As with any social media meltdown, there are things we can learn, all of which are more succinct than “Don’t physically assault your customers”. It’s true that most of you reading this probably haven’t overcooked food with the intent of physically hurting a customer, so apply this advice to the less extreme situations you find yourself in as a business owner.

1. Know where this button is:

Three sixteenths of one inch. That’s the distance you have to move your pinky in order to not sound like you’re having a psychotic episode. It doesn’t matter how angry you are, or even how enthusiastic you are if you’re announcing a sale or promotion. You don’t need to sound like Nigerian prince E-mail spam.

2. Not all fans are good fans

When I first arrived the Amy’s Baking Company Facebook page on May 14 it had 2,000 fans, most of whom were already flooding the page with complaints and comparisons of Amy to Bellatrix Lestrange from Harry Potter (seriously). That number has skyrocketed to more than 103,000 and is still climbing as if this writing. 

Let this be a particularly extreme example of why you shouldn’t be measuring social media success based on the number of fans you have, since this virtual army isn’t extolling the virtues of Amy’s Baking Company. It actually represents a worst case scenario where you have a large number of fans actively spreading bad word of mouth. If they’re not leads or potential brand advocates, what’s the point? Don’t take my word for it; just look at this comment and the number of likes it received.


3. We’re still not going to believe that you got “hacked”

7. Don’t feed the trolls

I already covered this, but feeding  trolls is never a good thing. Many of the people complaining on Amy’s Baking Company’s Facebook page were trolling, but rather than ignore them, the owners fed them. They fed them again. As a result, the trolls grew and evolved into a terrifying, gargantuan force of nature. One capable of demolishing a business’s already battered brand to the point where I wonder how the restaurant will stay open.

8. Social media is only as good as the faces behind it

Amy’s Baking Company could have the most amazing Facebook page on the planet and it wouldn’t change a thing. People walking into Amy’s Baking Company would still be experiencing the hateful attitude of the owners, the dysfunctional relationship between management and staff, and the poor communication leading to subpar service. Social media, like any marketing, doesn’t fix a bad product or service. Before you tackle any form inbound marketing – which, I’ll remind you, is about generating leads based on merit – make sure your business has the type of personality that people want to support. In an Internet age, people have more options than ever before, and your business has more competition than ever before.As I’ve said time and time again, all gaffes and incidents are learning experiences. Even if the people who committed them don’t necessarily learn anything.

People have justifiably wary of wearable computers and augmented reality, since their history doesn’t offer a stellar track record. Google Glass, on the other hand, has been captivating technology blogs and consumers since its inception, and I’m among the people very impressed. Eric Schmidt just broke the news that the digital specs will be available in a year or so.

“It would be fair to say that there’ll be thousands of these in use by developers over the next months. And then based on their feedback, we’ll make some product changes, and it’s probably a year-ish away.” Schmidt said during an interview with BBC Radio 4′s World at One on Monday.

The technology of Google’s augmented reality glasses includes a heads-up display, voice command, and photography. Developers started getting their hands on Glass last week.

Schmidt noted that with augmented reality, technology has immense potential for different applications.

“There are tremendous numbers of applications that can be imagined — augmented reality, where you see what’s going on in real-time, and then we annotate that. We say, ‘oh that’s this building,’ or ‘this is something that you’ve already done,’ or those sorts of things.”

Augmented reality has come a long way in the past few years, especially with the rise of more sophisticated mobile technology.

Interestingly, the Google chairman also discussed the need for a “new social etiquette” when it comes to privacy concerns brought about by something like Glass.

“It’s obviously not appropriate to wear these glasses in situations where recording is not correct. And indeed, you have this problem already with phones. Companies like Google have a very important responsibility to keep your information safe, but you have a responsibility as well, which is to understand what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and behave appropriately and also keep everything up-to-date.”

Indeed, privacy and technology have often mixed like water and oil, especially when laws try to keep pace with rapidly improving technology. It remains to be seen how Schmidt will uphold this commitment, and what other organizations will do.

