Below is my Storify examination of the final tweets from famous brands. What did they do wrong, and what can your brand do to avoid a similar fate? Read on...

photo credit: Josh Bancroft via photopin cc

Yelp's Unique Monthly Visitors

If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.
                                                         Jeff Bezos

photo credit: niallkennedy via photopin cc

This quote from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos represents a sort of "north star" for me--user experience is a guiding principle upon which I set my professional compass. Give people what they want and make it easy, and you succeed. At least, that's the theory, but in the last few years, I have come to feel my compass does not always align to the actions of today's most popular online services. Some have lost the customer experience religion, and I predict a few of our top digital services may soon have "come to Jesus moments" with their increasingly annoyed and neglected customer bases.

The user experience of many top sites and services has become mediocre, and this is happening at a time when the tools of competition have never been more available or less expensive. The growth of social and mobile technology, advent of wearable tech, arrival of the sharing economy, rise of cloud services and ever-lowering cost of developing scalable digital products will bring new and better alternatives. I have been lucky to attend many of the New York Tech Meetups in the past year, and the creativity, power and polish of these tiny startups demonstrate that there are many capable Davids looking to defeat today's overly confident Goliaths.

I predict a wave of change in the next several years. Either the functionality and usability of the sites and tools we all love and use will evolve rapidly, or consumers will soon adopt new sites and tools to love and use. Some will argue the companies I cite as examples have grown too big and have too much traffic and too many users to fail, and to them I say this: Monster.com, Myspace, Goecities, Prodigy, AOL and Excite. This last site is an excellent example, because many people today would be hard pressed to recall Excite, but the company reached a peak market valuation of $35 billion in 1999, more than LinkedIn's or Yahoo's market cap today. No one is safe--even the most popular online services can lose loyal customers to competitors offering better customer experience.

It is hard to understand why some businesses need to relearn the importance of customer experience when the lessons are still so fresh. Bezos' observation tells the story of why some online firms succeeded and others failed, both in the halcyon days of the dot-com boom and the distressing years following the bust. Prodigy and Excite, with their pages full of blinking and distracting ads, are gone, while Google's clean, white interface lives on. A thousand e-tailers went bust, but the transparent consumer ratings and one-click purchasing of Amazon earns ever more customers and retail dollars.

But even if one is not familiar with recent history, the importance of customer experience is evidenced by a constant barrage of studies and surveys:

• The Temkin Group studied the attitudes of 10,000 US consumers and found that "Customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend."
    
• In the Business Impact of Customer Experience, Forrester estimates that moving from below-average customer experience to above average would yield more than $3 billion of annual revenue benefit for wireless carriers, more than $1 billion for hotels, $262 million for insurers and $227 million for retailers. Forrester further finds that brands are not performing well in this regard--its 2013 Customer Experience Index found that 61% of brands rank okay, poor or very poor in customer experience compared to just 8% that rank excellent.
    
• The 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer found that consumers value companies that "listen to customer needs and feedback"--this attribute ranked a mere one percentage point behind "quality products and services," and the gap between consumer expectations and company performance was much larger.
    
• According to the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. The same study found that 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience and 79% of consumers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.
  
• Accenture recently found that the performance of digital orientation in high-growth companies is 21% greater than in negative sales growth companies. CMOs in high-growth companies have found a less turbulent path by working across the organization to infuse a digital focus in all business processes and functions and improving the digital customer experience.
    
• Avaya released a 2013 study that found 63% of consumers say they would be extremely likely to continue spending money as a result of an exceptional customer experience, while almost half are extremely likely to stop spending money with companies as a result of a bad customer experience.

It is obvious customer experience is paramount, but someone needs to remind today's most popular web sites and digital services. I think three services are on the bubble in the next three to five years, and the rest of this week I will explore how Groupon, Yelp and Facebook may be facing customer experience crises that could hurt their bottom line and limit future growth potential.

These three are hardly alone--in recent months I've had frustrating experiences with the web sites and customer service processes with a variety of firms, from giants like Sprint and Comcast to tiny upstarts like Pebble. Still, Groupon, Yelp and Facebook are good companies to focus on because all have risen quickly and have much to lose if the companies do not rapidly improve customer experience.

