Tagged: Social Media Today

Is Ryanair right to eschew social media?

FireShot Screen Capture #127 - 'Ryanair's new comms chief to eschew social media I PR & public relations news I PRWeek' - www_prweek_com_uk_bulletin_prweekukdaily_article_1168936_ryanairs-new-comms-chief-eschew-sociaPR Week in the UK is running this story about the decision of Robin Kiely,  Ryanair’s new head of comms to to dismiss the value of social media engagement.  Is he right to do this?  Absolutely, in my opinion.  Ryanair is an organisation that has been hugely successful despite a studious disregard for customer service.  I am fond of contrasting the corporate stories of Ryanair and easyJet.  The story of the later is “you only pay for what you want” and the story of the former is “you only get what you pay for”.  In this respect, Ryanair is being absolutely true to it corporate story.

Kiely is quoted in the article thus:

‘A Facebook account would not be helpful to us, as we would have so many people looking for a response.’

He called the social network a ‘two-way tool’ and said maintaining a dedicated account would probably mean ‘hiring two more people just to sit on Facebook all day’.

‘If customers want to get in touch, the methods are there,’ he added, referring to the brand’s customer care line.

Spot on.  A dedicated Facebook account would mean hiring two people just to sit on Facebook all day.  For most organisations this would be a productive use of two people’s time because: a) it would demonstrate that the organisation takes its customers seriously and, b) it would provide the organsiation with valuable intelligence about what its customers want.  But Ryanair is not ‘most organisations’.  It is the exception which proves the rule when it comes to customer service.

In many ways this approach to social media is less insulting, and less ineffective, than the approach of many organisations who simply outsource the management of their Facebook presence to an agency,  At least Kiely recognises that you need to put dedicated people onto managing Facebook, and better to promote the customer care line upfront, rather than respond to Facebook enquiries with a standard “Thanks for you question, please call our customer care line on this number” response.

Co-incidentally, Rynair was discussed in the SMTLive webinar on ‘Marketing and Customer Service’ organised by Social Media Today on Tuesday – i.e. before Kiely’s statement. You can download the audio here.   It was a good session (as have been all the recent SMT webinars in recent weeks – I recommend you sign-up).  I think it was  either Frank Eliason (he of former @ComcastCares fame)  or Carol Borghesi who made the point that effective customer service is all about being “true to who you are.”  And that, or course, is exactly is what Ryanair is doing.

(But I would still always prefer to fly easyJet – provided, of course, that they can get me where I want to go, when I want to go there, from an airport I want to fly from, at a competitive price.  And therein lies the rub.)

A radical thought on brand ambassadors (prompted by @coryedwards and Social Media Today)

Here is a thought to end the week.  There is a view out there that a good way to use social media is to find  and cultivate a group of people who can become brand ambassadors – representatives of a brand within the consumer community.  I don’t support this approach.  I think a much better approach is to use social media to establish consumer ambassadors within your brand.

The key to this is understanding the difference between a super-fan and a brand ambassador.  A super-fan is someone who, for whatever reason, has a particular passion or interest in your brand.  There will not be many of them (almost always significantly less than one per cent of your consumer base).  These are also the same people that might appear to qualify as brand ambassadors.  However, these people rarely want to talk to the rest of your consumers, they would much prefer to talk to other people like them, or to the brand itself.  Even if they did want to represent your brand, you would have to question their suitability – because, by definition, they will not be representative of your consumers.  They may even come across as rather strange to the 99.9 per cent who don’t share their particular passion.

So – to use these people effectively, you need to go with their flow.  You need to motivate the behaviours that they are already inclined towards, and this generally means involving them in your business, rather than promoting your business.

I was prompted to write this having tuned in to the #allthingscustomer  webinar yesterday organised by Social Media Today.  Not sure if this will be podcasted – but if it is, it is well worth checking out (watch this space).  @coryedwards from Dell was talking about how Dell had identified “ranters and ravers” from their social media monitoring.  Rather than try and convert the ranters and encourage the ravers to go and rave some more (i.e. become brand ambassadors), what Dell did was bring these people together, offline, with the people from Dell who were seen as activators – i.e. the key Dell people who needed to hear what these people had to say and were empowered to go and do something with this information.  Basically Dell was creating customer ambassadors within the organisation.  Dell originally held two of these session and this year they are holding 20 – from which we can assume that this idea is working.  I wonder if any brands have set up a Customer Embassy within their organisations.  Might be an interesting idea.

(This is really a build on a previous post about digital influence http://richardstacy.com/2012/05/15/are-digital-influencers-actually-that-important/)