Archives for category: Social Media
« Older Entries

In Defense of Being Nice

June 15, 2013 //
0

There is a bad joke / semi serious statement amongst veterinary practice managers; “no good deed goes unpunished.” And while I see the reality in this, and have even said it few times, I ultimately do not subscribe to the point of view. What is wrong with being nice?

I get it, I really do, being nice is hard. But being polite and showing respect for your peers,  those you interact with, those who report to you and those you report to is not only the right thing to do, it is in your interest.

Since being a manager, and someone who hires and fires, I have always been shocked at those who felt that just not turning up for work, and refusing to communicate was an acceptable way to hand in one’s notice. Despite the obvious impoliteness and unprofessional behavior of leaving your co-workers in the lurch, there is the added inconsideration of those who feel at least partially responsibility for your well-being. Stories abound, and I have personal experience of, employees with limited family in serious trouble at home which is only discovered when an employer starts inquiring after their well-being after they fail to show up for work. I never even considered doing this, and I’ve seen this behavior from young and old so the generational clichés don’t offer any answers.

As I discussed in another post, the superstar employee who feels they are above the general rules of behavior in the workplace is another example of a failure to be nice. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this kind of behavior and generally find it to be counterproductive – the exceptions being just that and not proving anything.

And then there is the Dunkin Doughnuts Lady…

The following video is pretty offensive but it does prove a point. A customer feeling that they have been wronged videos herself claiming free food from the day shift of a Dunkin Doughnuts  after she feels her receipt was not given to her in a timely manner the night before. While all the time informing anyone who will listen that she is filming the encounter, and that she is going to post it on Facebook, she delivers an avalanche of racial slurs, abuse, and is generally obnoxious. The employees, to their extreme credit, keep their cool, try to make the customer happy, and are professional throughout despite extreme provocation.

(WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS VERY OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE )

The story of the video however, does not end with the video. After being posted online last week it went viral, but not in the way that the original poster had hoped. A tirade of negative comments about the behavior of the customer led her to delete her Facebook account and one can only imagine the personal repercussions – the least of which is finding out that the majority of people do not think the way she does.

This incident also shows of the worst side of social media, where someone tries to leverage it for their own ends and as a shield for their own bad behavior or sense of being wronged. This can also be called the Yelp Effect. I am not a Yelp hater, but I do think it is a flawed system and one that rewards bad behavior from both businesses and customers with little recourse. The Better Business Bureau had its flaws but at least there was an attempt a resolution.

In the veterinary world, an often heard phrase is “you don’t care about animals” often paired with “it is all about the money.” Although uttered by people in difficult circumstances, and born out of frustration, it is still extremely hurtful for anyone who has choose to make their career working with animals and has caused more than a few sleepless nights for a lot of deeply caring people.

We all have difficult customers, employees, and colleagues - it is how we deal with them that counts and makes a difference from one business or organization to the next.  The bottom line is that doing the right thing, being polite, professional and, I guess for want of a better word nice, is the only way to behave for your interest and for everyone else. It is the only way to guarantee that things will not get worse.

And you never know, it might rub off on to someone else.

Tags , , , , , , , ,
Categories Business, Customer Service, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Veterinary

Book review: The Book of Business Awesome by Scott Stratten

August 18, 2012 //
0

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

– Charles Dickens, ’A Tale of Two Cities.’

Scott Stratten’s excellent new book is actually two books, printed back-to-back under the same cover.  “The Book of Business Awesome,” as its name suggests, is a collection of examples, ideas and concepts on how businesses can deliver extraordinary customer service through actually communicating and connecting with their customers. The flip side, “The Book of Business Unawesome,” shows the price of not communicating, not thinking, and not caring  about your customers.

As you might expect, social media plays a large role in both the positive examples and the negative examples of this book, but it is not a book about social media per say. Those looking for a nuts and bolts how to I do X, Y, and Z on Twitter, Facebook or practically any another sphere of social media would be better served by Arnie Kuenn’s excellent: Accelerate! that I reviewed this time last year. ”The Book of Business Awesome,” however, is more of a call to arms for brands and companies to be something other than normal – particularly because normal can be so crappy – and to go out of their way for their customer.

To be funny.

To be honest.

To be human.

And to apologize because they genuinely regret a mistake, or bad customer experience, not because they got caught or called on it.

