Susan Getgood

The direction of Marketing Roadmaps

May 28, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Marketing Roadmaps has been going in a new direction for the past couple months, so I thought it would be a good time to articulate what you can expect to find here. And what you most likely will not find here.

First off — what you will find here. More on the practice of blogger relations, the impact of social media on customer care, practical tips culled from my workshops on social media and blogger relations. Conversation about online reputation management, measuring the return on investment, online communities and the impact of social media on traditional entertainment.

What you won’t find so much of? Sales process and marketing management tips. I’ll be writing and talking about those on Business Forward, the blog and podcast I produce for my client GuideMark. Too much talk about my family, pets, trips and favorite tv shows, unless there’s a marketing angle. All of that you’ll find at my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles.

You also won’t find too much discussion of the practice of public relations, as distinct from blogger relations, unless it is something really juicy like blacklists or gross unethical behavior by a top PR agency that I just cannot resist.

I especially will not be talking about the social media press release. For me to comment on the press release, as a form, in any form, at this point is like a vegetarian recommending a cut of beef. As my practice moves away from pureplay public relations, and toward blogger relations and online reputation management, I find that just about the last thing I recommend to clients is a press release. It’s just not relevant to what they are trying to achieve, which is to talk with their customers online.

Wait a minute, I hear you cry. Over the past few years, many marketing and PR consultants have recommended online distribution of releases through services like PR Web as a way to reach customers directly. By putting the release on the wire, the story goes, you improve the discoverability of your news by the search engines. Well, yes. But the operative word is NEWS. If you are issuing actual company news or material information, and you need to reach the news media, by all means do a news release, in whatever form floats your boat — traditional, social media, tom-tom drum. Whatever.

But if it isn’t actually news, as in new and interesting, it shouldn’t be distributed as news. I attribute most of the press release crap lining my spam folder to the mistaken notion that using the form of the press release somehow transforms mundane sales pitches into page one material.

If you are trying to reach your customers, the news release is not and and never has been the optimum form. Telephone. Newsletters. Email blast to your customer list. Personal email. Blogs. All of these are better, more easily understood ways to convey information about your products and services to your customers. Including bloggers.

So take it away, Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and Tom Foremski. I’ll come over and comment at your places, but as far as Marketing Roadmaps goes, I’ve said what I’m going to say, I’ve said it again, and now I’ve said it for the last time.

Instead, I’m going to focus on helping companies meet their customers online.

Peace out.

Tags: social media press release, blogger relations, customer relations

JetBlue is listening, but are they able to do anything about what they hear?

May 27, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Well, JetBlue is clearly listening to what’s being said about them online — see Jenny Dervin’s comment on my previous post. Points for walking the social media talk. And this cranky blogger certainly appreciates attention being paid to my posts. Especially since I informally track how well companies are listening to what it being said about them online.

But, are they able to do anything about what they hear?

Corp Comm may be listening, but you wouldn’t know it from communicating with customer service. Here are the disconnects over the past day that lead me to conclude that the airline has a significant customer service problem.

First, the initial email, part of which is reproduced in my earlier post, definitely pushes the customer to accept the rebooking. The option to reschedule is below the BIG ORANGE BUTTON, and you can’t do that online. You have to call.

Which I did, as reported in my earlier post. Mostly to complain. The customer service rep also suggested I leave a comment on the website. So I did, repeating most of the points from my Monday post.

Points for speediness. JetBlue replied back almost immediately. And that brings us to the next set of problems. Here’s the email.

New concerns, in order of appearance in the email:

What do caps placed on flights to/from New York have to do with my original flight plan, which was roundtrip Boston to San Francisco?
Whoa Nellie. I had the option of canceling these flights?And getting a full refund? How come this is the first I’ve heard of it?
Finally — I don’t exactly recall choosing to keep the 1:35 pm flight.

So I sent another email to customer service. Here are my exact words:

In fact, I deliberately did not push the BIG ORANGE button because I needed time to explore my alternatives.

Here’s the reply to to that email. I dare you to find an actual answer to any of my questions. In fact, as my son would say, I double-dog dare you.