In the next few days, I hope the lessons learned about these three companies may provide you with some guidance and ideas to implement at your own organizations. As always, I welcome your input about the companies you see as being at risk due to disappointing customer experience and the ways you feel customer experience will affect business in the coming years.

Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment

The other day I noticed that my December 2009 blog post, "2010: The Year Marketing Dies," was my blog's most popular article. Here it is, 2012, and CMOs are still employed and Marketing Departments still exist. Oops!

Should I be embarrassed? Before you answer that, I would like to make the case that Marketing is already dead, but marketers just don't know it yet. Like Wile E. Coyote after he has dashed off the edge of the cliff but before gravity has kicked in, I think the profession of Marketing is hovering and waiting for a fall.

I will cop to employing some hyperbole in both my December 2009 blog post and the one you are reading now, but less than you might think. Exaggeration aside, the discipline of marketing has some profound and painful changes coming.

Just this week, we witnessed yet another in a long string of marketing blunders. McDonald's promoted the #McDStories hashtag as a way to get people talking about their McDonald's experiences. People talked, all right--they used the hashtag to vent on everything from poor service to the chain's treatment of animals. Marketing observers can add this faux pas to a long list of recent marketing missteps:

• Earlier this month, Taco Bell irked customers with an insanely misguided promotional tweet on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day about the "dream" of "eating @TacoBell." 
• In November, Qantas Airlines blundered badly with a hashtag marketing campaign that people appropriated to gripe about the carrier having canceled flights and stranded passengers. 
• In September, Unilever sparked a "Ragu Hates Dads" meme with an insulting ad campaign that slighted fathers.
    

It is important to note that I am not citing cases of mistakes or service blunders that became social media disasters (a la PayPal/Regretsy, Chrysler's F-bomb or GoDaddy's Elephant-Killing CEO). Nor are these examples of consumers taking to social media to rail against corporate policies (such as Greenpeace/Mattel or Bank of America's debit fee). Rather, all of these blunders are something entirely different--companies deploying marketing strategies and tactics that consumers reject, resulting in brand damage.

There is an awful lot one can learn from the remarkable Steve Jobs, of course, but one thing stands out to me--one single thing that can get lost among the many lessons his story offers: Failure.

The people who change the world are not brighter than everyone else is; there are many bright people with great ideas. It isn't that Steve had vision; when I worked in the Bay Area, I found I couldn't take a dozen steps without running into someone with an exciting vision for the future. And it isn't that Steve better focused on the needs of humans; that is certainly an integral part of his success, but every organization is full of people capable of putting customers first.

No, the one thing that sets Steve Jobs apart from others is not success but failure. Reading his biographies and tributes this week reminded me of another hero of mine, Walt Disney. Their tales are remarkably similar in many ways.

We Americans have a terrible habit of distilling the stories of our great men and women into simplified and boring soundbites of success--Walt Disney invented Mickey Mouse! Steve Jobs invented the iPad!--while ignoring the long, crooked, difficult, brave roads they took to realize that success. We like to believe that success is what defines the American spirit, but the truth is the opposite: Failure is what defines the people who achieve greatness.

Steve Jobs and Walt Disney are American success stories--and they both failed in spectacular fashion. Steve Jobs produced the Apple III, a computer with so many hardware issues that one of the solutions (I'm not kidding) was to drop the computer two inches to reseat the chips on the motherboard. Walt Disney's first animation effort went bankrupt and he lost the rights to his first commercially successful character (the forgotten Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.)

For most, the story would have ended there. Steve Jobs, pushed out of the very company he founded, could have spent his life developing products that didn't push the envelope but delivered his family a very comfortable standard of living. Walt Disney could have given up animation--something he'd briefly attempted in the past--and sought work in the booming Hollywood movie business. But neither did--they learned from failure and eagerly dove back into the deep end of the risk pool. Said Steve Jobs, "It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me... Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

What is remarkable about both Steve Jobs and Walt Disney isn't merely that they persevered after failure; instead, the defining characteristic of these great men--the one thing we can and should learn from Jobs and Disney--is that they never stopped embracing risk even after they achieved success. It is difficult enough to make risky decisions after one is prosperous and comfortable, but imagine making those same risky decisions after having suffered the kind of confidence-shaking flameouts that Jobs and Disney experienced.

