Why You Should Be "Listening" In Social Media

This is a "cautionary tale" about how to use social media effectively, as well as the need to have a solid reaction plan for negative items on social media!

It all started when...

I wrote on my Twitter account: "State Farm just called to wish me a happy birthday. Wow." (This is a whole other story in customer service, but we'll leave that for later.)

A few in my network responded, as well as did @Statefarm, which replied, "Let me second that. Happy b-day!" Pretty cool! They were actually listening and joined in. I felt even better about State Farm!

But a little later, I received a bizarre tweet from someone I've never met (@PeterGargan): "This is the mess State Farm left @statefarmsucks to deal with: bit.ly/cTRgQu More info: bit.ly/37GVU" (And as you can guess, those links do not go to a "I love State Farm" page. And I looked at his Twitter account, and every one of his tweets is the same, but to different people. In other words, he's using a "bot" to automatically tweet the same message to anybody who mentions "State Farm"!

I have no idea whether the claims are legit or not, but it doesn't take much of an imagination to realize that this type of reaction could just as easily hit an apartment community.

Heather Blume sent me the following tweet: "You cannot stop the consumer rampage. You can only manage your response to it."

So my question to everybody here is, what would you do to react to this happening to one of your communities?

Brent: This is a tough one. Insurance is a totally different business than apartments.

Having said that, I know of a couple of real estate (apartment & condo) developers who have received ALOT of bad press in the past year, and much of it very personal - similar to the complaint that you linked to.

So the question is, are the claims true? If the claims of unfair treatment are true, than the thing that needs to happen is to change that perception, and become more fair in dealing with the situation.

If the claims are totally false and untrue, that is a really tricky situation to respond to!

This does seem like a tough call. On the one hand, I'd think that it'd be important to figure out whether it really *is* a bot (aren't those prohibited by Twitter's terms of service?), as opposed to someone who's actually watching for mentions of State Farm who has a particular grievance. You could still argue that the account is in violation of Twitter's terms of service in terms of spam, but either way, that's not the real issue.

The real issue is addressing the consumer's grievance - regardless of how legitimate the claim is, dealing with it is more important to the public eye than trying to brush it under the rug or otherwise ignore it, because that sends the message that you don't care enough to know, or don't care enough to respond. Apartment communities moreso than other industries need to care about their residents - the emotional investment in a home is enormous compared to, say, preferring to do my grocery shopping at this store or that store. And aside from looking good, it may actually be an opportunity to learn something about your company that could require address or redress - maybe there's a poor policy to blame, or a poor understanding and implementation of that policy that could be addressed by better training, etc.

It's not that the customer is always right, but the customer always has a right to be HEARD - and companies ought to listen. Because if they don't ... the internet will.

Brent,

I know exactly what you are talking about. Unfortunate you can’t please everyone in the world, and you always going to have someone out there trying to put your name down. Recently it happened to me. If you look at my linkedin.com page, all you will see is positive reference and strong experience background, however, about a month ago, we terminated an employee, who took it upon himself after termination to go and use the “reference” section to speak ill about us as individuals and as an organization. The good news is that our positive recommendations overcame his ill remarks, and ultimately LinkedIn Support recognized the issue and eliminated his membership. So, all I would recommend is to keep doing the job to the best of your ability, provide quality service across the board, and you will see that your positive feedbacks will exceed your negatives. As for the negatives, do not attack the person who wrote them, simply address the items as a whole with your positive feedback of the situation. Ultimately, people will realize that the truth about your firm and your ability to get the job done and provide quality service.