The apology is lovely. Really. And I do appreciate Jenny Dervin’s offer of assistance. But I still would have liked someone in Customer Service to answer my questions, not just pull some standard verbiage out of the manual. I get that the airline can change the schedule any way it wishes and there is very little I can do about it.

But… Once you start engaging with your customers online, as JetBlue is doing on Twitter and in responding to bloggers, we are going to expect the same level of honesty and yes, transparency, in our other transactions with you.

So, why not tell me why? I can guess at the answers.

Why wasn’t I given the opportunity to select a new itinerary in the first place, given the major shift in time represented by the rebooked itinerary?

The system is set up to handle things in one standard way, rebook and email. Doesn’t matter if the time shift is 10 minutes or 10 hours. As Jenny Dervin commented on my previous post: "We do an auto-rebook when we have a schedule change, because it locks a seat in on the other flight, and it’s definately something we can change if the rebooking doesn’t work out."

Why wasn’t the option to cancel presented to me upfront?

They don’t want you to cancel. They just want you to take the rebooking.

What in the world does New York have to do with flights to Boston?

Flight consolidation. They can sell out the JFK flight, and travellers to other destinations will suck it up and take the connection. I just screw things up by planning so far ahead.

Since I can figure it out, wouldn’t it be better to just tell me? And in the case of the cancel option, make sure it is in the very first communication about the change, if not for all changes, those that represent more than 3-4 hours difference?

—

Since Jenny had reached out to me, I wanted to give her, and JetBlue, an opportunity to comment. I forwarded her the draft post, so she could see the unsatisfactory emails from customer service. She called about an hour later.

Note: my post is unchanged except for this conclusion.

We discussed my concerns and she told me that she intended to forward my post, once published, to the head of customer service as an example of how important it is to fully read the email and answer the customer’s question, not simply reply fast.

She also told me about a flight option, a red-eye out of Oakland, that has essentially the same times as the original flight we booked out of SFO: depart Oakland at 10:30 pm and arrive BOS at 7:02 am the next morning. We both agreed that this should have been provided as an option by one of the three customer service reps who touched my reservation over the past 24 hours. It wasn’t.

The message for JetBlue? Your Corp Comm group and your Twitter guy are representing you well online. Your customer service team has got to catch up, and walk the same talk. Just tell us the truth. Customers, with a few really nasty exceptions, are generally nice people. We want to like you, because we don’t like the big guys. We’re also not stupid, and pretty much understand the game as played. We just want to be able to trust that you are playing fair.

Because, you know, I get it. With the rising cost of fuel, it makes no sense for there to be two basically equivalent red-eyes out of the Bay Area to Boston. One’s enough. We just want to be on it.

Thanks, Jenny.

Tags: JetBlue, customer satisfaction, airlines

The JetBlue Blues

May 26, 2008 by Susan Getgood

When it comes to travel, I’m a planner. Once I know I will be going somewhere, whether business or pleasure, I sort out my travel arrangements. Does this save me money? Often, yes. But that’s not my primary motivation. I just like to have things sorted.

Since 9/11, I have come to expect that the airlines will shift flights around a bit as they consolidate similar flights to save money, increase profitability. Usually it’s a change of 20-40 minutes in departure time. Once in a while it is a change in aircraft that impacts seating, but luckily I’ve never lost my seat as a result.

But the latest change I received from JetBlue indicates just how little the airline really cares about customer satisfaction.

I’m flying out to San Francisco in July with my mom and son for BlogHer. Afterward, we are driving up to Sonoma for a couple days, planning to return home Wednesday. We booked a redeye back to Boston on JetBlue, a direct flight, leaving 10ish, arriving 7ish the next day. I booked this flight MONTHS AGO.

Today I got an email saying we’d been changed to a flight leaving at 1:35 pm, arriving in Boston at 10:19 pm.

For those keeping track, that means we’ll be home before we had planned to leave California.

I called customer service, because this was a pretty big shift in time with no explanation. The rep told me that now none of the evening flights are direct to Boston. Our original evening flight would now go through JFK in New York. Assuming I preferred a direct flight, JetBlue moved us to the earlier flight.