In the meantime, next year I’ll probably be spending more time wearing glasses.

About a month ago, I had planned for this article to be a scathing, searing condemnation of Hewlett-Packard and a declaration that it was on the same level as Electronic Arts. A lot has happened since then. This is a story about a company’s fall from grace in the eyes of a customer, and how it redeemed itself through good service and sincere efforts to make amends.

I purchased a high end desktop from Hewlett-Packard in December. Mine is a very media-intensive profession, and I’d mostly been relying on a Sony Vaio that did the job, but started sputtering if I ran anything as simple as Photoshop or Minecraft. Based on recommendations and positive feedback – and the fact that a bad customer service experience with Dell has still left me scarred – I bought the HP Envy Phoenix model. Beautiful, sleek, and it ran like a dream initially.

About two months later, any media related activity – including things as simple as uploading photos and watching YouTube videos – started causing freezes and crashes, followed by bad reboots. Within a few weeks, it was impossible to do any work. I theorized that this was a graphics card problem and contacted HP. They promised to send a technician over to make the necessary repairs, and the people I spoke to seemed capable and patient. So far, so good.

I got a call a day before the scheduled repair date that HP would be missing their appointment. I was mildly annoyed, but figured things happened and patiently rescheduled for the following week. The day of the appointment I got a call from HP, saying they had to reschedule again and that they had been “unable” to get in touch with me. I hadn’t received any missed calls, voicemails, or E-mails and was more irritated this time, but we rescheduled again. Saturday between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM.

By 6:00 PM that Saturday, my blood was boiling. No technician, no phone call, no explanation, no apology. The third missed appointment. By that point, all bets were off and I did what anyone in my situation is justified doing: I whined, screamed, and threw a tantrum.

Take note, businesses: Customers usually aren’t screaming because they have anger issues or they’re out to make your life miserable. They feel powerless.  When people in my situation talk and don’t hear responses, their raised voices are fueled by their resulting indignation. Yelling and raging is a way of taking that power back. If you want to avoid the vast majority of irate customers – especially as a bigger company – make sure your customers feel like they’re being heard. We all know nobody likes dealing with complaints, so don’t make your customers feel like they have to resort to shouting.

In my case, I found Hewlett Packard has a very active LinkedIn audience and I quickly started a group discussion angrily outlining my problem. I personally reached out to as many marketing and customer support employees as I could find to express my vocal rage, telling one social media strategist in particular how inexcusable it was that my inquiries on Twitter were going unanswered.

I was mollified by the response. In less than three hours, no less than ten people had messaged me on LinkedIn offering apologies, saying that my experience with Hewlett Packard was unacceptable and that they would all do what they could to help. The HP employees were geographically diverse and included some fairly senior managers, several of whom offered to advocate on my behalf. Did they only take notice because I was steaming? Probably, but they could have ignored me. I’ve seen that happen, and it only enrages people even further. Instead the professional, apologetic responses cooled me off a little.

Pictured: A visual representation of the SimCity launch (blog.games.com)

AllFacebook posted an interesting article recently. Facebook has been congratulating itself for its Facebook Offers program, but Business Insider has been taking issue with how many offers are merely “claimed” versus how many claimed offers are claimed in the context of acting on the offer and redeeming it at the physical location or online store.

I will say that the number of redeemed offers is an important statistic to track. Knowing the revenue generated by a Facebook Offer allows businesses to better define their cost-benefit analysis. Facebook Offers cost money to run, and the tab can be significant depending on how many people you promote the offer to. More importantly, you want to use social media to generate revenue, right?

My first problem with this article is that the announcement of people not following through on claimed offers is anything revelatory. People print out coupons or take entry forms for contests but don’t follow through on them all the time, and the concept of Facebook Offers isn’t any different. People redeem promotional codes for online stores all the time and there’s always going to be a percentage of people who don’t follow through on them.

