I wrote to Rivers this afternoon, just the general email address from the website. I wasn’t expecting much response, despite Rivers’s reputation for being pretty ‘DIY’ and approachable. They sent me an auto-response, which is a nice start, but the way they worded it made it quite special. The formatting was terrible (I’ve pasted in html so you can see), they could lift their game there, but the words were right. I thought I’d share, because it’s a great example of a company getting their customer service oh so right (I’m not a customer by the way, just thought I’d make that disclaimer):

YOU WILL BE GLAD TO HEAR……..

Your email really has been circulated to all of us senior management/ directors.

If we have our wits about us and pick up that your mail raises concerns (not covered below ) that need one of us to deal with we will do as such.

You would be amazed just how many things we fix in the business this way.

PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT BE CROSS WITH US BUT WE HAVE TO CONFESS …………

As we are trying to cut some overheads in these economic times we have generated this email that answers the most common queries which means if your query is covered by the below you will not receive an email direct from one of our customer service members…

—

The email goes on, but you get the idea… Nice work Rivers.

I’ve written a new blog post for Marketing Mag called ‘Every thing you need to know about social media monitoring‘ - I’ve gone into quite a fair bit of detail about a range of tools, including the new social media monitoring tool we’ve been developing. Take a peek if you like, it’s quite a useful article and not overtly self-serving

OK, so that’s an attention grabbing headline, but I don’t think it’s far off. We’ve launched a social network for ABC Learning Centres you see, and I think it’s pretty on the mark in terms of community engagement and potential results. It’s called Childcare Chat. All the boxes are ticked - transparency (tick), involving an existing community of interest instead of trying to concoct a fake one (Pimp My Noodle anyone?) tick, quick response times from the community managers (tick), engaging content (tick).

ABC Childcare Centres, if you weren’t already aware, have been through a rough patch of lately. (I’m being conservatively liberal with the term ‘rough patch’ there by the way. Saying ABC have been through a rough patch is a bit like saying General Motors is going through a little turbulence). After borrowing a heck of a lot of money to buy day care centres around the world (I think they have debts of $1.5 billion) the company is now in receivership and their hands are tied by the administrators who run the show. The ‘colourful’ (my liberal conservative use of adjectives continues) former CEO Eddy Groves no longer has anything to do with the organisation and the new management team is keen to move forward, but as bad press is about the only media coverage they get, life has been tough for their marketing department, even for an organisation that has a bigger presence and takes up more real estate in this country than McDonalds.

The core problem is that parents who have children at ABC are generally quite happy with the service (I’ve sat in on the research sessions myself and have seen their joy first-hand) but when they go to a barbecue and get asked about where they send their kids, the rumours and negativity have made it hard for them to justify their decision to their peers. Word of mouth has been identified as one of the biggest influencers for parents when it comes to deciding which centre they should send their kids to, but with such a huge amount of negative press around, finding positive reviews ain’t easy. The solution? A social network/video forum where parents, potential parents and staff can ask questions, share experiences and report problems. The result is www.childcarechat.com.au - take a peek, it’s open to the public.

Obviously by opening up lines of communication to anyone who wants to chat, ABC aren’t going to get all positive reviews (in fact, the balance has shifted towards the negative side), but most of the issues so far have come from former staff, or people who’ve had a misunderstanding. However, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t really matter. Potential parents  who wouldn’t ever consider going to an ABC Centre to check it out for themselves now have the opportunity to snoop online, and instead of seeing the usually corporate ‘we’re the best’ yaddah yaddah, spun from the desks of the PR people, they can see honest discussion about the company, its customers and its staff.

Not many corporations are willing to be that honest about themselves, but in the case of ABC, who don’t really have a lot to lose, it works out. The effect negative reviews had on online book sales was evaluated in a September 2005 study by researchers from the Yale School of Management. They, not surprisingly, found that mostly negative reviews for a product on a site like Amazon.com translates into less sales. However, if a book had a lot of positive reviews and a few negative ones thrown in the mix, customers appreciated the honest feedback, felt re-assured that the reviews weren’t rigged, and accepted the fact that you can’t please everyone. Negative reviews actually made them more likely to purchase the book.

