Social Media Done Right Vs. Wrong

Social media is one of those buzzwords that’s all the rage in corporate America. Still, many companies are slow to adapt social media. Here are two examples, one good – one bad, of my interaction with social media and companies.

The first was a little while back. My wife and I have our home loan (originally) through Quicken Loans (great experience by the way). On my wife’s birthday, they sent her an email saying, “Thanks for being a customer, here is a coupon to get a free Mrs. Fields cookie”.

Awesome! Nothing too amazing or ground breaking by any means but it certainly was nice.

My wife later tweeted out “Awesome Free Cookie from quicken loans!” or something similar.

Shortly after, they replied back to my wife’s twitter account saying, “Hey… must be your birthday! Happy birthday!”

THAT to me is a great example of social media done right. PERFECT way for a customer to feel appreciated. When it’s time to get another loan, guess where we will be going?

Now for the bad example.
The other day I got a survey from Google Adwords asking how my experience with Google Adwords has been so far.

I’ve been advertising on Google since 2004, so I have had my chance to do a fair amount of these surveys. I’ve never filled one out because I’ve never felt the need to give feedback.

Adwords support has been on the continual decline. Support is unbelievably and increasingly rude, response times are getting longer and longer, and more… so I decided to reply to their customer survey expressing my discontent.

I put extremely dissatisfied for everything dealing with customer support.

I then tweeted about it (expressing my discontent) to Google’s twitter account.

I had a good 4-5 people reply back to my tweet (not Google employees) also expressing their discontent with Google Adword’s terrible support.

I almost expected some sort of reply or something… ANYTHING. After all, I have spent MILLIONS on Google Adwords; you’d think they would care, at least a tiny bit.

Nope. Nothing. No reply, no nothing.

Sure Google is a huge company and probably get’s a lot of tweets. But, in traditional bad customer service manner, Google doesn’t reply to ANY tweets. It’s really just an account to spit out their announcements. Boo.

This makes me like Google’s support team even less and more and more advertisers continue to communicate their discontent and Google does nothing except for get worse and worse. Craziness.