Disney achieved great success and recognition with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and The Three Pigs, yet he risked it all to push his company into the dangerous and untested waters of full-length animated movies. He was forced to release "Snow White" sooner than he wanted when the banks funding what had come to be known as  "Disney's Folly" refused to advance any more credit. Snow White earned Walt money and recognition, yet he risked it again and again on pet animation projects, live-action films and the riskiest bet of all--theme parks. Having tasted the bitter pill of failure, he nonetheless risked his reputation and wealth frequently.

Steve Jobs did the same. After being dumped from the company he founded, Jobs turned his attention to new risky endeavors. He launched a new software company called NeXT, Inc. and invested $50 million of his own money into Pixar. NeXT floundered, Pixar soared and Jobs was soon back at the helm at Apple. For most of us, the satisfaction and recognition of a triumphant return to the company that dumped us would be validation enough, yet Jobs took a salary of $1 a year and repeatedly placed risky bets on new business models and innovative technology. Jobs might have stopped at any point in his journey and retired with the kind of wealth and accolades most can only dream of, yet his risks and hits kept coming--iMac, Macbook Air, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and the iPad.

Most within corporate America work their entire careers avoiding risk. Some do it blatantly, taking pride in saying "no" to anything new that comes along, protecting the bottom line and corporate reputation from anything that feels a little dicey. Others avoid risk superstitiously, hiding behind focus groups, best practices and spreadsheets that promise (but rarely deliver) ROI.

In Human Resource departments, for example, the risk avoiders hire only candidates who present excellent education records; Steve Jobs dropped out of college and Walt Disney left high school after one year. In Marketing Departments, the risk avoiders spend big money on TV and print while moving cautiously into digital and social; Disney made huge bets before others on Technicolor in movies and on the nascent television medium, and Steve Jobs doubled down on mobile computing at a time when few expressed a desire for expensive mobile devices.

Avoiding risks doesn't get someone fired. No one is ever called into a senior executive's office to justify why he or she declined to invest the company's money in a bold but untested idea. The risk avoiders rise slowly and steadily in corporate ranks, producing modest results. They never risk their reputations or career achievement, and when they fail, they fail small and justifiably--"The creative tested well!" or "The candidate had a great GPA from a respected school!"

Most of the time, these people guide companies to outcomes within a safe and expected range, perhaps stealing a point of market share from the competition. Little is risked, lost or gained. But the road to failure is paved with a thousand tiny successes, and while risk avoiders don't fail spectacularly, their companies can. Risk avoiders cannot change quickly enough; they miss threats to their marketplace and are unable to rapidly steer a new course. Blockbuster, Borders, GM, and many other firms were full of risk avoiders who were constantly and modestly successful until they suddenly were not.

Of course, there are many in corporate America who embrace risk, but few do so like Jobs and Disney. If you are a risk taker, you probably do so only part way. You likely don't bet your job, your home and your family's future on your vision. Walt Disney would have lost Mickey Mouse and his home had Snow White failed, and he later borrowed against his own life insurance policy to fund the construction of Disneyland. You don't take that kind of risk, and neither do I.

How much are you willing to risk failure? After being promoted and earning a healthy income, are you inclined to put that at risk to pursue your vision and deliver exceptional results for your employer? Can you defend and support an employee's new idea when their last one failed thoroughly?

The lessons of Walt Disney and Steve Jobs aren't simple or easy. Very few of us have the power to achieve anything close to their level of greatness, but the way we choose to view failure and our willingness to risk what we have achieved is, in my opinion, the defining difference between those who are merely successful and those who bring vital change to their organizations.

Most of us desire success and fear failure. What the stories of Jobs and Disney tell me is that we ought to embrace failure and fear success. The more we succeed and achieve, the less likely we become to accept risks. Jobs and Disney remind me of a Steinbeck quote--one I learned from Epcot's American Adventure (Thanks, Walt!)  Steinbeck was speaking of our nation, but he may have well been speaking to every company and individual who has tasted success:

We now face the danger which in the past has been the most destructive to nations. Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure: no dynamic people have ever survived these dangers.

Think Different, indeed!

