Searching for Yoldash

Honesty is not a policy. Transparency is not a communication strategy. But you’d hardly know this from the number of so-called “community features” appearing across company websites today—all in the spirit of an open and transparent approach that we’re told is so critical to survival in the Web 2.0 world. While it’s true that frank communication is important for credibility, smart companies have the right conversations in the right places.  A forum that publishes unfiltered comments should also include responses from real people in the company, creating a dialog between those who care enough about a product to share their opinions in public. Simply giving customers extra places to complain without monitoring and responding will more likely damage a company’s credibility than improve it.

Take Epson, for example. If you are looking for a new printer and considering Epson, it’s natural enough to go to the company’s website for details on available products. You would expect to find prices and feature lists. But Epson.com also includes customer ratings and comments on their site for each printer. You can actually learn a lot from customer reviews on Epson’s site. For example, you can learn that one printer is so loud it makes the ower jump, and another “makes little circles, like a slinky, in your photos.” Good information for prospective buyers, but not good for Epson.

A better integration of community features can be found on the D’addario company website, where team blogs connect employees with customers. An artist relations manager shares his bouzouki stringing nightmare. A regional sales manager dives into myths about saxophone reeds. These posts demonstrate that D’addario employees are interesting people with passion and expertise to share. If it seems unfair to compare ink jet printers to bouzouki strings, consider how interesting GEICO and Progressive have made the insurance industry. Progressive maintains a Facebook site dedicated to people who want to dress up as Flo, their quirky spokeswoman, for Halloween (check out the fan photos). Even the Washington State Department of Transportation maintains a funny and engaging community presence with an active blog and Twitter account.

The point is, successful Web 2.0 implementations nurture the relationship between a company and its customers. They demonstrate that people in a company are willing to contribute to this relationship by solving problems, recognizing loyal customers, and simply being personable. Ultimately, being earnest in the relationship goes a long way toward building loyalty, and is more important than simply being accurate about issues and challenges. You can be frank without  committing to positive change. But when you are earnest, you are committed.

Oh, and honesty? That’s just personal integrity, plain and simple. Something that seems to be missing from the Epson site, where someone from the company has seeded the customer comments with entries like this: “I found this printer to have exceptional print quality, easy installation and really like the Instant-dry DURABrite® Ultra Ink.”

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In his later years, British writer Evelyn Waugh carried a Victorian ear trumpet with him which he would raise to his ear while speaking so that he could better hear his own wit. But when others tried to speak to him, he would take it down.

Amazingly, this is the way most businesses today approach social media. In large part, this is because too many marketers treat social media as if it were just another outlet for their newsletter content. They pay close attention to their own communications, scheduling and monitoring posts and tracking click-through rates. But when it comes to listening to what others are saying about their business, they are tuned out.

The need to listen and respond goes well beyond replying to the occasional direct message. Most of what is said about a company—good and bad—is not sent in a direct message. Instead, questions, comments and complaints are usually made openly to the community. If your business maintains an active account within the community, responses are not only acceptable, they are often expected.

And it’s not just about putting out fires. Successful social media marketers contribute to conversations, recognize fans, and learn what matters most to their customers and prospects. While there are a number of good commercial applications for monitoring conversations across blogs and online communities, you don’t have to be a big company with a social media budget to get started. Monitoring the millions of daily posts across Twitter can be as simple as finding the key words that produce the most relevant results for your business on www.search.twitter.com, and then subscribing to the RSS feed for the search query. It’s about as simple as an old ear trumpet, really.

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