Empowering a company’s internet voices
I’ll be watching the groundswell series of articles “How to unleash empowered workers without creating chaos: The HERO Compact” with interest. It deals specifically with the conundrum of getting employees closer to customers for large companies. A minefield of considerations, risks and interdependencies for big B2C operations, nevertheless, engaging customer issues directly can be entirely advantageous, done right.
It strikes me that the right people are essentially Product or Brand Managers, that is, anyone who acts as a hub for key information about a product or service within an organisation. They need to know about what they are selling down to the minutiae. However, these employees would also need the customer-savvy outlook of a PR person or perhaps Customer Services. PR people can mean too much spin, at least from a customer’s perspective, whilst a Product Manager can be too ‘honest’ or blunt. With training, and a solid set of operational guidelines, select employees could be allowed into the wilds of the Internet. They would be backed-up by a cross-functional ‘rapid-response team’, including PR, CS and tech people, to allow decisive and useful answers to customer input.
Too often issues circulating the web pertaining to an unprepared brand result in a knee-jerk response amongst top brass, who then push for action across the business, rather than from the right people - the results often proving counterproductive to ongoing efforts at dialogue in the space. Conversely, an organisation might put its metaphorical fingers in its ears and keep schtum. The Eurostar ‘wrong snow’ debacle should be a lesson to the follies of that approach.
It will be interesting to see how groundswell shows how to gear up teams and build an operational manual for social media engagement.
And for something completely different…what’s the moment when something that was cool became uncool? Can it be pinpointed? Take the humble tattoo for example. Formerly the preserve of rogues and the misunderstood and now the subject of a 6-minute R/GA video exposé.