Today I came across a blog post entitled Social Media Caveats from a Dinosaur by Sung Kim, a healthcare recruiter. His stance is that social media works well for shilling products, but it doesn’t work well for services.
I see a disproportionate amount of product-related ads on Facebook but not so many service ones and there’s a reason for that. The service industry was and always will be based on human-to-human “live” transactional relationships.
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At the end of the day, when you treat clients (and candidates alike) with respect, with personal attention, and offer them value in your offering, your business will grow and those folks will keep coming back because of trust.
Sadly, Kim seems to have missed a fundamental aspect of social media – the ’social’ part. For one thing, having an ad on a social network is no more ‘using social media’ than having an ad in a magazine is ‘being a publishing house’. Social media is more about people using technology to communicate* than about the technology itself.
Contrasting using the phone to engage with clients versus advertising somewhere is an unfair comparison: Kim would be better off to compare the effectiveness of advertising in a magazine vs on a social network, or using the phone to engage with people vs using a direct messaging system. Social media doesn’t prevent people from offering good customer service, if anything it may offer more opportunities for both clients and organizations.
Comcast has figured out a way to leverage the power of technology to offer better customer service through their strong presence on Twitter. When people “tweet” about comcast, their Director of Digital Care Frank Eliason reaches out to them to work things out from his account, @comcastcares. This is a level of customer service and support that never would have existed before-people have always chatted to friends and neighbors about products and services, and social media makes it possible to “eavesdrop” on these conversations and engage with existing or potential clients. Rather than forcing a potential client to pick up the phone and reach out to you, you can offer them service directly, lowering any barriers to starting an engagement.
Social media is never going to replace one-to-one communication; if anything, it facilitates engagement and gives us more opportunity in our everyday interactions.
*note: this is a phrase I will utter at least once per blog post, guaranteed.
Tagged as:
customer service,
social networks,
twitter