Really, this book is about culture and people. The stories that are replayed in both their awesomeness and unawesomeness throughout give a window into the soul of the featured companies. It shows ordinary front line employees doing extraordinary things and those extraordinary things having an impact far beyond the normal, or even intended, business interaction.  As Scott states on numerous occasions: social media doesn’t fix anything – it just makes things louder. If you don’t give a damn about customers when you transact with them – this will be heard loud and clear online and will also come across in your social media interactions.

Filled with links to additional content and even the odd QR code (I’d actually would have liked to see more QR codes, the link typing thing got old after a while) the Book of Business Awesome also has an excellent couple of chapters on public speaking and panel discussions. As a side note, if you ever get a chance to see Scott speak at a conference, or on his book tour, do so – for the rest of us there is YouTube!

Not as funny as Scott’s in-person presentations, The Book of Business Awesome is, however, just as passionate and quite amusing. And this is actually a very minor quibble consider that many business books are about as entertaining as a tax audit. It also probably says more about Scott’s skills as a public speaker than any lack of skill as a writer.

The Book of Business Awesome is nothing short of a bible for customer service in the Social Media age.

Categories Books, Business, Customer Service, Marketing, Social Media

Social Media, ROI, and the Cost of Talking to your Customers

July 29, 2012 //
0

I am all for Return On Investment (ROI).

However, defining ROI in any small service business, particularly in marketing, can be incredibly difficult to be even remotely useful. Most businesses don’t bother except when it is easy. But for some reason, when it comes to social media, ROI is mission critical.

Why?

You can place an ad for discounted services, with a coupon, running for a month, and a unique web address, and  a unique phone number, and track that (but honestly how many actually do this?) But how can you track the person who becomes aware of your business through that ad, spots your sign one day while driving by, and then six months later needs and uses your services unrelated to the ad?

What is the ROI of your fax machine?

What is the ROI of customer service?

What is the ROI of a strong brand?

How do you place a value on communicating with a significant proportion of your clients every day?

Most businesses consider word of mouth one of the most important forms of promotion. It is essentially free and it is highly effective. With social media, we have the opportunity to insert our businesses into the “word of mouth” of our customers, and thereby their friends, and their friends friends. Why would you not get involved and take advantage of that?

Facebook for my business probably takes up 15 minutes of my day on average. An email, or even a call by the time I’ve documented it, to an upset client can easily take an hour. Should I not deal with an upset client when I don’t have to because the ROI is lousy? Yes, you can place a value on a client and on retaining that client. You can even track that you do get some clients from Facebook, but you may also get clients because you have an email address or a telephone number. When was the last time that anyone figured out the ROI of their email system? Even when buying a new phone system most businesses to not justify it with ROI, but rather than as the cost of doing business.

Small businesses often look up to companies such as Nike and Apple and see their devoted, and almost rabid, fan bases as evidence of marketing in action. I would argue, however, that companies like Apple and Nike create devoted fan bases is by being approachable and interacting with their clients – Apple in particular. I’m not the greatest Steve Jobs fan, but there are lots of examples of Steve taking the time to reply to ordinary consumers and being very interested in what they had to say. HP, Dell, et al. for a number of years, sold dramatically more computers than Apple, but it was Apple who held Mac World every year. Nike became cool because they did not go after deals, they went after people who actually used their shoes – athletes. They engaged their most high profile target market.

Of course, there is a lot of other marketing involved, but remember Apple’s most famous ad only ran once in most markets. Apple, and Nike for that matter, opened their own stores that operate on a quite a different model from other retail outlets. There is some argument that this was to help control the customer experience, but I also feel it was to be able to respond, and engage, with customers. Like all companies, they do not always get it right, but I do think that it is the willingness to attempt true engagement, and a real concern for the customer experience, that breeds fierce loyalty.

Social media is not a strategy – engagement, however, is.

So how to do social media and get some results and some traction?

To me, a major issue for small businesses is when they are on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, YouTube, and are doing all of them badly. Focus on one, and only one, and do it well. Then you can move on to another one.

Create things,or provide a service, using social media that other people will value.

Share other people’s content sparingly.

Self promotion has to have value, or at least not look like self promotion.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your fan base or ask them to share.

Drive fans to your website, or blog, from places like Facebook or YouTube not the other way round.