The only difference is that people see how many users have actually claimed a copy of the offer in real time. If Facebook users misinterpret the number of offer claims as actual sales, that isn’t Facebook’s problem. These offers may not have been redeemed, but a claimed offer doesn’t mean redemption on its own. A claim is just a simple measure of eligibility amongst other Facebook users.

When a Facebook user sees an offer for 50% off a large pizza, for example, they need to claim a copy of the offer in order to make themselves eligible to receive it. By claiming the offer, they’ve declared their eligibility to redeem it. On its own, a claim can potentially great for exposure when I.M. Gangsta’s profile displays to his 700 friends that he claimed a page’s offer, which is a great trade-off for a single mouse click.

I will concede that Business Insider has a valid point when it comes to clicks generating erroneous Offer claims, but Facebook isn’t actively confusing offer claims with sales. For claims to actually be misleading, Facebook would have to know in advance that people would interpret a claim as a sale and use the language anyway. It’s certainly possible that they intended it, but it’s a hypothetical stretch at best.

When the issue becomes how to maximize redemption rates for your Facebook Offers, simply make your offer memorable and enticing enough that people follow through on it. Based on personal experience Facebook Offers has been a fantastic way to drive online or offline traffic by providing specific incentives that also take advantage of Facebook’s word-of-mouth capabilities. Offers are already a great way to promote your page, but the onus is on you – the business owner – to make people take that extra step.

I timed it with this cat picture so you wouldn’t have to read obnoxious political debates

Facebook’s newsfeed now lets you view a summary of your ad campaigns, including the number of ads you’re running, the number of campaigns, and your daily clicks. As someone who frequently has to open the ad campaign manager page in a separate tab this is pretty helpful and a clever idea.

As Facebook becomes ever more entwined with business, I wouldn’t mind seeing if Facebook expands business features available directly through the newsfeed. Seeing the amount of money being spent on ad campaigns would be helpful, not to mention something indicating differences between ads and promoted page posts.

There’s a simple antidote to Internet trolls. It costs nothing to manufacture and can be found in vast quantities if you know where to look.

Before this goes further let’s establish the difference between criticism and trolling. Criticism of a business is done out of imperfections such as poor service and genuine unhappiness with a product. More importantly, unhappy customers tend to be more civil. Trolls simply vent their hate wherever they have an audience, and social networks are one of their favorite nesting grounds. Ninety nine percent of the time business owners have done nothing to earn the enmity of trolls.

Dealing with trolls can be a tricky subject when it comes to a business’ social profiles. Every instinct screams to make them want to disappear.  As an administrator you have the ability to do it but people don’t consider the ramifications. Deleting their comments or outright blocking them tends to add fuel to the fire and should be done as an extreme last resort if they absolutely won’t leave you alone.

On the other hand, telling trolls to piss off, get jobs, or go through puberty elsewhere may feel good in the short term but this these exchanges are going to be visible everyone with an Internet connection. You’re letting trolls drag you down to their level and it only looks juvenile to sling mud back at them. It’s not a personality trait you want affiliated with your online voice when it’s time for consumers to buy.

There’s a much easier, more effective way to deal with trolls: Being polite and courteous, just as you would be when dealing with criticism.

I spent some time consulting for a restaurant in South Norwalk that’s serving up some delicious pizza. Their Facebook page was off to a great start complete with near-unanimous positive reviews of the food, ambiance  and service. All was well, until this insidious commenter reared his head:

This was an unproductive, unhelpful comment from someone who had probably never been to the restaurant, but the response is more important. We turned the comment around by claiming the commenter’s expertise on the subject, and it would have been an opportunity for potential business had the commenter taken them up on the offer. On a more subtle level, this was a polite way of saying “Put up or shut up” and a way for this troll to get down to brass tacks.

It’s been months with no word from this fellow. Either he didn’t bother checking for responses or he saw the response and decided to not press the issue. When you show trolls that you aren’t taking their trollbait, they get bored and wander off almost immediately. Only the most dedicated, vendetta-driven trolls will actively pursue an argument. When it becomes clear that they’re just out to pick a bone with you and won’t back off, use the delete tool as your little red button.

