why internet marketing

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an Internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing. Download her newest e-book, “Content is Queen: How Article & Blog Writing Will Increase Your Sales.“

Companies love positive feedback. They share it on Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter, post it on their website and use it as marketing fodder. But what about when feedback is, well, less than pleasant? What can you do with a handful (or more) of irate customers? Do you ignore them? Bury them out back? Not in today’s social atmosphere.

Rather than try to sweep these unhappy customers under the rug, look at them as a challenge and an opportunity to improve your brand and leverage them for some publicity.

Why You Want Angry Customers

Well, maybe you don’t want angry customers, but let’s be honest — you’ll never have 100 percent customer satisfaction. No one does. So use those unhappy customers to better understand what you’re doing wrong, and learn from the experience. And while you’re at it, turn the angry customers into brand evangelists.

There are several ways to connect with unhappy customers in a meaningful way:

• Hold a panel or forum in person; give them a tour of your facility and hold a venting session
• Work virtually; host an online panel to get feedback from them
• Work one-on-one to understand their concerns and address them individually

In-Person Events

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Dell recently held its first Customer Advisory Panel event at their headquarters in Round Rock, TX. They invited two groups of 15 bloggers and social media gurus. One group was full of people who had negative experiences with the company and who were vocal about their displeasure. The second group was made up of people that Dell considered brand evangelists; people who loved Dell and told others.

The attendees started the morning with their gripes; customer service issues came up again and again. The heads of customer service and marketing were present and actively engaged. As they listened, they took notes, then asked questions and they promised they would make changes.

That type of customer empowerment is important. Now, whether they’ll go through with the promised changes is another story, but it was clear that Dell understood it was time to start paying attention to the public’s perception of its brand, and make some changes to keep their customers.

Nestlé is another company that has been successful at holding an event to let people engage with its brand directly. After a resurgence in interest in the Nestle Boycott a few years ago, Nestlé decided to invite a group of bloggers to what it called its “Happy, Healthy Gathering” in 2009. Mommy bloggers, who’d been tweeting up a storm about the company’s stance on breastfeeding in third world countries, were invited to tour the facilities and give their input on the company.

Whether the event truly changed perceptions remains to be seen, but it did a great deal to show that Nestlé was putting in the effort to reach its audience.

Disclosure: I was one of the bloggers invited to participate Dell’s Customer Advisory Panel.

Virtual Panels

Virtual panels are decidedly less effective than in-person ones. But they can be good replacements for focus groups. Pssst is General Mills’ online testing ground for new products. The company sends participants coupons and free products to try, and in return they are asked to fill out surveys. The program is so successful that bloggers who write about saving money are gladly turning others onto joining Pssst.

Similarly, the Starbucks Passion Panel was designed to get customer feedback — for better or worse. The community of Starbucks drinkers gives their input via surveys and forums.

Passion Panel member Jennifer Boyd said, “Being on the Passion Panel means that I have access to direct input and discussion with other members. It enables me to give my opinion on Starbucks’ current and future products through surveys. The panel is a great way to engage with their loyal customers and solidifies a relationship with a consumer to a brand.”

Wal-Mart’s Elevenmoms platform is another example of how a mix of online community, shopper experience and in-person visits can work together to help the company gather new insights. John Andrews, former Senior Manager of Emerging Media for Wal-Mart and founder of the Elevenmoms, said the community succeeded in getting Wal-Mart’s attention in a few areas where it was lacking.

When the iPhone was launched in Wal-Mart stores, the Elevenmoms were invited to go through the purchase process. Some had no problems, but others did. It took one blogger two hours to buy a phone. Each blogger published her experience, and Wal-Mart took the feedback to its operations staff, who took notes and improved the purchase process.

“The Elevenmoms used direct social media interaction to improve the shopping process,” said Andrews.

Other feedback caused Wal-Mart to reconsider its layaway strategy. Having canceled the layaway plan due to costs, Wal-Mart got some flack from the Elevenmoms, who felt it made it easier to make big purchases. As a result, Wal-Mart developed its Site to Store platform, which provided the benefit of layaway online, so that local stores didn’t incur extra costs.

Disclosure: John Andrews now works with Collective Bias, a company with which I have collaborated on projects.

One-on-One

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Solving a customer’s problems and changing their perception individually is the least cost-effective method, but a little work goes a long way. And it starts with customer service personnel being properly trained to solve problems, and not to simply stick to “the script” at all costs. Look at Zappos or Disney for great examples of how service reps are empowered to solve problems.

