The Conversation Manager

Yesterday something very remarkable happened in the Twitter spheres. The global vehicle glass specialist Carglass suddenly became the center of attention after the hashtag #carglasszuigt became a trending topic on Twitter.

It all started with some people complaining about the quality of Carglass’ latest advertisements, tagging their tweets with #carglasszuigt.

It seemed that Carglass was observing & joining the conversation via the Twitter account @NL_carglass, sending out warning-messages to everyone using the #carglasszuigt hashtag that they would be sued if they continued using it.

This and other bold reactions of the @NL_Carglass account were so striking that they were retweeted massively as a case of total miscommunication. Later on, it seemed that the Twitter account was fake and that the official (unfortunately inactive) account of Carglass is @Carglass_NL.

This case clearly shows that companies really need to join the conversation, and at least need to start observing it, to be able to react quickly upon such a critical situation.

So what should Carglass have done:

• Being proactively present in the conversation (they have an official Twitter account @CarglassNL, but it’s inactive)
• Communicating proactively about the fake Twitter account by observing the conversations
• Giving immediate and clear reactions on all media channels (both on-and offline) to avoid speculations (it took a long time before official messages came through)

However, it is not too late for Carglass. Now that the brand is being discussed by a great number of people, it is time to take positive action. What about using the hashtag #carglasszuigt as an ongoing customer satisfaction survey? Carglass could openly communicate that it has picked up on the buzz, and that it knows that it’s a hoax, but that they however are always willing to listen. Whoever really thinks that Carglass sucks, could use the hashtag to give feedback to the company, so that they know what to improve. There is a wave out there, it might be the ideal time for Carglass to ride on it!

Follow me on Twitter via @dadovpeteghem

In Belgium and the Netherlands, the brand Betterfood (Kraft) is part of everyone’s personal history. During the last 80 years, most kids ate tons of it during their first years. When I heard the news this morning that Betterfood could be dangerous for smaller children (between 6 & 9 months), I was truly surprised. A product that we trust so much, we give it so often to our kids (and they love it), could be dangerous. That’s difficult to accept for me!

Diving into the news, things sound a little less shocking. On the box of the product, Kraft recommends parents to give the cookie together with some juice or milk. This makes the cookie softer and easier for your kids to eat. Now, a few parents warned Kraft that their baby almost choked on a Betterfood cookie (because they didn’t soften the cookie as recommended). Instead of keeping this of the radar, Kraft acts very open and proactive. They decided to change the package of the product by adding a more clear and visible warning on how to give their cookies to smaller babies.

They are not waiting for a new shipment of products to do so, no, they are removing all their packages from retail stores as we speak. People won’t be able to buy them for a few weeks because of that. An enormous loss of turnover and huge additional costs for them, but they still decided to do so. I think it’s a great example of open communication and proactive behavior to avoid real dramas with their product.

Acting upon the safety of your consumers no matter what the cost is for your company, is probably a good investment in client trust and building a long term relationship.

I just wanted to write a quick blog post on a video I ran into of Gary Vaynerchuk at the SXSW conference of 2010. I saw Gary for the first time on LeWeb in Paris and he is a great speaker but most of all, a man with a vision. Gary has 850.000+ twitter followers(@garyvee), wrote a book Crush It (inspiring and empowering readers to pursue their passion for a living) and the only thing he wants to buy with his money is ‘The Jets’.

This video only takes 7 minutes of your time and is giving you a down to earth wake-up call on the changes going on. He kicks off, in his own style (which I love), by explaining that we all say what we are not going to do, why he believes the opportunity lies in what we ARE going to do. Gary is pointing out that no matter what industry you are in, one day you will be in the customer service business, we need to start caring about our consumers.

Gary confirms what you can read in the book ‘The Conversation Manager’: The world is changing and everyone has an audience and a voice. He uses an example of his brother going to a restaurant … nice one! Gary very often gets the question after he was on stage … how do you scale the efforts? ‘Scale is important, of course, but I can try’ is his answer. Caring is massively underestimated.

By the way, I also love my parents a lot :-) For those who get fascinated by Gary and want to see another nice video, check this one. Gary talks about his person, his family, his road to winelibrary.com, honesty, numbers of followers and the emotion of the audience, consistency, relationships, mobile allowing us to be lazy, Google and Facebook on search, …