No matter how big or small your business is, you must get up to speed with technology and marketing trends and get on the boat! Social Media is not about one more method of advertising, it goes beyond that! It ís brand awareness , creating it and protecting it. Making sure that your clients stay happy.Spreading your good service by word of mouth is very powerful.
Let me share a personal experience how social media helped Bank of America turn a bad situation into a good one, in matters of days. A few months ago I sent two car payments from my checking account. The money was there and waiting for the checks to be cashed. well, I didn’t realize but I sent the check from a different account where there was no money. When they cashed the checks I got hit with 4 overdraft fees. $35.00 each! I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of money that I couldn’t afford to lose. I decided to call Bank of America customer service and was treated very rudely, I mean they were cutting the phone while I was talking, transferring me from representative to representative.
By time I was finally transferred to the 4th representative I was so mad. On top of that she wasn’t very helpful at all, so I asked to be transferred to a Supervisor; but that was no use either. I felt completely ignored, it was the worst experience I’ve ever had with Bank of America. My perception of Bank of America definitely changed. She suggested putting in a claim for the bad service; but of course… I didn’t believe they would do anything. About the overdraft fees, well she said she was being nice and she could only take one off, when 2 weeks before my good friend had 7 overdrafts and were all returned); even though she understood it was a mistake. She then had a bad comeback when I mentioned It was a mistake… but I’m not even going there.
I asked to speak with the manager and that was even worse…. I told the manager that they were very rude and she completely ignored me, she said ” I can put in a claim about it but that’s about as much as I can do” I mentioned at some point that I had a lot of influence in the online community and after being a loyal Bank of America customer for more than 10 years their attitude was just wrong. She underestimated my words and just hung up the phone.me, still with a big red negative number on my account said to myself “there has to be a way…. and I remembered that I had a few followers on twitter that needed to know about this. Well, actually, I just wanted to vent! so I wrote a few twitter posts about the whole situation. If you don’t know what it is and how you can use it you can learn how to use twitter on this post.
Well, almost instantaneously I got contacted by @BofA_help from Bank of America. Guess what!? they are on twitter too. We had a few DM messages to try to fix the situation, but I was scared this was a scam. I never heard of Bank of America being on twitter and I was hesitant to share bank information with a stranger. After all, this is the internet and the online world is full of scams and false people pretending to be other companies. So after a few precautions, we got in contact over the phone, I explained my situation and they submitted a claim with the Headquarters. (yeah right! like I needed another lie about “submitting the claim”) but only this time, it was true. The next day, I was directly contacted by Bank of America headquarters and got an apology and all my overdraft fees taken care of.
Now you tell me! If this was a situation with your company and your business wasn’t on the Social Media boat, what would’ve happened? I’ll tell you, the bad experience would’ve spread all over from one person to the next to the next. and as a business person you know that is not good.
Here is a little video one of my favorite tweeple send us a few days ago sent from @tatango about how social media is not another advertising method and it reinforces why no matter how big or small your business is, you MUST get on the social media boat! Start listening to your customers and taking some action.
If you are convinced that your business needs to be on the social media boat, but are uncertain on where to start, contact me and we’ll create a social media plan for your business. It can be managed by you or by one of our specialists.
hope you got some value out of my experience and don’t forget to follow me at @amecoli for more useful tips on social media and SEO for your business. You can also follow @tatango