Pick your social media sites carefully. In my opinion, YouTube, for example, is very useful and can expose you to an enormous audiences, but the attention span is fleeting and the sense of community is almost non-existent. Embed videos in your site or page. Facebook works for my business and my previous business. Twitter does not. However, Twitter will almost certainly work for my new business, and it works for me personally. This has a lot to do with the small towns versus large cities and the  nature of my business – it may well be different for yours. Google+ has some personal value, and some SEO benefits, but has little real world value at this point in time in my opinion. But it does look very pretty!

Numbers of likes or followers are pretty irrelevant. It is the level of engagement that counts. I’d much rather have two hundred relevant, and engaged, fans or followers than 6,000 just making up the numbers. As someone much smarter than me once said: “If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.”

And finally, don’t cross post, post from one social network to another, unless you really know what you are doing.

And even then just don’t do it.

Please.

I beg of you.

I see people I respect and who should really know better, cross posting and it is counterproductive. Content for Facebook does not translate well to Twitter because of the character limit. Twitter’s special characters are not understood by most Facebook users.

There are social networks where cross posting seems to work pretty well, but again, it is a black art, and if you are questioning the ROI of any social network, cross posting from a different network is not any kind of an investment.

To sum up this long, and sprawling post, the ROI of social media is the ROI of engagement. If talking to existing and new customers is not for you then I wish you well.

That just means more customers for the rest of us.

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues on the Marking in Veterinary Medicine LinkedIn group for the conversation that this post was cannibalized from. Also many thanks to Ali Burden-Blake (@inkspotsocial) for her excellent blog post: “Stop! Why using social media won’t work for your veterinary practice.” which inspired the conversation in the first place.

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Business, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Marketing, Social Media

Book Review: Violated Online – How Online Slander Can Destroy Your Life & What You Must Do to Protect Yourself, by Steven Wyer

December 17, 2011 //
0

 

Violated Online is a interesting book for a number of reasons. But by far the most interesting thing is the quandary at it’s heart.

Wyer runs a company that specializes in Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) and Violated Online is essentially a 200 page pitch for the SERM industry. In case there is any doubt, SERM is essentially the same as the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practiced by online marketers to ensure that search engine results reflect the results that they want.

The fundamental idea at the heart of Violated Online is that we live in a connected world and that information is easy to find or publish. That this world can be a scary place, and that things have changed, should really come as no surprise to anyone.

It is hard not to feel while reading this work that the author would rather go back to the “good-old-days.” By its own admission, Violated Online states that a lot of personal information was always available offline, but that now this information is a lot easier to access and somehow this makes the internet is a bad thing. It is interesting to reflect that only 10 years ago we gladly gave our social security numbers to department store clerks, or any other number of people, to bring up account information. Just like we have all learned to control our personal information, we also have to take responsibility for our online presence.

To be fair, Violated Online, makes this exact argument. However, most people reading it will only take away from the near hysterical tone is the idea that to protect themselves they need to stay off the internet or employ a SERM company. For example, some of the advise is practically useless for the average person – registering every single web address permutation of you and your families name. Great advise for a business, or someone in the public eye, but more than a little over the top for most people. It is easy to forget that in the days before the internet, if the major media misquoted or focused on an individual, there was very little recourse. The internet can magnify these problems but it also provides an avenue for correcting those mistakes. Violated Online makes no such comparisons or admissions.

However, the biggest issue with this book is that on the one hand it bemoans that individuals can be anonymous online, and then rails against social media’s use of proper names and identities. You can’t have it both ways! The online identity issue is significant, but it needs to be handled with education about when you can and can’t rely on online information and who posted it.

Violated Online is an important book and is well worth reading, despite its problems. Just don’t buy into the end of the world scenarios and take away its most important message – take control of your life online before someone else does.

Tags , , ,
Categories Books, Marketing, Search, Social Media

The Bayer Brakke Study & Me

December 4, 2011 //
12

2011 has felt like the year of the Bayer Brakke Study. Most of what has been written in the world of practice management, seminars, and conversations between managers, have ended up talking about the Bayer Brakke study.

This was finally summed up for me when attend a one day workshop held at VSCoT by Butler, Bayer, and Jessica Goodman Lee, CVPM of Brakke consulting, on the study itself and what to do about it’s findings.

I felt it might be interesting for me to give my personal view point on some of what I took away from this presentation, the Bayer Brakke Study in general, and what it means for the veterinary profession, clients and pets, as a whole.

1: The profession needs to change and it needs to take the change seriously.

