How not to use Twitter – a UK case study

June 22, 2009 by

Twitter – it’s either all the rage, or a cause of rage among people you know, right?  Mostly people seem to either love it or hate it to the point where they rant about it for what may seem like several days.

The service is admittedly quirky – it has its own syntax and rules.  You can target a specific person by placing the @ symbol in front of their user name,  and you can identify a topic or issue by prefacing it with a hashtag (e.g. the protests and crackdowns following the Iranian elections means that #Iran is a very common hashtag term at the moment).

Identification via hashtag does more than just giving a regular reader a categorical “heads up.”  It makes a topic easier to search for.   For instance, a search for “law” might give you everything from gripes about someone’s mother-in-law to a legislative alert; however, if you search for “#law” you will get messages (“tweets”) specifically relating to law and the legal field.

Hashtags, therefore, can serve as primitive but valuable finding aids for people interested in certain issues or topics. tallmanwalking {at} gmail(.)com" target="_blank"> So, consider this case study of the UK furniture firm Habitat, who signed up for Twitter and immediately started populating their tweets about store sales with random hashtagged terms like #iPhone and #Apple.

Who thought this was a good idea?  What happens when someone who is interested in the new iPhone runs into a tweet about a furniture sale?  Do they say, “Oh – I thought I was interested in an iPhone, but perhaps I will purchase a sofa instead”?

I have to say that I think the chances of that happening are extremely low.  I would even go so far as to venture a guess that people running a search on #iPhone might feel as if they were the targets of a very inept con.  I don’t know about you, but when I am the target of an inept con, I either think that the person attempting to perpetrate it is exceedingly stupid or has such a low opinion of my intellect that they haven’t bothered to make an effort.

It’s not especially good branding strategy to either look really stupid or assume your customers are really stupid.

The original post linked above has fantastic advice about how to step back from the brink of such a PR disaster.  The best of these in my opinion is this:

Its ok to fail. Do it quickly and apologise publicly. People are a lot more forgiving when you admit to your mistakes rather than deny any wrongdoing.

Very, very true.  If you are stepping up to use a medium that is expressly designed to communicate both directly and publicly with your customers, you really need to proceed with utter openness and honesty.  Otherwise, don’t bother.

Filed Under: proper tool, proper use, really dumb stuff, say what you mean Tagged With: ,

Now hiring: Corporate Spokespeople

June 18, 2009 by

As a follow up to my post Your brand is your brand, I thought I would address a few additional points.

First, among the many hits that post generated, I got  at least six visits from nat1.jo-annstores.com.  Actual direct outreach from the company?  Nothing.  No use of my contact page, no comment on the blog, nothing.

While this didn’t surprise me, it does allow me to make a collateral point, which is well known to many people in relationship management:

When your customer knows you are listening and you do not respond, they will assume you do not care.

Not caring about your customers or service may work in the short term if you are a monopolist selling a necessary product with high barriers to entry.  In that scenario, you basically have a captive audience until someone gets clever enough to surmount those barriers and compete effectively.

So what does Jo-Ann’s competitive landscape look like?  They carry sewing supplies (fabric, thread, notions, sewing machines, etc.), craft supplies, and some knitting/crochet materials.  The bricks-and-mortar options in my local area are thus: there are at least two other mass-market fabric store chains in my area with multiple retail outlets for each within 25 miles of my house.  There are also at least two stores that carry craft and hobby supplies and a great wealth of independent knitting/crochet shops.  There are probably also additional specialty niche shops in a variety of areas that could compete in areas where J0-Ann plays.

On the Internet side of things, there are also several large players and I don’t even want to begin to count the number of boutique players (including eBay sellers) who can compete with Jo-Ann.

So, the market is anywhere from very to intensely competitive and the Internet makes the barriers to entry exceedingly low.  Not caring about your customers is a really bad idea in this instance.