Caveat Emptor is Latin for "Let the buyer beware." It is a call for purchasers to become informed and use due diligence before completing a transaction. If you're a marketer, this is a call you should take very seriously before contracting with a Social Media agency or hiring a Social Media specialist. Care is required if you don't want your brand to end up in the headlines for the wrong reason, as has European furniture maker Habitat.

We've been through this before. A decade ago, with the power of search engines surging, the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) became evident to marketers everywhere--and they had no idea what to do about it. The Internet was still new and some were yet debating its importance, so the ways of managing a brand's searchability and findability were unfamiliar and strange to marketers accustomed to print ads and FSIs. They, of course, turned to "experts" (either external agencies or new hires), but many had no basis upon which to evaluate that expertise. Disasters ensued.

This brings me to one of my favorite stories of my Internet career. Many years ago, a client asked my agency for an SEO proposal. Their goals were lofty--they wanted the top spot for several very common search terms. We responded with an appropriate proposal based on the best practices of the day; it was not inexpensive, nor did we promise the top spot on Google.

We lost the contract to an "SEO agency" we'd never heard of that was cheaper and made promises to match the aggressive (and unrealistic) goals set by the client. You can probably guess the rest of the story--within months, the black hat tactics used by the other firm (such as hidden text and link farms) resulted in our client's site disappearing from top search engine databases.

This story returned to mind as I read about the trouble in which Habitat has found itself with Social Media spamming. As described on Mashable, the furniture maker was caught seeding Twitter's top trending terms as hashtags into tweets promoting a sweepstakes for those who would join Habitat's email list. If you are reading this post and didn't understand that last sentence, then this should be a very clear warning sign to proceed with caution when contracting for Social Media services or hiring a social media expert, because this action proved to be a PR disaster for Habitat.

With dozens of blogs with tens of thousands of readers complaining about Habitat's spamming of Twitter, Habitat was forced to apologize. The company's note to bloggers said, in part:

The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.

In this case, the error in judgment was not made by a johnny-come-lately fly-by-night Social Media agency (although it could've been) but by an intern.

One of my biggest gripes nowadays is the mistaken belief that I have heard repeated time and again in a form similar to this: "Young adults are so clued into Social Media, so we're going to hire an intern to handle Social Media for our brand." Again, if you are reading this blog and have found yourself thinking an intern is the solution to close the Social Media gap in your organization, this is another warning sign to proceed with caution and seek expertise where you need expertise. Social Media is the most important change in human and marketing communications in a decade, and trusting your brand's presence and reputation to the maturity, expertise, knowledge, and judgment of a 22 year old is as dangerous as it sounds.

Habitat found this out the hard way. Not only did they leave an important marketing channel to an intern, they also completely failed to monitor this channel or their employee. It is evident no one was subscribed to and keeping tabs on the company's own Twitter feed, or if they were, they lacked the Social Media wisdom to recognize a truly horrible and painfully apparent Social Media mistake.

Habitat's reputation has been stung. There have been thousands of tweets and blog posts accusing them of being spammers and exploiting some of the most sensitive and timely situations in the world--including the Iranian elections--for their own gain. Tweets in just the last five minutes as I type this include, "We've seen your apology, but telling us who didn't post them doesn't tell us who did post them. Why did Habitat let this happen?" and "Are u kidding me? @HabitatUK gets an intern to work on the Twitter acc. with no clue and then get rid of him?"

Much like brands stung by improper SEO tactics in years past, the use and abuse of Social Media can result in the kind of disasters that cost money and harm brands. How can a marketing organization with little or no Social Media expertise prevent this from happening? The solution is actually very simple; it's just not necessarily cheap:

• Get smart now: Social Media isn't hype and it's not going away. Social Media isn't just important to your business, it is your business. Just like today, when every employee and leader is expected to be conversant in the Internet, it will soon become required that every employee understand the best (and worst) practices of Social Media. The quicker you and your organization can get there, the better. This will require both a personal and professional commitment to learn for many marketing professionals.
  
  
• Recognize what you do not know: Knowing what you and your organization do not know is the first, important step in determining how to address Social Media challenges and opportunities. Many organizations have embraced Social Media and are prepared to do it themselves or to apply their knowledge and experience to buy or hire the skills they need, but other organizations are still in the shallow end of the Social Media pool. If you find yourself thinking that the biggest need your organization has is to launch and participate in Twitter and Facebook, then you should take a step back and take time (or find assistance) to define your organization's need before jumping to vendor or candidate evaluation.
  