The 1998 Brakke study made 19 recommendations and the only one that was adopted by almost all veterinary practices was to raise fees. Now that was a good thing – fees need to rise, but the other recommendations we’re also important. Inventory management and reducing expenses, for example, were the recommendations with the next highest adoption rate and they were adopted by less than 50% of practices.

Just raising fees is fine when the economy is doing well, but does not bode well recessionary times and helps explain why visits are down and some practices are have had a significantly hard time over the last couple of years.

What was valid five years ago is not valid now – never mind 10 years ago.

2: Normalcy is not an excuse for inaction.

One of the elements that the study points out is that many practices believe that all they have to do is “weather the storm” and everything will get back to normal. What is currently being misunderstood is that the industry has changed. New competition, with different business models, have arisen partly in response to these challenging times, and who is to say that these will end anytime soon? Only 20% of practices expressed serious concern about the changing market place.

The other major issue is that business itself has changed. As Jim Lecinski points out in his book “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” buying, consuming and even reviewing habits have changed. As a business you ignore these changes at your peril.

3: We Live, or Perish, by Communication with our Clients.

59% of dog owners and 56% of cat owners would bring their pets in more often if they could prevent problems and extensive treatments later on. The figures are almost identical when owners believe that their pet will live longer by bringing them to their veterinarian more often.

In addition, 56% of clients feel that their veterinarian does give them clear instructions as to when they should bring their pet in.

4: Cats – the Great Opportunity.

As I personally experienced while helping with the pet evacuation due to the Monument Fire in Sierra Vista, cats are woefully undeserved by the veterinary community. The bottom line is that cats do not get brought into the vet enough or sometimes ever. It is difficult for the owner, difficult for the cat, and difficult (from the client’s perspective) for the veterinary practice.

If a veterinary practice sees 25% cats and 75% dogs, and there are 13% more cats that dogs in the U.S. the opportunities are enormous both for the business of the practice and in improving feline health.

5: It is all about money – except when it is not.

Getting inventive about payment options, whatever they might be, are seen by clients as needed services. That does not nessecerally mean that veterinarians have to become banks, but it does mean that we can’t wash our hands of the financial issue. The practices that are able to provide options will find clients flocking to them. It is also important to note that choice is not always a good thing. It can send a a mixed message to clients who are looking for a recommendation. Pet insurance is an obvious area where having a practice provider of choice in terms of recommendations can make a big difference to clients.

Trumping the financial issues, however, is communication as mentioned above. If we do not explain the value of what we do and why we do it (exhibit A: the lack of feline visits) how can we ever expect clients to?

I can sum a lot of what I have written above by one word: Management.

The industry needs to embraise management (this may seem like a self serving argument as a practice manager, and to an extent it is, but it does also does not make it any less true) as a key ingredient for practice health. It is no accident that the Bayer Brakke Study shows that the variables most constistant with increased visits were: seeing the same veterarian every time, wellness exams considered the most important service, marketing and advertising as important to practice success, and the active use of social media. The variables most consistent with decreased visits were: advertising undermines credibility as a veterinarian and lack of referral arrangements with shelters, groomers etc. These are all areas where good management can make a significant difference. Managers have to be allowed to manage, but they also need to manage well.

Proper practice management is not just the responsibility of the managers. Of course, managers must manage, but there has to be a sea-change in understanding that proper practice management actually effects patient health and outcomes.

Just ask all those cats!

These are just my take always, any others or any other ideas? Lets here from you in the comments. Abuse, as always, very welcome.

Tags , ,
Categories Business, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social Media, Veterinary

Social Media Envy

November 8, 2011 //
3

For a field supposedly bereft of metrics, social media is full of them.

I have more Facebook fans / Twitter followers / blog subscribers than you do. My tweets get re-tweeted more often, more people are talking about this on Facebook, and every blog post has a hundred comments. And, of course, the crowning achievement, my Klout score is higher than yours.

I’ve had a couple of run-ins lately with social media envy. The first was a blog post that was very popular for all the wrong reasons – I took a position that lots of people disagreed with. I don’t regret that post (or the sentiment it contained), but it did get me thinking on the nature of why that post was so “popular” compared to others on my blog. Certainly, it has been a long understood concept that controversy boosts readership (just ask a tabloid journalist). However, what really made me start thinking on this topic was why would readers engage more just to tell me I’m wrong? Does this kind of thinking carry over into more corporate blogging? Should I start my next vet practice blog with the words “I hate pets?”

Obviously, you won’t find any anti-pet blog posts from me any time soon. But it led me to start reassessing as to why I decided to start blogging in the first place.