Whilst buying a book is a completely different sort of purchasing decision to choosing a company to raise your first-born-child, the end goal of each consumer is the same - to find out what your peers think. The worst case scenario here for ABC is that people will read what they already know - that there are a few people out there with gripes about past practices, staff levels, wage rates and the like. At best, potential parents who would never have considered ABC as an option can jump online and see some honest stories from real parents who are actually quite happy with the level of care they get. Furthermore, existing customers can also take comfort knowing that they aren’t ‘bad’ parents for sending their kids to ABC and that they’re not alone. The end goal should be increased positive word of mouth and, ultimately, more enrolments.

Given that the site was only launched last week it’s too early to tell if we’ve achieved that yet, but in terms of providing a platform for community engagment that will ultimately lead to a better bottom-line for one of the largest commercial organisations in this country, Childcare Chat could well be one of the best uses of social media in Australia.

If you’re interested in reading more on the project, Nathan Bush (A.K.A. Another Advertising Wanker) played an integral part in the site’s development and he’s written up his take on it at his blog. Mumbrella also did a pre-launch article on it here. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece on it yesterday, which blogger Matt Crozier was quick to call out as a beat-up.

What do you think? Is a social media platform the right solution for ABC?

I was in hospital last week. It was my first time as a patient, not counting the day I was born. I’m OK now, it was a stomach thing and I’ll be fine, but it left me feeling a little shaken (and poked, and jabbed and prodded and tired and vulnerable). In fact, I was so mortified by my own mortality, I even changed my Facebook status to the following:

“…is in hospital. First time in hospital. Doesn’t like hospital. Fees mortal. Preferred previous immortal feeling.”

If you’ve never been in hospital before you probably don’t quite know what I mean, but if you have ever been in hospital for the first time and been told the news that you are not, in fact, immune to everything, you will, in fact, die sooner or later, and your previously temple-like body is not as fit and healthy as it was when you were, for example, 12-years-old, it does definitely arouse a sense of  mortality. So much so, that the last thing you want to be told upon you exit is that you will, with almost 100% certainty, be back, one day.

This ad in the hospital elevator was therefore the last thing I wanted to see:

The photograph is a little blurry because the lift was full of sick people and I didn’t want to be seen happy-snapping away in a hospital (’it’s OK people, it’s for my blog’), but the poster is advertising ‘free will-making’ and ‘executor services’. Ouch. Talk about kicking people while they’re down. I can totally see why the Public Trustee of Queensland wanted to get a message to people in a hospital lift, but it left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Is the same media buying agency hitting up morgue escalators and funeral parlour urinals as well?

We’re about to launch a major new campaign/initiative for a client of ours, if all goes well it’ll get a bit of national press and we should get a few hundred thousand people involved. The press, if we get it, will be nice, but I’m far more excited about actually helping this particular organisation get back in touch with its customers, take on board some feedback, create a community of users, and at the end of the day, make some money.

What we’re doing is social media #101, but the funny thing is, you’d be hard pressed to recognise it as such. You see, the client won’t be starting a Twitter account, they won’t be blogging about their experience, they won’t have a Facebook page, no photos will appear on Flickr, we won’t touch the company Wikipedia article and YouTube won’t play a part. In fact, there isn’t a scrap of traditional social media involved in this social media campaign, and you know what, I think we’ve come far enough down the digital highway for that statement to not be an oxymoron. I feel a bit like those particular sites are stepping stones on the social media path, tourist attractions if you will, the big bananas of the digital world. Politicians and interested surfers with too much time on their hands use them as pit-stops on the information super-highway because they’re there, because they think they have too, even if, like Anna Bligh, they end up with 14-year-olds on their MySpace leaving such poignant messages as: “its good ur trying 2 reach the next generation of voters and all but you really need 2 get more friends. just a heads up.”

Sure, MySpace still has lots of users and everyone’s on Twitter or Facebook these days, I’m not saying those sites are so far past their prime they’re irrelevant, but they just weren’t the right tools to help this particular client engage their audience and treat their customers like friends, so fuck ‘em.

DP Dialogue is a member of the American Word of Mouth Marketing Association - it means we get a little logo to put in places, but more importantly, we get access to lots of cool articles and resources related to word of mouth and social media marketing. This morning their daily newsletter threw up this little gem about the most valuable and under-used social media strategy - customer reviews; in particular, negative ones. It’s worth a read, and quite timely I think. We’re certainly putting it into practice.

What about you?