  
• Recognize the importance of Social Media: A company that recognizes how important Social Media is today and will be in the future does not leave it to an intern or an agency that was founded six months ago and consists of three people. The significance of Social Media to your brand's future and the caliber of the strategy and support needed by your enterprise may become evident when the organization's leaders understand Social Media's growth and future potential.
  
  
• Finally, hire what you really need: I mean no disrespect to the many young people who are active in Social Media both personally and professionally, but most brands wouldn't hire a young adult fresh out of school to manage their media strategy, their brand strategy, or digital strategy. The same should be no less true of Social Media strategy. Mistakes can be costly, and the way to avoid mistakes is to find professionals who not only understand Social Media but also have the appropriate seasoning to know the marketing, legal, PR, brand, internal, and competitive implications of their decisions and actions.

Mistakes are costly and unnecessary, so it is vital that marketers make smart decisions. Finding someone with the ability to tweet is easy; finding the right agency or employee to furnish insight, judgment, and experience in Social Media is not. Securing the maturity and experience your enterprise needs might be the difference between a Social Media presence that builds your brand's influence or destroys it.

Everyone is talking about Domino's big Social Media challenge, but I think they actually have a Social Media opportunity--a HUGE opportunity. Domino's--if it acts quickly, authentically, and socially--can turn lemons into lemonade (or snot into gold, as the case may be).

There's plenty of places to get details about the pizza chain's burgeoning PR crisis, so I won't go into detail here except to share a bit of information from AdAge.com's article: Two Domino's employees, identifying themselves as Kristy and Michael, posted a video in which they "besmirch a pair of sub sandwiches and the pizza chain's reputation. Michael inserts pieces of cheese into his nose and waves pieces of salami behind his backside. Both the salami and the cheese are placed on the sandwiches." In other videos posted to the Internet, Michael sneezes on cheese sticks and wipes his bare backside with a dish sponge.

According to AdAge.com, a Domino's spokesperson said the company "is looking into what can be done to prevent this in the future, but there's only so much a marketer can do." The company decided not to issue a press release or post a statement online fearing that "a strong response from Domino's would alert more consumers to the embarrassment." While I agree that issuing a press release to combat a negative and viral Internet threat is like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose, I believe there is a way to fight fire with fire. This Social Media disaster demands an equally social response!

No, the answer isn't for Domino's' to produce their own videos. It's not that official videos--ones that demonstrate the care given to food safety or with an apology and denial from Kristy (who has already claimed that the tainted ingredients were never distributed to customers)--are a bad idea. But anything Domino's says officially to try to combat the negative PR will be met with some level of suspicion. "Of course," consumers will think to themselves, "Domino's corporate staff thinks all of their rules are followed, but what really happens when their young, part-time kitchen staff are left on their own in the 8,000 stores they have worldwide?" Of course, that's the insidious image that has been planted in the back of consumers' brains by Kristy and Michael's video--what happens when the bosses aren't watching?

No, the million-dollar idea isn't an "official" response. In a social and interconnected world, the way to fight situations like this is in a social and interconnected way. Here's how to turn this PR problem into an opportunity: Be authentic and social by asking other employees to post their video responses. Domino's shouldn't guide those responses, issue talking points, or even ask that these be positive. Instead, Domino's should challenge their 125,000 employees to share their thoughts online and in video form. How did Kristy and Michael's clips make other employees feel? What did they think when they saw their peers' behavior? What message would they like to deliver to those two?

If a hundred or a thousand Domino's employees--ones who look not like corporate suits but instead are exactly like Kristy and Michael--were to speak with a different message, the problem could not only be resolved but could actually become a marketing opportunity.

While Domino's could train their cameras on their employees, tell them what to say, filter it, edit it, and polish it, doing so would drain their employees' words of their authenticity. Instead, encouraging their own employees to share their own thoughts in their own words is the authentic response necessary. Might some employees say the wrong thing? Sure, that's authenticity at work! My guess is that most employees, when encouraged to do so, will instead demonstrate the care and commitment they have for their jobs, the food, and the customers, which would create a wave of buzz, attention, awareness, and goodwill.

