A piece of advice to CEOs (and everyone else interested): The Social Media is not the silver bullet

The response of businesses to the Social Media as marketing tools is overwhelming. It is getting hard to find any company home pages that do not display proudly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, RSS and other social links. To many managers the Social Media hype has triggered euphoric expectations and the illusion that jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon will magically solve all their problems and give them “competitive advantage”.

The countless Social Media aficionados and self-proclaimed “gurus”, “experts”, “evangelists”, “specialists”, and “prophets” I wrote about earlier are also contributing to the confusion; a very similar picture to the dot.com frenzy that some of us still remember but obviously many of us have already forgotten.

One of the big management fallacies (shared and distributed by most of the ignorant “experts”) is that the logos of the trendy apps on the web site will make customers believe that things have suddenly changed: our products got better, the customer service works, we listen to the customer. Some serious research is of course necessary here to see whether these management perceptions have anything to do with reality and whether the introduction of Social Media is really by itself leading to any improvements.

Until such evidence is available I would rather advice some cautiousness: the Social Media is not the silver bullet. I consistently explain to those who follow my lectures on the subject that the Social Media is only part of the solution. Other parts are the Customer Advocacy and the of course the Marketing strategy on different levels. I explain them that you should not start investing (or rather throwing) money in social Media strategies if you do not first address the issues in the (E)-Marketing Strategy Pyramid.

Borrowed from the well-known Hierarchy of Needs Maslow model my pyramid simply says that in order to be able to apply any Web 2.0 / Social Media strategies you should consistently address ALL lower levels of the model. In simple words you can not have Social Media ambitions with lousy products and customer service, a marketing organization in a permanent state of winter sleep and a dysfunctional web site that was last updated in the previous century.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that indeed such situations are not the exception. I recently read the post of Tom Davenport and the post of Umair Haque in the HBR blog that discuss the problem from different angles.
For those who want to address effectively some of the issues arising I have a few simple advices. Before you start talking about Social Media Marketing:

- Place yourself in the place of your customer
- Try to listen (and hear) the real customer voice
- If you have outsourced your customer service to a Call Center break today the contract with them (if possible). If you do not do this you can never apply the first two advices
- Look to your organization carefully and without bias (or maybe let someone else to look to it).
- Have you ever heard the terms CRM (not the software packages that are called so) and Customer Advocacy? If not go to Google (or maybe in an old fashion library) and try to find out something about them.

Call Centers: A curse in disguise?

In the 90s they were praised as the new frontier of marketing, the foundation of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the key for creating loyal customers and as the ultimate customer service solution. I refer of course to the infamous call centers: with very few exceptions confirming the rule, call centers are widely seen as nothing more than customer nuisance, source of resentment and as far as I know one of the main reasons of customer irritation that goes as far as switching brands or service providers. I still have to find someone who talks positively about them; I really can not imagine how it is possible that marketers have not yet understood what kind of damage these centers do to their brands and firm reputation.
Call centers offer two main categories of services: Outbound (bothering people with unsolicited calls at any time of the day, trying to sell from cheap electricity to dubious financial products) and Inbound i.e. under the pretext of “Customer Service” or “Help Line” doing their best to go through scripts that persuade you that the whole problem is inside your head and deny you any access to the firm responsible for the piece of crap you bought and can’t get working. Next to depriving the term Customer Service from any meaning and actually hurting most companies using them by creating a barrier between them and their customer, call centers do not seem to have many positive things worth talking about. Some skeptics will argue that they have helped increasing the welfare in the developing world by creating new employment opportunities in India, Pakistan, China and other low-cost countries. I would say that perusing low-costs is one of the main sources of the problem i.e. the unacceptable low quality of services provided and the actual denial of service since the people sitting at the other side of the world have no real power or authorization to actually solve any problem.
I have many personal experiences of the inability of call centers to help the customers, the nicest one is from last year when I was attempted to make a hotel reservation through the hotel help line since the online booking system was refusing my reservation without any obvious reason and any explanation. A very polite yet stubborn voice with a very nice exotic accent informed that booking through the site was the only way to make my reservation. In my repeated questions why the site booking system was not accepting my reservation the voice kept repeating "I am sorry sir, the only way to make the reservation is through our web site". After repeating this to me 4 to 5 times I hung up and booked in another hotel.

The real long term advantages of call centers on low cost countries is also a point worth some though. In that respect I recomend the film Outsourced The Movie to everyone. In the web site of the movie you can also enjoy a very entertaining spoof about call centers and outsourcing solutions. However it would not surprise me if someone would tell me that this video is not a parody but actual footage. The reality is not much different.