Disney empowers each of its “cast members” (staff) to solve a guest’s problem. From the street sweeper to the reservation specialist, everyone has the ability to turn a negative situation into a good one. That might mean replacing a fallen ice cream cone, upgrading a guest’s hotel room, or simply answering politely the most commonly asked question on Disney property: what time is the three o’clock parade?

Disney is so good at customer service, they’ve opened the Disney Institute, a customer service training program helps other corporations use the same techniques that has made Disney such a success.

Likewise, Zappos is also famous for its customer service tactics. The reps don’t use scripts, and seem to genuinely care about solving problems. Many customers are pleasantly surprised when their shipping gets upgraded and they get their shoes even faster – at no additional charge.

By providing instant happiness to the customer, these brands can prevent a lot of the bad karma that comes down the road when an unhappy customer becomes an enraged customer who tells everyone he knows about how bad the company is (no one wants their own version of DellHell).

Conclusion

No matter how you interact with unhappy customers, the point is not to brush them off, and make sure you learn from it. Don’t just pretend to listen and then go on doing business as usual. Take the feedback as constructive criticism that can help you determine your company’s future. How you handle your failures could make you or break you.

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There is no Antennagate.

Well, that’s not true. But what Jobs called Antennagate at today’s press conference is more than just the design flaw in the iPhone 4 they insisted was a non-issue. It’s a design flaw with the entire way the issue was handled — by them and by us. The feeding frenzy around the iPhone 4 has been a months-long affair, for a combination of two reasons: one, that Apple has a unique position in tech coverage, and two, that controversy generates traffic. The result is outrage, confusion, expenditure, flamewars, and everything else that’s been happening online since the launch.

Sorry about that. We’re not perfect.

See, as you may know, Apple enjoys a bit of a coverage bias here and elsewhere on the net. Why is that? You know why, for the most part: sexy products, charismatic leader, a whiff of elitism. They’re fun to write about and many people enjoy reading about them — that’s enough for us. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when a design flaw, plain for all to see, was detected in what was heralded as the best smartphone ever to be released, the response in the tech community was mixed and misleading.

I say mixed because Apple coverage seems to be opinionated for more than other coverage, anywhere you look on the net. There is very little emotion in reporting on HP or Palm — perhaps it is because, as MG suggests, Apple works hard on building an emotional bond with its customers, something which its detractors see and abhor. Whether that’s the case or not, Apple news is often delivered with a slant. And I say misleading because in some ways, how Antennagate (which I am going to stop referring to as such; “-gate” terms are overused) was reported exposed many of the weaknesses in the online reporting structure of which we are a small part. Let’s get into that.

Apple’s ubiquity in web culture usually works in their favor: a press conference with a couple hundred people becomes an internet-wide festival of love and hate. Of course, part of that is their knowing how to put on a presentation, the value of which is something many companies deeply underestimate. Even when revealing the iPhone’s flaws and return rates, Steve treated it like he was revealing new flavors of candy. But the coverage is unstoppable and in a way, free. A major part of advertising is getting people talking about your product; with Apple, people are so primed to talk that all they have to do to advertise is show a picture with the name of the product. Considering Apple’s marketing reach, the excesses and Jobsian quips that do routinely set the internet on fire are mercifully few and far between.

In the last few weeks, however, that self-same ubiquity has been Apple’s worst enemy. Imagine if everything you did propagated, memelike, to the farthest corners of the internet, where even the die-hard Apple hater must acknowledge every announcement, even if it’s just to criticize it (something I enjoy occasionally). After using that power judiciously and deliberately for years, the inevitable finally happened: they dropped the ball — and it dutifully propagated. When your failure becomes a meme, you’re cooked.

For the record, these were my two contributions:

The signal drop heard ’round the world was followed by many more reports of launch issues. It was rough, and because of the way the internet has set itself up to instantly propagate exactly this kind of thing, soon people were hearing about iPhone 4 issues before they even knew there was an iPhone 4. The launch problems became a bigger story than the launch. Why? Because we liked it that way.

The appetite for this kind of thing is bottomless. Reasons for interest include fanboyism, professional interest, idleness, schadenfreude, legitimate concern… there was something for everybody. Then Apple, knocked off-balance by their own unpreparedness, gave a response that simply made things worse. “Non-issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.” I can’t think of a response that could have garnered a more comprehensively varied response. Shock! Defensiveness! Rationalizing! Minimizing! The circus became a feeding frenzy. And then the official statement, in which they revealed that iPhones had been using a ridiculously inaccurate signal display for years, and that they were going to make the bars bigger? My god!