And that’s the problem. Why didn’t the airline ask? I’m a reasonable (if somewhat cranky) person. I understand that the airline needs to make money, and sometimes that means consolidating flights, although I do think they’ve abused our tolerance more than a bit on this in recent months.

But this is a pretty significant time change. Wouldn’t it make sense to give the customer a choice, rather than present a fait accompli? Especially a customer that had booked so far in advance. What if my plans precluded such a drastic time change?

It’s a choice between two bad options — lose a day of vacation or have a stopover in JFK. But JetBlue should give the customer the choice, not make it for them.

Needless to say, after this July trip, I won’t be jetting on JetBlue anytime soon.

—

UPDATE — A clarification on the flight consolidation issue mentioned above. All the airlines are doing this far more than they should and abusing travellers’ goodwill in the process. Not just JetBlue. (5/27/08, 1 pm EDT)

Tags: JetBlue, customer satisfaction

Pitch clinic: When good pitches go bad

May 24, 2008 by Susan Getgood

Changing up the promised order a bit because I want to do justice to the Jim Beam social media pitch and haven’t had the time to really dig into the program itself the way I’d like before commenting. So today I’m going to share some ways good pitches go bad, and what you can do to fix it.

The first comes via Twitter pal and environmental blogger Chris Baskind who tweeted the other day about a bad pitch. Never shy, I asked if he would share. Here’s the scoop.

Chris got a product pitch that interested him for EcoTech Daily, but there was no link to pictures. Strike one: if you are pitching a product to someone who covers products, it’s a good idea to include a link to some pictures. No images made an otherwise interesting pitch a failure for Chris.

Why do PR people do this? Often it is because they want to control access to images and additional resources. Know who is getting what. Old school, my friends, do not do it.

Chris asked the PR rep for images, and got… two shots that looked like they’d been taken with a cameraphone. Strike two: poor quality artwork.

Eventually, he did get some decent images and wrote the story. But this PR person was lucky. Chris gave him more than one chance. Not everyone will .

How did this good pitch almost fail? By not giving the writer the information he needed in the form he needed. First no pictures, then bad pictures. How do you avoid it? Find out what the blogger wants. EcoTech Daily covers "green technology, gadgets and news." Product pitches without good pictures are pretty useless.

Word of caution: Do not attach the pictures to your email pitch. Include a link. If a blogger needs you to send them in email, he’ll ask.

The second is the meandering pitch that wanders around, here there and everywhere, but never quite seems to get to the point. For example, this one.

This is well-intentioned, and gets good marks for its opening paragraph. And then it falls apart. Instead of telling the blogger quickly and succinctly how they might work together and the benefit to the blogger, the email goes into the message points for the web series. Then it sort of wanders around how the blogger might work with the show but there’s nothing specific.

Too long, no specifics, no benefits.

9×1 does not equal 3×3. It’s a well understood communications concept. In any given conversation, sharing nine different ideas one time each will never have the same impact that repeating three core ideas three times each has. Modern PR practice is pretty much based on this idea; develop three messages and repeat repeat repeat. These messages are about the company, its products and sometimes why the customer needs/wants it. But they are rarely about the customer.

And that’s why so many blog pitches fail. Because they are based on the standard messages about the products and how the blogger can promote them. Not the blogger and how the products can help her.

What’s the fix?

Do your blogger relations math. Write your pitch. Count the number of times you mention your company, product and what you’d like the blogger to do for you. Then count the number of times you mention the customer and what she gets from the deal. First time through, you’ll probably have far more mentions of YOU than of HER. That’s what you fix. Go back through it, and make sure you’ve got at least as much about your customer as you do about your products, and please, do not fool yourself that the privilege of buying your products is about the customer. It’s still about you.

The pitch above could have been done in two paragraphs:

Introduction, one sentence about the show and a specific offer about a way the blogger could engage with the show with clear benefit to the blogger
Indication that the show was open to other ideas from bloggers and close

Finally, for another perspective on what makes a good pitch, check out this post from Chris Brogan. Make sure you read the comments. Quite a variety of opinions.

Tags: blogger relations, public relations