Have my expectations of brands changed because of social media? Perhaps. Why? Because I feel like there is an opportunity like never before for a brand to connect and engage fans and consumers on a whole other level. So it’s shocking to me that some are not monitoring these conversations about their brands, are not leveraging the conversations about competitor brands and are just not responding when someone is clearly yelling ‘help me’ in the social channels.
I’ve observed it with a few brands that seem to keep popping up and just cannot understand why the conversation is not happening when one side is clearly doing everything to make it happen.
Choosing the conversation you wish to participate in?
I recently tweeted that I was having a lot of problems with spam on this blog. While a few of my close online friends responded right away willing to help and give me suggestions for what worked for them, only one blog commenting company participated and that was Livefyre. Regardless of what I have said about commenting systems this time or in past conversations, Livefyre is always right there. Disqus – not in sight. Not even 3, 4, 5 days later. WordPress didn’t even comment to try and help. Needless to say, I installed the Livefyre plug-in and you can see it’s now active on my site here.
Some of my colleagues have said that these big guys don’t ‘need’ to respond. Feedburner is a great example. I can only assume what portion of Google’s overall business comes from Feedburner users only (I would guess not a whole lot) so I guess they don’t ‘need’ to respond to someone like me – right? Am I missing something? Feedblitz on the other hand is constantly monitoring everything in the social channels. If you mention a problem you are having with Feedburner, I guarantee someone from Feedblitz will try and help. Go test it out now and let me know. Same thing with Livefyre.
What is the point in initiating a conversation or enabling one if you are going to sit dormant on the other side?
Since yesterday I have been tweeting up a storm about the latest Tweetdeck ‘upgrade’ and it hasn’t been positive. I’ve exchanged tweets with others to tell them what I didn’t like about the latest version and watched a ripple effect of people using me as the ‘cautionary take’ not to implement the update on their own systems. When I said I wanted to find something else and even tagged my tweet with @Tweetdeck, I was shocked to not see one response from a rep at their company.
Some brands have Twitter handles just to have them and are not really engaged (Feedburner’s last tweet was in June and Tweetdeck’s was last week) but Tweetdeck is asking people to follow them on their homepage and over 1 million people are. Why would a brand do that just to ignore anyone that tries to talk to them?
We have these tools at our fingertips and the conversation still is not happening. Does it take a lot to simply monitor what is being said? Sure. Do you really not care about me as a customer because you don’t ‘need’ to? Perhaps. Or are brands ignoring some conversations and jumping in on others? Definitely think so.
I understand that it takes a lot of effort to monitor and respond to each and every mention. I understand that with over one million followers, you may get tons of mentions and messages. But I also understand that when a customer is crying out ‘help’, that something needs to be done. Why is this conversation still not happening when the tools we have make it easier than ever before to do?
This is a gigantic missed opportunity for brands. We need to start paying attention to the conversations that are being had and initiated with us better. And we need to do it now before our competitors do.
Hey Christina! I’m from Disqus. We dropped the ball on communication with you — and I do think Livefyre is doing a great job here. We’ve got to step up our game.
On our end, we’ve been keeping up with growth and trying to put the right things in place so that we can make sure we’re interacting with (potential) users in the right way. I’m very excited about what we’re working on right now, so hopefully you’ll be checking out Disqus sometime in the future.
@danielha
Thanks so much for your response. I think Disqus has a huge opportunity here to join the online conversation. At one time, you guys were the go-to blog commenting system until Livefyre came out of beta. They are definately benefiting from being the only company responding to people complaining or asking questions about commenting systems. Im looking forward to seeing Disqus interact with users like myself.
@C_Pappas Thank you! We’ve tightened things up and in full force now.
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