070 was our first show. We launched it with KNX on March 21st, 2009. One year later, it was renewed and all three major sponsors continued with us. While we leveraged the 50k watt stick that KNX provides, we did a few things different. For one, we built a following by using Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites. We post content from our show on blogs including show notes and tips and tricks. We post podcasts immediately on the blog, websites and iTunes. We built unique websites for each show. This show can be found at http://www.cbstechnews.com. We even plastered it on our fleet of Mini Coopers.

After Tech News, we run Jeremy’s Desktop. This one hour online webinar uses Citrix’s GoToWebinar to provide a view of our host Jeremy Anticouni’s actual computer desktop. Jeremy demos various new programs and websites and shows all kinds of tips and tricks, DIY and other cool stuff. Our audience can interact with Jeremy, ask questions and the entire show is posted as a video on the site and blog shortly after the show airs. In addition, we use this platform during our other shows to provide our audience a way to view what Jeremy is displaying on his monitor while during a typical radio broadcast. Why not?

Next, came our show on Citadel’s KSFO in San Francisco. This one is simply called “Make It Work with Jeremy Anticouni.” Again, we built a following with Facebook and Twitter, our blog, a unique website (http://www.abctechnews.com). We will soon launch service in the area and our fleet will be logo’d accordingly. But there’s more…on this show, we control the content and we have built the social media right into the program.

Here’s a sample of what you might hear on the show:

	TECH NEWS – Top technology headlines
	HUMS, BEEPS OR CLICKS – Our favorite gadgets & gizmos
	OSN 101 – Online Social Networking news and tips
	APP WATCH – Spotlight on the hottest mobile applications
	MAKE IT SAFE – How to practice safe browsing
	TECH TALES – Real life stories from the Make It Work Neighborhood Technology Consultants
	POOGLING INTERNET SAFETY – Keeping your kids safe online
	ECO-TECH – Earth-friendly technology

On April 16th, the day my son Jackson was born (facebook.com/jacksongreenspan) we signed our first formal syndication agreement with Envision Radio Networks. Our show on KSFO will now become a two-hour broadcast and run in cities and states nationwide. We are currently in production for this show and we hope to have it on the air soon. To learn more, view the website here.

Anyhow, I somehow got all caught up in radio and like anything else I do, I like to do it my way. Not so much that I need to control the way its done, I just often see change as a means to differentiate and take advantage of a growth cycle. So, I jumped in and created a social media radio monster that is starting to show some results. I am excited about the future and quite honestly, marketing has never been so much fun. Tell no one!

On June 3rd, I will emcee Radio Ink’s Convergence 2010 with keynote by Guy Kawasaki. When I was asked to emcee, I simply said, “sure, it seems like a perfect fit for me.” Eric Rhoads, the conference producer and publisher/CEO of Radio Ink magazine said this: “Eric Greenspan is a perfect example of how a platform can be built around a personality and use social networking to build a world brand. He exemplifies what we’re trying to bring to the radio industry.” I’m flattered by his comment and I plan to live up to his expectations.

Seems like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could soon be living his worst nightmare. I truly hope not as I’m a big FB fan. The air is filled with FB germs right now and he needs to disinfect fast. Additionally, Twitter is powerful enough to bring the whole thing down on its own, IMHO. Here’s evidence it may already be happening…

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22deleted%20my%20facebook%20account%22

Users are deleting their accounts and using Twitter to spread the news. While Twitter is not necessarily a competitor to Facebook, it has a cult like following that could lead to the demise of the “other” monster social networking service. If Twitterers want it gone, they can spread the word fast and a viral mass exodus could ensue.

On May 31st, there is a planned “walk out” on FB, so is this just a sign of what’s to come or is it just fluff? We shall soon see. See Make It Work’s T3 story here.

Need help properly deleting your Facebook account…Click here for detailed instructions

Keep in touch at http://www.makeitwork.com for more on this story and others.

For those of you that love your iPhones and Androids (I have both), I still use a Blackberry every day and here’s why:

1. First, its my phone. The call quality and reception exceeds the iPhone substantially. The one button “speed-dial” is perfect and has saved many an accident. Not to mention it fits nicely in my pocket when I use my favorite Jawbone Icon (<<the almost perfect wireless headset).
2. Second, the email features are far superior to other devices. See: http://www.ericgreenspan.com/me/why-doesnt-my-iphone-do/ for what the iPhone needs to compete and why I still need to carry a Blackberry.
3. Finally, I like having two devices frankly, a phone in one hand and a “pocket computer” in the other. In my left hand is my Blackberry Bold which is my phone device, and in my right hand is my iPhone, which I use for Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, company stats, YouTube, reading sites and news apps and email, if I must. The ability to have a conversation on one while surfing the Web, email, or crunching numbers on the other is a great benefit to me. The Blackberry is the perfect left hand device.

I hope Blackberry reads this post. While I believe the iPhone is enough for most, the Blackberry still has its place in my life. I’m a power user, but today, who isn’t? The Blackberry has proven itself time and time again to be a reliable and highly useful device. It’s not a competitor to the iPhone in terms of viewing apps and pages, but if the price is right, I will continue to carry both until I can get all the functionality on one or when I retire, buy an island and chuck them both into the ocean (kidding, I meant into a recycling receptacle).

For those of you like me, you may also have an iPad in the mix. Here’s my take on that: http://www.ericgreenspan.com/rant/ipad-not-sure-yet/.

P.S. If you need help with any of these devices, my company Make It Work is just a phonecall (877)-625-3489 or click away.

P.P.S. With a newborn at home and my sleep deprivation, please forgive any spelling or grammar errors within.

Let’s face it, the iPhone is pretty great. But…why, oh why, can’t my iPhone do the following…

(For my iPad review, click here)

1. Why can’t I touch and hold an email and be given a popup menu that offers:
   1. Find/show all from this person
   2. Find/show all to this person
   3. Show all from Subject
   4. Show all UNOPENED
   5. Flag for Follow-up
2. How about a hard button for switching on multi-tasking and/or one for the camera. Before OS 4.0, my double click was my camera and I still never got to it in time to get the shot.
3. Consider a fingerprint scanner as login, directly on the screen?
4. What about a screen of Favorites for phone numbers?
5. Can’t I touch a time on the calendar to START an entry?
6. I’d like to see scroll/swipe up and down as a feature too (Thanks to @crosbyloggins for this one)

I could go on, but if my iPhone had all of these items I would toss my Blackberry (since I carry both) and never consider another device again. All are relatively easy to implement. Am I alone?

P.S. If you need help with any of these devices, my company Make It Work is just a phonecall (877)-625-3489 or click away.