Second, in not responding to my original post (which generated quite a bit of commentary and interest – at least by the traffic standards I usually go by), Jo-Ann basically ceded the conversation about their brand to me, which cedes a bit of control over their messaging.  It is madness to chase rumors, but it is smart retail brand management to reach out to a customer you know is disgruntled and to try to fix the situation.  Any person has the capacity to be your unpaid corporate spokesperson – you can either work with them and help them to be a source of positive brand messages, or you can ignore them (or worse yet be antagonistic towards them: see the recording industry for too many examples) and make them a font of negativity.

My third point is is also about who some of your other corporate spokespeople are.  In retail operations, your store employees are your spokespeople — they are the face of your brand.  “Corporate” may not recognize it, they may pay lip service to it, or they may embrace it.  Not recognizing or ignoring this fact will not help you, because the people who come face to face with your customers every day are the ones who are creating impressions, building (or destroying) loyalty, and making your store a destination or a place to be avoided.

It is fashionable to be disdainful of retail as a career.  There are exceptions: specialty shops are often repositories of knowledge, some large retailers (Apple, for instance) are known for their well-trained and enthusiastic staff.  But for the most part, we have low expectations that are often disappointed — which only lowers our expectations further, and the next time… swings and roundabouts, ever downward.

But, in many cases, a person chooses a specific retailer to work for because they have a passion for the subject and knowledge in that area.  Art shops draw artists to their payrolls.  Fabric shops gather seamstresses.  Fishing shops lure anglers (okay, I’ll stop).

Give that employee the opportunity to create bonds with your customer.  After all, these two people already probably have something in common.

Will every customer coming in for a $2 spool of thread become a customer for life?  Of course not.  But they are far more likely to if they are confronted with an employee who is engaged, knowledgeable, and empowered to help, rather than hinder.

In this way, you create not just employees but spokespeople who are ambassadors for your brand, instead of apologists for your policies.

Filed Under: just dumb, proper tool, proper use, really dumb stuff, relationship management, Working with writers Tagged With:

Your brand is your brand

March 24, 2009 by

…or, the $1.75 reason why Jo-Ann Fabric just lost a customer today.  Behold:

The $1.75 reason why I won't shop at Jo-Ann Fabric anymore

This arrived in a larger order from joann.com yesterday.  It was in a plastic bag with a few other spools of thread, and the missing pieces from that spool were not in the bag, so it was clearly broken before whoever packed the order put it in there.

No problem, I thought -  I can take this to the local store and get an exchange.  So, in the process of running errands this morning, I swing by the local Jo-Ann Fabrics to make the exchange and pick up a few other small items.

From the start, I have a bad impression: the store is beyond dingy.  It is dirty and run down.  The stock is disorganized and untidy.  The clerks’ uniform shirts are uniformly dirty.  It is not long after opening, and there is already a long line and only one cashier.  This is not promising, but I am already there, so I pick up a few small purchases and resign myself to the wait.  To the store’s credit, they slowly add staff members to the registers.   Even so, it takes quite a while, and when I get to the front of the line, I quickly explain that I have a bad spool from an online order.

“Oh – we don’t do returns from online orders.  It’s not really the same store.”

“Really?  Because they have the same brand.”

“No – somewhere on the website it explains that.”

Let me explain something as clearly as I can to the people who make decisions that create these kinds of conversations:

Your brand is your brand.

If you want to benefit from a brand name that has customer loyalty attached to it, you have to be prepared for your customers to view that brand as a whole entity — online and off.  Your customers neither know nor care about your corporate structure. Beyond that, when a customer is faced with an employee (your corporate spokesperson, like it or not) explaining that their broken item must be mailed back to the online entity for the approximate replacement cost of the item itself, it makes your customers… unhappy.  And that unhappy experience creates a very strong impression.  Call it a brand association.

As a result, I now associate the entire Jo-Ann Fabric brand with dingy, disorganized stores, unhelpful employees in dirty uniforms, and a corporate policy that is a paragon of customer-unfriendly “gotcha” rules.

Congratulations, Jo-Ann Fabric branding team.  That’s a clear picture of a store I won’t shop at again.

Filed Under: really dumb stuff Tagged With: ,