The social media band aid mentality

Social media and social marketing are the first topics in our videos from the recent Canadian Marketing Association National Convention, featuring social media author, Tara Hunt. We’ll be posting more videos from the CMA 2010: Next daily! We’ve got a lot to share from this great convention!

Tara Hunt is well known in the social media and social marketing circles. She’s the author of:  The Power of Social Networking (formerly titled: The Wuffie Factor) and a sought after speaker on social media and social marketing. At the recent Canadian Marketing Association Next: 2010 national convention, she spoke passionately about how many companies seem to perceive social media and social marketing as some kind of band aid solution to be used as a short term fix for other customer service shortcomings.

It’s a good point. I would imagine there’s more than a few VPs out there who think that social media tools such as twitter give them a perfect way to treat the symptoms of a problem (with the high visibility of social media and social marketing), rather than having to actually improve their service.

See someone say something negative about you on Twitter or other social media? Have a staffer using social media monitoring tools reply quickly to the person offering help. Yep, that’s going to play well to some but, it doesn’t really fix the problem that caused the negative tweet in the first place does it?

Tara tells a story of how she got a call from a Rogers Communications phone bot telling her she should call a specific number regarding an important matter (if it’s important shouldn’t  Rogers have a live person call?) so, Tara called the number and got, yes you guessed it, another bot! This bot told her the number had changed and gave her a new number to call which led Tara to yet another phone bot! It gets better kids! This time the bot asked her to press 8 for English and after she did so, proceeded with instructions in French – you just can’t make up this kind of stuff.

Watch the video and you’ll see how Tara reacted, how Rogers attempted to react via social media and how that attempt failed.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMSctvnW154

Takeaway: Social media is not a band aid solution for other customer service shortcomings.