ChasNote

Battelle interviews Frank Eliason, the voice of @ComcastCares at Searchblog.

@ComcastCares is a Twitter-based customer service channel that’s part listening beacon — Comcast tracks mentions of their brand by Twitter users — and part real-time help desk. As much as actually helping individuals improve their Comcast experiences, though, @ComcastCares has become an emissary of goodwill across the 5-plus-million member Twitterverse: Taking disgruntled (and influential, well-followed) Comcast customers, make them happy, and have that conversation out in the public, for all Twitter users to see.

“I’ve been following Frank’s work on Twitter for a while, it seemed he was always listening to what folks were saying, and when folks (inevitably) ranted about Comcast service, he jumped in, and almost always seemed to fix the problem. Then it happened to me, in October, my service started acting deeply flaky, and I complained about it.

“I quickly got a response, and when I moved to a new place last month, he helped again. Then just this weekend, my new Internet service started acting flaky again, and in ten minutes, Frank had assessed the problem and helped me fix it, calmly, intelligently, and in the grammar natural to social media….”

That last phrase, to me, is the most important. If your customers are expressing their discontent in social media environments, bid for their forgiveness in those same social media environments, using the language and grammar of social media natives.

To see @ComcastCares in action, here’s how it worked for Guy Kawasaki and his 32,000 followers.

To see what happened to a brand that opted not to engage with disgruntled customers in the social media settings where they made their complaints, check out the Motrin Moms dust up.

UPDATE: I Twittered Battelle’s interview with @ComcastCares:

Six minutes later (on a Saturday afternoon), @ComcastCares Twittered me back:

Chalk up another fan, @ComcastCares! Now I’m off to Twitter all about it.

An agency friend asked for my take on the recent dust-up over Motrin’s campaign targeting new moms. As I see it, Motrin made two blunders. One, old-fashioned bad creative in a post-Internet world. Two, when the campaign upset its customers, it demanded that those customers come to Motrin’s website to get their apology. Excerpts from my note below.

One:
The ad creative was careless. There’s no question that carrying a baby, or pushing a baby stroller, or going sleepless for weeks, can cause pain that lots of us parents take Motrin to alleviate. But by talking about slings as a trendy fashion accessory, they overlooked that many parents see slings as vital equipment for an approach to parenting that those parents take very seriously (see Attachment Parenting). We’d never talk about clothing-based religious practices as “fashion accessories.” I’d argue that to the attachment parenting community, calling slings “fashion” is an insult of similar magnitude. This was bad copy-writing, full stop.

I’m guessing no one worried too much about sloppy, perhaps insensitive copy-writing because it was a traditional ad buy. There was no “social media strategy,” so don’t worry about it. TV and print and standard banner ads are one-way, so who cares? The reality is: Social media happens to you whether or not you have a strategy. (I stole that line from Pete Spande.) If you have strategy, you are in the conversation and you prepare for the conversation. If you don’t have a strategy, your customers have the conversation without you, and when it goes in the wrong direction, you join the conversation late and defensively. Motrin landed in the latter situation.

Two:
When Motrin’s customers got pissed, they voiced their discontent on the social media platforms where they “live” online. Yet Motrin did not go “visit” those customers (ie, joining the Twitter conversation, right there on Twitter) to apologize. It required those angry customers to come to Motrin.com to get an apology. It should have syndicated the apology, published it on Twitter with @jessicagotleib and #motrinmoms, and published it as a comment on the most influential blogs that joined and accelerated the conversation.

Last month Johnson & Johnson’s Children’s Motrin brand launched Code Orange, a site that invites parents to share experiences of “that slightly scary moment when our kids develop a high fever. A Code Orange moment can happen any time, but doesn’t it always seem to kick off just when you have something planned for your child or your family? That’s the time to take a deep breath, call your doctor and reach for Children’s Motrin.”

It’s quite a feat for a pharmaceutical company — what with the regulations imposed on that industry — to step into the conversational marketing arena at all. Among the rules of engagement for the Code Orange site is this:

“Please keep in mind that the makers of Children’s MOTRIN® work within a highly regulated industry. Therefore, comments that pertain to regulatory issues or product issues, that offer medical advice, or that contain vulgarity or otherwise offensive material, will not be posted. All comments within this group will be reviewed before posting. Some comments may be forward to other people with the company for review and possible follow-up. The makers of Children’s MOTRIN® reserve the right to not post comments for any reason whatsoever.”

It’s double the feat that they seem to be pulling it off. Several FM authors — Asha Dornfest of ParentHacks, Danielle Friedland of Celebrity Baby Blog, and Mindy Roberts of The Mommy Blog — supplied their own stories alongside 350 member-contributors so far. Other visitors are rating stories or adding comments. It’s a smallish community compared to the reach J&J might accomplish with broadcast TV, but — unlike the passive recipients of an ad impression via TV — it’s an actual community. It’s the alpha moms who never miss a meeting of their new-parents groups, the ones you call for a pediatrician recommendation or — I have two kids, trust me! — a reminder on the right dosage for a sick kid under 24 months. Three-hundred-fifty times 12 people in the average moms’ group is 4,200. In army-speak, that’s around 100 platoons!

RELATED 11/20: In recognition of the power of small groups to influence much larger audiences, book publishers are staging a major marketing effort against book-group organizers.