On Monday, our account rep and tech lead from Rackspace stopped by the office. They met with our development team for a couple of hours to make sure that everything was going well and to find ways to provide better service. While this may seem like a normal occurrence in most B2B relationships, it’s rare that a company goes to the extent that Rackspace does.
Most companies may send an occasional e-mail or make a monthly phone call, but there are a few that really go the extra mile. This meeting is just one example of how Rackspace has exemplified good customer service. We’re always working with the same team and their support is always prompt and helpful. They also take measures like these meetings to stay connected and make sure that our needs are met proactively.
In a related story, Business Week posted a list of the Top 25 Customer Service Champs. While Rackspace isn’t on the list, they share a common trait with the companies on the list. In many cases, handling complications is as important as handling things when all is going smoothly. The companies on the list not only make an effort to meet customers’ initial needs, they also make an effort to address problems proactively. Like Rackspace, their customers know they can count on good service even when things get a little rough.
Overall it comes down to an ideology about customer service. Some companies just try to prevent a bad experience; the customer service champs work to actively create a good experience.
I was delighted to leave the Granite State Monday evening to attend the Boston PRSA panel discussion on social media, featuring moderator John Cass and expert panelists Todd Deferen, Paul Gillin and Todd Van Hoosear.
The event was extremely well attended, proving—as Gillin noted in his post on the panel—that learning about social media has truly become a top priority for PR practitioners. Indeed, several of the attendees at my table (a mixed bag of in-house communications aides and agency folks) were entirely new to social media, but realized learning as much as possible about it was becoming essential to their careers.
The panelists covered the full range of topics, from the importance of updating the press release to implementing tricks of the trade for search engine optimization. The most interesting question, and the only one that even came close to stumping the panel, involved finding resources on the technology of blogging, podcasting and other social media. For example, how would someone new to podcasting go about setting one up?
This is something I haven’t seen a lot of in PR blogs (although I’m sure tech blogs contain plenty of resources on the topic). There is information abound regarding the particulars of applying social media to public relations strategy, but the discussion rarely turns to the technological aspects for the “non-geeks” among us.
Is this is a topic the social media experts out there could delve into in the future? Perhaps as a companion piece to all the PR 2.0 primers out there, such Kami Huyse’s excellent Corporate Blogging 101 post.
Thanks to everyone at PRSA Boston for a terrific, informative event.
Now that the dust has settled around last week’s marketing stunt that went horribly awry for Boston-area commuters, what lessons can marketers take away?
In his excellent post on the fiasco, Todd Defren declined to address a key question: Was this stunt even an effective marketing campaign? (A question that naturally leads to another: Was it worth all the trouble?)
If Todd doesn’t mind, I’d like to grab that baton.
First, was the stunt a good idea? Todd mentions the “any press is good press” angle, which I think implies that this campaign was getting any press at all before the Boston ruckus. Media coverage from the other cities indicates that some people did notice the odd little light displays, but there were certainly no terrorism scares in these cities, and definitely no national media attention.
As a word of mouth campaign, I think this project was ill-conceived, even without the bomb scare implications. Without an accompanying billboard or print media ad campaign, the stunt’s success relied entirely on the average American’s ability to recognize a character from an obscure cable cartoon, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” Without the attention on the terror scare, it is safe to say that this campaign would most definitely not have resulted in a week’s worth of free national media coverage and endless blog chatter about the program.
The terrorism scare then, while a nightmare for Boston commuters, turned out to be something of a boon for Turner Broadcasting. If nothing else, there are far more people today who have heard of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” than there were a week ago (count me as one of them). And while the two young men hired to place the devices aren’t doing the company any PR favors with their silly grandstanding, they certainly are keeping the event—and the cartoon—in the news.
The stunt has also inspired an online viral response, exactly the kind of word-of-mouth companies hope for when they go to the trouble to start their own viral campaigns (usually with limited success, as the Wal-Mart fake blog and other similar projects have proved). Boston website Bostonist links to a song parody of the incident, a short video and a “whack-a-mole” style online game.
No one would argue that anyone behind this campaign intended to cause a massive panic and shut down the entire transportation infrastructure of a metropolitan area when this idea was conceived. The scare and the resulting viral buzz are entirely accidental, as all the best viral campaigns are. That is why companies attempting to create their own will almost always fail.
One must wonder then whether there is a marketing exec somewhere turning secret cartwheels over this gaffe, even as they issue public apologies—and if other companies will make bungled attempts to imitate this sort of accidental publicity with stunts of their own.
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