The next thing that really set off the social media envy was Facebook. Working in small communities, and have having a very successful Facebook presence on the two major pages I have run as a veterinary practice manager, I believe I am justifiably proud of both the number of fans and the level of engagement, without vast sums of cash being sunk into the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg. My pages have had significantly better engagement, and fan bases than my competitors, or other local businesses. Of course, it is therefore disheartening to come across others who seem to be doing a better job – with more fans and better engagement, even if they are not in your market. Social Media envy I hate you.

The bottom line, however, is that social media envy, like envy and jealously in general is pointless and stupid. The real questions to be asking ones self when faced with social media envy are:

1: Does my presence achieve what I want it to achieve?

2: If someone else is achieving more than I am how can I learn from them and is it even possible for me to do something similar? There is a big difference, for example, in running a Facebook page for a rock band versus running a page for a veterinary hospital or a restaurant.

3: Am I making forward progress and do my clients, and potential clients, like what my online presence delivers for them?

Social media, is a element of a marketing strategy, not a marketing strategy in itself. It is a tool to achieve your goals. And those goals can be quite ethereal. If social media is not working for you, then it is time to try something else or learn from those who doing what you want to be able to do.

It is not a race.

It is not a competition.

It is a tool.

It makes no sense to judge yourself, or even the tool, by how others use it.

Comments, good, bad, and indifferent are always welcome – flame away!   

Tags , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Business, Marketing, Social Media

The Best “Friday Follow” Ever!

October 15, 2011 //
0

For those who do not use Twitter, you might not know about Friday Follows. The idea is that on Fridays, Twitter users recommend other Twitter users to follow.

It has fallen out of favor of late a little, the Twitterverse can be fickle, and I’ve never been a big believer anyway - preferring to retweet (repost others messages) on a regular basis. But it has always been nice to get one.

Yesterday, however, I got the best Friday Follow ever from Jim Dougherty who goes by the name @leaderswest on Twitter.

Jim’s Friday Follow took the form of a short – talking to camera – video, explaining to users why they should follow me, and others, on Twitter. The genius of the idea is that each subject gets their own short video making it very easy to view and share by the subject.

This is great content marketing.

Easy to consume, relevant, and selfless – which of course reflects very well on the content creator like all great content marketing. It would be interesting to see if all recommendations will eventually be like this: personal, short, and on video. It has certainly got my wheels turning considering just how effective I find the video below. Interestingly, Jim used Keek for this project. Keek is hoping to be video Twitter.

Please follow @leaderswest on Twitter, after you follow me!

Video Friday Follow about @mike_falconer from @leaderswest

(Keek's embedding does not work very well in WordPress yet - just click on the image to take you to Jim's Keek page and his video post about me!)

Well, what did you think?

Let me know in the comments and take a look at Jim’s other Friday Follows in the same page.

Categories Content Marketing, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized

It’s not, but it is, Personal!

October 9, 2011 //
2

Bad feedback, subtle (and not so subtle) digs on Twitter, your mistakes pointed out for all to see, and then you go make it way worse…

In your online life, just like your business life, it can be hard to take criticism. We are not married, after all, to our peers – business is personal. But just like in person, going ballistic certainly does not help the relationship, how you are perceived by other people, or even your own equilibrium.

I seemed to attract a deluge of criticism online and off recently. In addition, I had a management issue that felt like backhanded criticism. Although my first instinct was to react as if these were attacks, by standing back, taking a deep breath, and actually trying to see what the other person was saying, I realized that they all had merit – and in some cases, there were things that needed addressing.

What is so odd, for me, is that, I consider it a key function of my job to address client issues when they come up about my practice. I survey every client who visits us, so thanking clients for positive feedback, and trying to address negative feedback, is part and parcel of what I do.

Learning the lesson that bad, even unjustified, feedback about your business is not a personal attack was an easy lesson to learn. Understanding, that personal business criticism should be handled in a similar vein is harder to learn, but ultimately even more important.

Comments welcome (please be gentle…)

Tags , , , ,
Categories Business, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social Media

Why I Hate Webinars

September 27, 2011 //
7

This week, I take pot shots at webinars and why I think they are a waste for speaker, and the virtual attendee.

Webinars, where a speaker presents over the Internet, at a predetermined time to an audience sitting at home or at their desks, have always seemed to be a classic example of having your cake and eating it too. By the way – that expression makes no sense whatsoever. If I’m having cake you better believe that I want to eat it!