So Apple was far from innocent in this whole affair, right up to the non-apology given by Steve today. Their only mistake, Steve implied, was a visual element that caused users to involuntarily ruin their own signal. Steve could talk his way out of a sunburn, as the saying goes, but not this time. Scott noted when we were chatting about this that according to Apple, the iPhone is unlike every other phone on the market — except when there is a problem, at which point it’s just like every other phone on the market. That said, I’m glad they decided to give out bumpers, and of course you can always return the phone for a full refund, so as far as I’m concerned, customers are completely provided for. Class-action lawsuits are pending but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for a settlement.

But were we innocent? One could say we just did our jobs, and wrote up what was going on. We detailed it step by step. Was that the extent of our responsibilities, though? If it was, then Twitter did our job as well as we did, and maybe better. I wrote a while back: “Real time, real discussion, real reporting – choose two.” Looking back on all the coverage, there was a lot of real-time discussion, but almost no reporting at all. Some very valuable input came from Anandtech, when Anand systematically tested the attenuation caused by shorting the antenna, but by and large it was theories, counter-theories, rumors, and fabrications getting multiplied and amplified by blogs like this one. Even ostensibly reliable outlets in the old media posted garbage of every kind. Publishing rumors is, of course, a valuable part of the job, since many are true or end up resulting in interesting discussion. I’m glad we posted all the things we posted. But I also think Steve is right: this was a pretty serious mountain-molehill situation.

The antenna problem is real, of course. How much of a problem it really is — that’s harder to say. Although I would normally say that it’s under-reported in those Apple statistics, that probably isn’t the case here. After all, this is probably one of the most widely-publicized product launches in history, partly because of the huge amount of attention given to this very flaw. If a user has an iPhone, they are almost certain to know of the issue. And if they know of it, they are almost certain to notice it when it happens. Although as Apple and others have noted, it mainly occurs in areas with marginal reception, so many people may find later that they are death grip sufferers and didn’t know it when they take a trip to the boonies. For this reason I’d suggest getting a case even if you don’t really need it where you live.

But those numbers: half a percent of iPhone 4 users complaining? 1.7% return rate? Nearly identical call drops to 3GS? Out of 3 million users, that’s around 30,000 — not a trivial number by any means, but in retrospect, does it justify the international wave of mockery? It ain’t exactly Side Talkin, after all: 2.9 million people seem to be happy with their phones.

The Point

What am I getting at here? Well, I think this whole debacle demonstrates the power of the Internet to report in the wrong way, as opposed to the Tiger Woods incident, which I think demonstrated the Internet’s strengths (though it also resulted in my writing the “Choose Two” article I mentioned). When the event is what matters (e.g. Tiger Woods crashing his car with his wife beating on the windows), and updates on the granularity of minutes are warranted, the Internet is the perfect medium. But by applying that toolset to something it is totally unsuited for, we found ourselves groping in a dark and crowded echo chamber, grasping at factual straws and thrusting them into the faces of everyone we encountered. How little it accomplished! Apple is temporarily humbled, but they would have been one way or another. But they have the benefit of being unfairly set upon, of being able to quote hundreds of articles spewing FUD and unconfirmed nonsense — after all this, they get to play the victim card! That’s the real Antennagate.

Unfortunately, the solution is an impossible one. This is because the solution is discretion. Discretion and restraint are things that have more or less disappeared, since the benefits of being first and wrong outweigh the benefits of being late and right. The short-term benefits, I should say, in the form of traffic and popularity — very important metrics to the powers that be (advertisers and such). The long-term benefits of being a reliable source for news and analysis are becoming more and more difficult to discern, which is disturbing to me. Yet I still believe, and this whole thing has made me believe more, that perspective and discretion are as important as ever — and probably only as rare as they ever were to begin with. I’m not going to get all emotional on you here and say “oh no journalism is dying,” as if I know a thing about that, but let’s be honest: sometimes journalism can be pretty hard to find — even if you think you know where to look.

There you have it. I just wanted to put my own lid on this whole iPhone 4 thing, with the conclusions I’ve drawn from it. If it came off like Apple apologia, I don’t think you read closely enough. The way the world reports and is reported is going through all kinds of transitions, and one day I think that this whole thing and other stories like it are on their way to becoming case studies in Mass Communications 101.

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