The True & Remarkable Fate of Public Relations
About a week ago, the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble announced that his family was expecting another joyous care package from the stork. (Congrats, Robert!)
Shortly thereafter, he tweeted:
“State of marketing on Twitter? FAIL. Not a single company got back when we announced our pregnancy. This is a good thing but won’t last.”
Let’s ignore the weird logic of simultaneously complaining about being ignored while at the same time saying it is “a good thing” that the twitterstream was not polluted with marketers. (If P&G had quickly tweeted an offer for “free Pampers,” would you have been surprised to see Robert vilify them for cheapening his wholesome family news?)
Let’s focus instead on this possibility: Consumers may increasingly expect that their online ruminations will be monitored and responded to in real-time.
As Robert’s tweet and Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post about “community representation” suggest, the day may be coming when consumers — singly or in ad-hoc special-interest groups (SIGs) — demand instant satisfaction from corporations.
This represents a monstrous scalability problem as the hordes increasingly move online. For the firms who figure it out, though, the karmic and revenue benefits could be equally monstrous.
Imagine this scenario:
You bought a lightweight laptop. Just 3lbs.! But the powercord that the manufacturer shipped it with? It’s another 2lbs. So much for alleviating your achey shoulder! You blog about it. You post a Flickr photo of the laptop and cord tipping the bathroom scales at over 5lbs. You tweet about it. A handful of your online buddies commiserate.
… And not long after, the manufacturer reaches out to you publicly and offers a lighter-weight powercord if you’ll just ship back the original two-pounder.
That laptop-maker just made a customer for life. They’ve birthed a new evangelist who will sing their praises online; who will defend the manufacturer from other consumers who complain.
Now imagine you arrive at the airport only to find that the flight’s just been delayed by three hours! You’re peeved. You tweet about it. Suddenly you get a tweet from a rival airline: they’re taking off for your destination in the next terminal, in 90 minutes — and they will save you a seat, including a free upgrade, if you can hustle over there. Now that’s worth eating the change fee! And, again: a new fan-for-life is born.
This is the new, hybridized service/marketing dynamic that ComcastCares and RichardatDELL are striving to achieve. As such examples become less hypothetical, we’ll pity and hiss at the companies that DON’T listen and respond in real-time.
PR does have a role in this new world order. Though, unlike Jeremiah Owyang, I don’t foresee SIGs banding together to pay PR to intermediate with brands (the brands are better off treating directly with the communities).
However, I do see PR sometimes serving as a stopgap between Corporation and Consumer: PR already does a ton of monitoring and analysis of both media and socialstreams. We can vet the issues; alert clients to rising customer angst; analyze which users need to be ushered into the red-carpet service channel; defend against frustrated claimants; etc.
Isn’t this the business of Customer Service? Not marketing or PR?
That’s more debatable than you might think, in a world in which every consumer is becoming a standalone media outlet, indexed by Google.
The stakes are too high to allow direct public interaction with online consumers to outsourced foreign workers or underpaid college kids. PR becomes the middleman — escorting the disgruntled to the right Customer Service resource and soothing the crowds at the gate in the meantime.
(Not to mention getting hits in the mainstream media, and all that traditional stuff. We’ll be busy.)
I can tell you that this future is coming because I’ve seen it happening with our own clients. Not necessarily every day, but such services are on the rise, almost by necessity. Pissy tweets must not languish unanswered. Not anymore.
Is that the future you saw for yourself when you joined the PR industry? Probably not. Is it a role you want? Is it appropriate? Do you see an alternative path?
UPDATE: Loic LeMeur also recently wrote about a similar topic.
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Todd
It’s happening already for us. I blogged about our experience recently with a furious client customer on Twitter (who was also a journalist/blogger with national newspaper connections – so doubling the potential impact). We were there and able to engage, so creating a happy customer, a visible thumbs up on Twitter and a subsequent blog post praising the client’s willingness to interact. Here’s the story: http://pr-media-blog.co.uk/listen-with-twitter/
Wow, so all irritated customers will need to do is tweet or blog their annoyance and poof! Wow, companies are going to need whole depts just to monitor twitter and blogs for these complaints!
Exactly!
That’s what I did, recently. I blogged and I started a Facebook group. Because of who joined it, I wound up getting my problem solved.
I agree – the risks are too great to not have an agency or in-house oversight and/or a highly skilled and trained communications-customer service dept.
However, I wonder – how are brands going to pay for this? Where will the marketing dollars come from? Perhaps a reallocation of ad dolllars…
I think this role will ultimately go towards a new niche PR sector, much like employee relations or grassroots/WOM firms.
