Twitter! Facebook! Quora! Danger!

What if a company spokesperson said this to you:

“Well, we did install some telephones and we like the way we can call folk and tell them about new products and sales.  Now and then, some of our customers and even prospects call us, but we just let ‘em roll to voice mail.  If someone thinks about it, we tell one of the interns to check voice mail every couple of weeks.  Funny story; sometimes even our competitors check the voice mail and answer our customers!”

You would think they were absolutely the most incompetent, negligent, company on Earth, right?  You might even say, they were asleep at the switch.  Guess what?  Many firms, from small one man shops to giant multi-nationals are doing exactly that in the realm of social media.

Anyone active on Twitter or the other sites has seen it.  There’s the account, blabbing out PR releases, loud and proud from @AcmeWidget (by the way, I just made that name up, in case @AcmeWidget is actually someone’s account!).  Soon, customers start asking questions, paying complements, or Tweeting complaints, tagging them with @AcmeWidget or using a hashtag of #acmewidget.

What follows is silence; deafening silence.  Or much worse, a competitor over at Superior Widgets jumps in the conversation and steers Acme’s $7,000,000 account to them. 

My friends in marketing and sales, if you don’t ignore the phones, don’t ignore social media!  It needs to be someone’s defined job to monitor all social media streams that you participate in, as close to 24/7/365 as you can physically manage.  Nature and business both abhor a vacuum.  If you don’t provide the answer, someone will, and you may not like what they have to say.

Social media gives you the chance to shine and look like a hero.  It also affords you the opportunity lose customers, offend prospects, and destroy a brand.  In future installments, we will look at not only the need to respond, but how to do so without inserting the corporate foot into the corporate mouth!

Anyone want to share either company’s that do it right or those that don’t?