Social Media Packaging?

It surfaced this week that Pepsi’s got a new package design for Pepsi Raw for the product stocked in the UK (originally covered by Brand Republic, also source of the picture.) I saw a discussion started on LinkedIn about this topic, and it sparked something in my mind…

Pic from Brand Republic via Mashable (whew!)

The original commenter wondered (as Mashable does, too) if this is jumping the shark and if such a thing could last.

I’m going to argue that it won’t last WITH A SINGLE OUTLET like Twitter. However, more and more, brands are claiming consistent ID’s across social networks and with tools like OpenID it will become easier to have a single identity across networks.

All this comes together to prove the perfect storm for brand to include their social media identity on their packaging. And why not? Twitter is increasingly becoming a tool for customer service, brands like Skittles are replacing their homepages with crowd-sourced content from across the social web, and so on. Why shouldn’t I as a consumer be able to expect to look up a brand using their published ID any place and be able to contact them easily using my choice of tool and at my own time and pace? Why should I have to call a published 800-number and sit on the line? I’d by far prefer to publish my question/concern to an asynchronous tool and get better customer service, too.

As a business person, it makes sense for me, too. If I direct everyone to their selected way of reaching me, I could then offer click-to-call technology for those who want to use the phone (between the mobile web and VoIP tools, this is easy to do TODAY and isn’t a shot for the future, though I think it will increase in popularity) and asynchronous communication via IM, microblog or social media site. The asynchronous communication takes some of the pressure off a call center and is easy and efficient to use (as we’ve already seen with companies like Comcast and others).

The social web is not just changing our online world – be ready to see it start to impact your packaging, too!

Long awaited observations

I tweeted about this topic the other day, but I’ll get on a little bit bigger soapbox here today to say that, like it or not, all roads in communications lead to customer service.  With ever increasing demand for transparency and responsiveness, step one down the road of greater customer engagement is to tackle the issue of customer service.  I’ve even blogged about this in the past, but not from the same perspective of actually tackling customer service head-on.

It’s been some time since I posted, and part of that is because of the high level of activity I’ve been doing on behalf of my current employer.  I’m not certain exactly where my freedom to share ends, so let’s just say up front that none of the ideas, comments, yada yada yada reflect the opinions of the company I’m talking about/working with.

My role is to help this company start to press forward more definitively into social media activities.  We did some planning, looked at some goals (the biggies for most companies? Keeping up with the competitive marketplace, name recognition, reputation management, and so on, at least in my opinion) and began pushing out on the tools we have set up.  The tools we’re using for outreach at the moment are a collection of social shopping websites, Facebook (with a newly launched Page that’s still in growth stages), Flickr (also in growth stages) and Twitter which was quite precocious and virtually popped fully grown and demanding attention from the computer monitor.

As a consumer goods company (ultimately), Mother’s Day is a very serious holiday for the company.  With a fairly recently launched presence on Twitter, we were all girding ourselves for what may come without really knowing how it may shake out for us or for our competitors.  We’d had the discussions about handling complaints in a timely matter, who we thought should ‘man the account’ for the holiday weekend and whether customer requests through Twitter would be handled by customer service team members or by marketing team members referring to the general company guidelines (every company has service guidelines and I’m coming to find the best companies make sure that EVERYONE is aware of these guidelines so all company employees can fairly represent that stance).

We pride ourselves on great customer service so that, also, had to shine through in anything we did on Twitter.

I’m not going to lie; as a former PR person, I thought I could handle these complaints without feeling berated or overly hassled by clients.  I also thought that I understood how emotional a gift purchase can be and what Mother’s Day means to many people.  But let me tell you – this is a new experience.  If you’re a n00b to social media marketing (though I prefer to call it communications), let me tell you, there is NO preparing unless you’ve previously worked in customer service.  I’m not talking about working in a customer facing job like a waitress or a retail store.  I’m talking straight-up customer service where all you connect with every day are people who have had problems with your product/service.  Some people’s complaints may strike you as minor and petty, while others catch even you off-guard by their magnitude.

What I CAN prepare you for, however, is that you cannot break through into real conversation until you have proven that you are willing and capable of handling these customer service issues.  The best conversations we’ve had on our Twitter account have resulted from people who started with complaints and were helped.  I know most people hear this in marketing classes (if you’ve taken them) that turning a customer’s poor experience into a positive experience is the best way to build lifelong customers.  Well let me tell you, the best way to build positive conversation in social media?  Prove that you can handle complaints and criticisms responsibly and politely.  You don’t have to be a whipping boy, but you do have to accept blame for the things that are your fault and support the customer no matter who made the first error.

All in all, we made it pretty well through Mother’s Day.  There were slips and errors, but there always will be.  In the end, however, we learned that the best way forward was to be open and honest and helpful – all things we proved through our customer service.  So I’ll state again – the first barrier to climb as a company entering the social media landscape is that of customer service.  Overcome that obstacle and you’ll see a fruitful landscape out in front of you.  Not an easy one to travel, but fruitful.