As I noted, yea, it’s a monster scale issue. Some combination of internal/external/cust-svc/pr will likely emerge. Coordination will be key, and I see PR on the frontlines of THAT initiative.
Perhaps it’s just me but if I saw that Pampers had sent Robert some diapers when they wouldn’t do that for any other new parents on Twitter, I’d think they were pandering to his internet celebrity/ego and I’d think less of them.
Yes, but that’s NOW. I am suggesting that, in the future, ANY consumer might get some kind of deal/discount/freebie!
But should they? Just because you have a kid and announce it on Twitter, a company should give you free stuff? I think that’s a slippery slope to walk and will just create even more entitlement in this country.
I feel like an old curmudgeon sometimes, but I really think people have come to expect getting something for nothing and this notion just plays into that.
Really interesting post and picks up on what I see as the underlying value of twitter – real time. The ability to communicate with customers, general public there and then. I use twitter every day (@guy1067) in my work at Carphone Warehouse to provide customer service to our customers who have problems with the service we have provided them, or to provide relevant tips or links to members of the public.
There are lots of negative tweets and I actively try to embrace these, as I see them as customers providing honest feedback about something we are not doing right. The by product of all of this interaction with customers is PR, both positive and negative. I do not actively set out to seek opportunities for PR, they present themselves as soon as I choose to respond to a tweet.
I do think we are only just starting to scratch the surface of the potential of what the concept of twitter or even twitter as a platform can give to us.
The really interesting questions are where are those filters and who should monitor them? Brands continue to get demonized when they invite others to help them in social media monitoring, and yet customers get angry when they don’t do it right. Great read.
Picking up on Susan’s point about cross-functions – if we were to design a company today, would it have 3 silos? (Marketing, PR, and Customer Service).
Maybe we should play musical chairs – if PR is the new customer service, then is customer service the new marketing, and marketing the new PR?
Customer service probably talks with more customers than marketing.
Marketing probably knows how to reach specific consumers through behavioral targeting than PR. (not with ads)
PR probably can get things done across the organization quicker than customer service.
I’m going to disagree–slightly–on the ‘woe be to thee who ignore the pissy tweet.’ Having worked in customer service, I can tell you unequivocally that there are two types of annoyed customers: those who have a right to be annoyed, and those for whom being annoyed is their latent state. I don’t think it’s reasonable, or necessary, for a company to chase every negative mention. I call it “chasing every rabbit,” and it’s a good way to completely waste time and run in circles with some people.
The scalability issue is nothing to sneeze at–when Dell and Comcast started making waves with their efforts in this area, I pointed out that they had just elevated customer service from entry-level to C-suite, because of the very wide range of complaints that come in need to be matched with someone who knows almost every aspect of the business in order to know where to direct the customer (or solve the problem). We all despise phone trees, but they are there to direct people with problems to those who are best equipped to solve them (allegedly).
I truly believe that PR has a place in this mix, but like everything else, this role should be thought through and make sense from the larger perspective of the client’s communications goals.
Also, on a purely personal note, I truly dislike seeing tweets from people who simply don’t want to go through the established customer service channels companies have set up–it seems very lazy to me for someone to tweet a complaint if they haven’t even tried the 1-800 number yet; and yes, I have seen this! Give the company a chance to make things right, at least. If it doesn’t work, then go the public forum route.
Back in the day, when I first started blogging in 2005, I though that the role of PR could be as a type of ombudsman, pleading the case of the customer to the management. Now that has morphed into the customer service bridging model that you describe above. I am working with a number of clients, including Network Solutions, that are doing just that. PR serves as an adviser. I am also working with clients that are empowering the front line of employees to respond directly when they see something in the social nets.
My concern has been that the social networks become the only way that you can get satisfaction. Companies still need to work on making all of their customer service world class and the social networking aspect of that should be an extension of an overall customer-centric approach.
Great Post Todd.
You laid out some great examples of how brands can make or break evangelists for their products / services.
As more and more brands get online, and as more people start Tweeting about them while expecting a response or restitution – will there be some sort of threshold developed as to when it becomes ‘worth it’ for a brand to respond?
I wonder if there will be certain criteria for a freebie or response as people start to expect one. Do I need to have a certain number of readers or twitter followers that I can tell which will spread that message. Its like the web 2.0 equivalent of ratings….
I could (and hope) I’m wrong, but its going to be interesting to see how this kind of interaction scales…
@ryancmiller