Just make sure you don’t feed the trolls.

Author’s note: This really only applies assuming the comments aren’t obscene, profane, bigoted, pornographic, or gives out personal information. If they are, don’t have any qualms about deletion.

In the past, I’ve usually had to keep two browser tabs open for Gmail: One for composing a message or continuing a correspondence, and one for going through mail or responding it to it as it comes in. One of the most significant changes about the new Compose layout is that you can compose an E-mail in a separate tab within Gmail, similarly to how Google chat is displayed.

The actual interface is more compact and feels much cleaner than the old Gmail. Cc and Bcc options are on the right. Most of the other options are on the bottom: Formatting options, attaching files, inserting photos, inserting links, and the option to switch back to the old compose for now. As of this writing options to insert emoticons and invitations are grayed out and listed as coming soon.

While the transition to new layouts and templates hasn’t always been an easy one, I haven’t bothered to switch back to the old compose. Having the ability to browse my incoming messages as I compose something is a big step up, although users have the option to bring the compose window into a separate tab if they want to. This feels like the best of both worlds by providing new features without taking away from an older experience.

Accessing the new Gmail compose system is as simple as  the “Try out the new compose experience” message when you log into Gmail. If you’ve ever saved an E-mail draft because of a new message you wanted to look at, this is definitely a feature to check out.

There’s a simple stress test: Look at their social media pages.

A real social media marketer or agency will be actively networking, chatting with people, offering lots of fresh and interesting content, and getting creative by hosting Twitter chats. A bad social media agency will be doing what they presumably advise clients to not do: Spamming sales messages, going lengthy periods of time without updating, not conversing with anyone, and generally not practicing what they preach.

I stumbled across an aspiring social media agency with a fairly slick looking under-construction website. They almost had me intrigued, but they blew it when I clicked on their Twitter feed and saw these gems (dividers for convenience’s sake):

This was the highlight of their Twitter content. Multiple identical messages, no real efforts to converse outside of a few bits of back and forth, and constant spamming about a contest that, to date, nobody has signed up for. What’s insulting about social media agencies that do this is that they obviously can’t properly manage their own social profiles, but expect businesses to pay them substantial amounts of money for their social media marketing.

Oh, but there’s plenty more. Every so often they would pay the usual lip service about how social media is about engagement, connecting with your community, and not slapping people in the face with your sales pitches. Maybe I would see more involvement on Facebook? Lo and behold:

Their first Facebook posts consisted of sending people to a website with no content, sending people to Twitter, a sales pitch, and a contest pitch.

The agency was even nice enough to provide me with some extra ammo as I started writing this post:

Content automated to Facebook. I’ve already been over this one, but the abridged version is that auto-syndicating your content to different social networks is lazy and disrespectful to your audience.

Of course, agencies have excuses for this; they always have excuses. My favorite is that an agency is too busy managing its clients’ social profiles to effectively manage its own. This defeats the purpose of social media marketing for other people. If you don’t have the time or money to manage your own social profiles, how can you be expected efficiently manage those of other businesses or organizations?

Another fallback I hear often is that their website is under construction as of this writing. This doesn’t preclude an agency from getting proactive on social media or encouraging prospects to opt-in using a lead capture form on the website. I’ve cultivated communities in advance of website client launches that resulted in plenty of lead captures. We even turned the countdown into something of a contest for one of the clients, and once the websites went live people were ready and waiting. It funneled traffic and drove sales. Just because you don’t have a website that you can send people to doesn’t mean you can’t use social media effectively.

When it comes to actual relationships, a lot of talk about how you need to build yourself up as a person that other people want to hang around for relationships to be successful. Social media has the same concept. There’s simply no excuse for impersonal, spammy, annoying social media content when you’re offering social media marketing as a service for other people. Like any agency, you are your own portfolio. Show your clients exactly what you coach them on.