Anyway, I digress…

The problem with webinars is that they have all the disadvantages of actually going to see someone speak, with none of the advantages. The timming of the webinar is decided by the speaker, or organizer. The transfer of information is limited to that timing window and whatever notes are issued.

From the speaker side, webinars offer the possibility of actual interaction with participants. However, because the interaction is one way, unless initiated by the viewer, the speaker has no idea as to how well the presentation is going and therefore how to tailor it to address potential issues.

I also cannot help shaking the notion that webinars are, for the most part, the lazy way out. If online delivery is what is required, let’s have proper content. Presentations that can be downloaded, shared, and watched again and again on the viewers schedule. YouTube, Slideshare, or even PowerPoint all make this very easy.

While saying all this, I do think there is great value in physical meetings and presentations- particularly for the conversations that happen before and after the meeting. Social media, is an excellent way of approximating this offline interaction of a physical meeting- online, but the realtime contraints of a webinar don’t really lend themselves to this interaction.

Plus, who doesn’t need more great content.

Tags , , ,
Categories Business, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

Disastrous Marketing, (or Please Don’t Do This…)

September 6, 2011 //
8

You build a marketing strategy, craft your brand, have a good grasp of your online identity, lots of likes and followers on the various social media platforms, and even have developed great connections to your local media…and then you do something really stupid that could potentially blow it all.

Nobody is perfect, and we all makes mistakes – I’ve made some doozers. But there is a real difference between making mistakes, admitting those mistakes and then trying to fix the problem, as opposed to declaring war on your customers and ultimately your own business.

Lets take this little Twitter gem for starters courtesy of the Daily Mail. A customer in your restaurant overhears a waiter being rude about another restaurant owner who the customer happens to know personally. Your customer is not to thrilled with the service already, and finds this behavior to be rather off, so they Tweet about it. What you do not do, as a restaurant owner, is call up from home, ask to speak to the customer in question, curse at them down the phone, and then demand they leave. That, however, is exactly what happened. In the ensuing Twitter onslaught, the restaurant came off far worse and created a massive (the restaurant is in Texas, the Daily Mail is a UK newspaper as an example) amount of negative publicity over a customer service issue. An apology, and a courtesy meal or bottle of wine, could have turned this incident into a minor win instead of this major fail.

Next up, the auto-body shop that after using a photographer’s work on their Facebook page without permission, proceeded to threaten and abuse the photographer on their own Facebook page for all to see. Needless to say, the page went viral over Twitter and Facebook. With the almost universally courteous, and intelligent, posts from supporters of the photographer, and gangsta inspired vitriol from the body shop it could only be seen as a massive marketing failure right in front of the businesses own 500+ fans. I believe the page is now been taken down as I can no longer find it, but if anyone knows if it is still up please drop me a line so I can share the link.

The Airbnb saga, has been done to death but is instructive because even very smart people can do really dumb things. The basic outline is that Airbnb is a service that allows homeowners to rent out a room on a short term basis like a hotel. Unfortunately, when an owner returned to find their apartment trashed, and their identity stolen, Airbnb basically stuck their heads in the sand and appeared to try and discredit the victim to stop her blogging about her experience. After a major backlash, Airbnb added safeguards, an insurance policy, and tried to do the right thing by the victim. But it could be too little too late considering their model is very easy to copy and already has a number of competitors. Most people had never even heard of Airbnb until this story exploded.

Finally, something a bit closer to home, how would you, or your staff, feel about having this tweeted from your hospital by a doctor, or about your pet?

Twitter vet image blanked out

Not only is this amazingly unprofessional, but all it will take is a single person to make the connection between hospital and Twitter account (the account does not identify the hospital, or the doctor, but I have still blanked out what is there in the interests of fairness) and this will become a huge problem. I’m sure it violates the hospital’s social media policy and I’m sure you could make an argument for it also being damaging to the profession to boot!

The bottom line is that your reputation and your brand are fragile. It is very easy for it to be damaged by just forgetting the basics of customer service. Never do anything, or say anything online, that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the paper or on a billboard. This is an age where it is easier to get your message out than ever before, but it is also just as easy for everyone else. And nothing travels, or goes viral, quite as well as scandal or bad news.

Does anyone have disastrous stories they would like to share or other examples they have seen online? Share with the rest of us in the comments!

Tags , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Veterinary
« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 25 other followers