Last night I tried to add a polling plug-in to my blog to capture opinions about use of corporate brands in social networks (like @TheHomeDepot or @Starbucks on Twitter) as opposed to corporate/employee identities (like @RichardatDELL et alii).
That exercise in feature enhancement failed, but, coincidentally, I wasn’t the only person thinking about the subject. This morning, Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posted “How Companies Respond to the Risks of Personal Brands,” in which he points out that companies have to manage certain risks when they allow their employees to build the personal brands when blogging on behalf of the company.
The risks he cites are real, but in the long run, they’ll be overshadowed by the benefits of humanizing the brand. Your customers want to be heard. They want to deal with a real human being.
Who wants to deal with a faceless mega-corporation?
Over the years, I’ve had to deal with countless angry customers. Furious, enraged customers. When customer service fails, when escalation processes lead to dead-ends and frustration, people desperately reach out to any human being listed on the company’s Web site. Too often, the media relations contact is the only person whose name and contact information is readily available.
Solving their problem is always a priority, but often, the most important thing you can do is to listen and treat them like a person rather than a customer ID number.
The desire to be treated like a person is nothing new. Why do companies think it’s such a risk to let their employees act human?
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Continuing the Discussion