The only way to fight Social is with Social! As my friend and Fullhouse peer Cindi Thomas says, "Focus on the Social, not the Media!"

Crowdsourcing evangelists are pretty breathless about its benefits. Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, says "the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive." In his book, Wikinomics, Don Tapscott contends, "Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of."

It all sounds so wonderful, but when did it become fashionable to be associated with a crowd? We used to want to "stand out from the crowd." There was a time we hated to "get lost in the crowd." And when we said "Two's company; three's a crowd," it wasn't because three people was the desired state.

Of course, Crowdsourcing--the act of organizing large groups of people outside an organization to collaborate on tasks that might otherwise be done within it--holds terrific potential, but it also can be dangerous. To effectively tap the "wisdom of the crowds," it is vital the task be carefully chosen and defined, all possible outcomes foreseen, and appropriate limits and guidelines implemented.

One danger of crowds is that they're prone to be affected by passionate minorities. Stephen Colbert has proven this several times already. In 2006, Colbert asked the viewers of "The Colbert Report" to vote for him in an online poll to select a name for a new bridge in Hungary; within two weeks he had earned 17 million votes--7 million more than the population of the country of Hungary. (The bridge was eventually named Megyeri Bridge, a name that didn't even make the second round of polling.)

Colbert is back in the news because he urged his viewers to vote for him in a NASA poll to name a new space station module. NASA offered four names of its own but permitted write-ins, which created an opening for Colbert's highly engaged fans. When voting ended, "Colbert" beat the most popular NASA name, "Serenity," by 40,000 votes. As noted in the Associated Press article, "NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins".

You might think that NASA covered it's bases since it "reserves the right to choose an appropriate name." In this case they're probably safe, since although Colbert and his fans might howl in protest when NASA passes over the comedian's name, it's still all in good fun. But what if a different set of passionate people had hijacked this exercise in crowdsourcing?

As a hypothetical example, what if instead of Comedy Central fans, it was a vocal set of opponents of California's Proposition 8 that had targeted the NASA voting campaign? Such a group might have mobilized folks from across the country to have the space module named "Milk," after the gay politician who was the subject of the recent award-winning film, "Milk." In this case, even with the stated right to choose an appropriate name, NASA would've been caught between a rock and a hard place--on the one hand conservatives might have objected to the politicizing of the space station, while on the other hand activists would've accused the space organization of homophobia and bias if NASA overruled the popular vote.

This example demonstrates several considerations for organizations looking to mount a crowdsourcing effort:

• Consider every possible outcome and ensure the worst-case scenario is one that can be accepted.
• Setting the rules so that the organization can make the ultimate decision regardless of the group's wishes does not mitigate every risk. Consider again the worst-case scenario in order to determine if the control retained by the organization is real or imagined. Recognize the danger inherent in publicly nullifying the will of the group after having asked that group for their time, consideration, and opinion.
• In many cases, open-ended tasks may furnish an opportunity for a passionate minority to overwhelm the majority. It may be better and safer to allow participants to choose from a set selection of options or to otherwise constrain the thinking and activity.
• Put limits in place that prevent or reduce ballot stuffing. While it may be difficult to obstruct all manipulation of a crowdsourced program, many sensitive situations can be avoided by setting appropriate rules and implementing technical restrictions such as requiring registration and limiting participation based on email address and/or IP address.

Crowdsourcing furnishes tremendously exciting ways to gather knowledge from stakeholders, increase loyalty among customers, mitigate risks with fresh thinking, and provide a unique perspective from outside the organization. If you execute and manage a crowdsourcing program with the appropriate foresight and care, you'll find yourself agreeing with P.T. Barnum, who said "Every crowd has a silver lining."

We've already seen it many times, and it will happen many, many more times in the future. The sweep of the Internet combined with the power of Social Media is amplifying brand missteps and furnishing mass media-like reach to consumers. Situations that a couple years ago would have been small and contained today are making an impression upon thousands and even millions of customers, prospects, and investors.

Here's a recent example: A wine critic perpetrated a hoax upon Wine Spectator magazine. He created a Web site for a fake restaurant, then submitted the restaurant for the magazine's award of excellence. Despite the fact the wine list was "well-stocked with dogs" likened to "paint thinner and nail varnish," the imaginary restaurant won the award. The critic, Robin Goldstein, believes his prank proves that Wine Spectator is more interested in the award entrance fee than with maintaining minimum standards.

