We have all seen the array of statistics which shows that Australian consumers have social media fever. The most recent statistic proving our true obsession with social media shows that the average Australian spends more than 7 hours on social media sites (Dec 09).
But it seems that social fever is yet to spread across the corporate world. Many Australian organisations are yet to embrace it or at a basic level even secure their brand name in the social arena with a recent study revealing only 40% of Australia’s top 20 brands have a Twitter account.
So whilst having a Twitter account isn’t the only true indicator that an organisation is actively getting involved in social media it did make me wonder if major organisations operating in Australia are listening to what consumers have to say about them in the social space and if they are doing something about it.
Research shows that Australian consumers want organisations to communicate with them through social media outlets such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. In fact, 60% of those surveyed by RightNow said that if they posted a negative comment about an organisation on a social networking site, they would welcome contact from the organisation to try and resolve the issue. 66% also said they’d be happy for an organisation to contact them following a positive comment post.
So as Australian consumers want interaction and many consumers are spending a significant amount of time in the social space, I conducted a “social experiment” – 5 complaints/ pieces of feedback posted, for 5 big brands over 2 weeks on Twitter. As I have 750 followers on Twitter, and my Twitter account is connected to my LinkedIn account, according to social experts I would have some level of authority and given this I could spread some bad PR quite quickly. My normal nature is not to place negative comments online however in the name of research I thought it was worth a go (so sorry if you had to hear me rant and rave.) But did any of them care?
# commbank ;This would have to be my favourite complaint. I have to go in to the branch to set up my net banking. This was met with frustration from me but the not so lovely person on the other end of the line made me even more irritable as they served up some bad customer service. Any response from commbank? Not likely but had some discussions with a fellow twitterer who kept the conversation alive. So someone is listening to my rant.
#portmans; A bit of feedback for their in-store service seemed to fall on deaf ears. Unfortunate given that I have found some nice additions to my wardrobe recently – just a shame the service experience was lacking.
#bunnings; A lack of availability for furniture items caused a few post Xmas & pre-Australia day frustrations met by little response. Even some contact to find out what I was looking for and to help me track down the item would have been appreciated – but instead I trekked across Melbourne to hunt them down.
#redenergy; I do have a soft spot for these guys and by the end I was running out of things to complain about. The promise of a rewards card on sign up was exciting only to leave me wondering when in fact that card will come in the mail. Still none the wiser after complaining on
Twitter.
#ikea; 2 trips to the superstore in Richmond in 1 week left me pondering how much better the experience would be if I could find a customer service representative on the floor when I need one. My complaint regarding the lack of staff on the floor was also left unanswered.
So what does this teach us and why should your company care?
Firstly there is probably a lot to be learnt online through our customers. Take some time to see if people are talking about your brand and try to turn a bad experience into a good one.
Secondly there is a lot of talk by many companies and little action. The opportunity to differentiate your service offering before others could put you in a healthy position against your competitors.
Lastly, Google has integrated social media results into search. It is still only early days and much more innovation is to come in this area – BUT if I want to ensure that my brand is being accurately represented I would like be ensuring that 2 sides of the conversation are appearing in search results – not just leaving Google to serve up the unanswered cries of a powerful generation of customers.
Written By: Teresa Sperti
Good post, thanks for taking the time to do research and write it up. Lets hope that in 12 months time it’s the other way round.
Great article idea Teresa – very insightful,
Australian Brands have such a long way to go. Can’t believe that none of them got back to you!
Thanks for sharing – appreciate it
Cheers!
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With millions of messages hitting the tweetstream every hour, one or two messages are unlikely to elicit much response from brands. Even using the additional #fail tag may be more useful for your experiment (encouraging retweet etc).
Hi Gavin,
Thank you for popping in. I know that it is obviously difficult for organisations to be able to monitor every feed – however I think to some degree organisations need to be monitoring the social space to identify customer service issues – particularly larger brands which are susceptible to bad consumer PR and who also have resources to do so – it should be an extension to their existing customer service efforts.
In terms of using one or two tweets per brand – I dont feel it is necessary for consumers to have to slag off brands multiple times before a response is made – to me progressive brands would ideally like to be able to be more proactive than to wait until a disaster erupts which is why I only used one or two tweets which is the more typical behaviour of users online.
These are however my personal views – please feel free to share more of your experience on this topic.
Cheers
Teresa