Goldstein posted his story to his Wine Economics blog and to the fake restaurant's blog. From there it was picked up by the Chicago Tribune and LA Times. The story has been carried further on beverage-related blogs such as Daily Blender and Scotch Talk. A Google search on the faux restaurant's name results in more than 70 news article hits from around the globe and almost 3,000 Web hits. In the last several days, dozens of Twitter users have Tweeted the news and links to thousands of followers. Wine Spectator's Wikipedia entry has already been updated with the incident, ensuring the magazine will be associated with the award embarrassment for years to come. The publicity has put Wine Spectator on the defensive; they posted a response, including accusations Goldstein isn't telling the entire story, within their online forum.

The interesting aspect of this is that Goldstein presented details of his hoax at a meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists, a group that I'm guessing doesn't even number in the thousands. Not so many years ago, Goldstein's story would've been an amusing tale passed among a small group of elite wine professionals, but today the story is being heard by hundreds of thousands. In less than two weeks and with a budget that I suspect is $0, Goldstein has reached an audience that is much greater than Wine Spectator's circulation of 350,000.

Remember the good old days when we used to be concerned that a consumer who experienced a bad customer service situation would tell 10 or 20 people? How does 1.3 million sound? The reach, power, and economy of Social Media can perhaps best be demonstrated by one of the most often repeated stories of Social Media embarrassment: the sleeping Comcast service tech. To date, the famous video shot by a disgruntled customer has been viewed almost 1.3 million times.

Just a decade ago, getting DVDs into the hands of 1.3M people would've required an investment of millions of dollars for replication, packaging, and postage (even assuming you already had a list of 1.3M addresses). But in 2007 , a "regular Joe" with no special marketing contacts or media acumen was able to get his video in front of that many people for a budget of absolutely nothing.

There was a time not long ago that brands and media partners controlled every means of mass communication; today, a guy who bathes in a Burger King sink has practically the same reach as the $3.5 billion fast food chain. Sure, Burger King has the power to blast messages across network television and reach every person who watches "Dancing With the Stars," but the advertising message doesn't hold interest, create buzz, or stick in the mind like one gross kid in a sink.

We can't be sure, but it seems likely that Wine Spectator, Burger King, and Comcast have collectively suffered financial losses that total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced sales, damaged reputation, and PR crisis management. And all it took was three people clicking "Submit" buttons.

In the future, you will hear a lot about how Social Media shifts power away from brands and towards consumers. The Wine Spectator, Burger King, and Comcast examples plainly demonstrate what this means.

Time after time after time after time this point is being made: In the age of social media--with consumers sharing information about brands and experiences freely and widely--there is no room for poor customer service.

Brands may not be able to please all of the people all of the time, but neither can brands accept employee or process failures that result in blatantly poor customer service. Each time a service meltdown occurs, the brand runs the risk of a single consumer spreading their anger and frustration to dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of people.

The latest Social Media failure comes from Belgian Chocolates Online, owned by CandyWorld, USA. A customer completed an order with the site and was promised next-day shipping, but the e-tailer took nine days to ship the customer's order. Strike one: This is enough to cause a consumer complaint but doesn't rise to the level of a social media concern.

The candy received by the customer was within weeks of expiring. Having ordered nine pounds of chocolate, it seems unlikely the customer intended to (or would be able to) consume this much chocolate so quickly. Strike two: Not a stellar customer service situation, but still not the kind of thing that is likely to explode into a social PR nightmare.

The unhappy customer, of course, sent an email to customer service but didn't hear back. So he sent another and didn't hear back. So he sent a third. Strike three: This situation has now clearly crossed a line between forgivable (or at least understandable) execution errors and unacceptable customer service.

But to really up the ante and make this circumstance the sort of social media disaster that will travel from blog to blog and person to person online, Belgian Chocolate Online added insult to injury. Here is the response their customer finally received:

We are not ignoring any emails. We are helping customers placing their orders or who really need customer’s service. We can’t help you in an expiration date problem that you do not like and which isn’t a problem.

The chocolates you bought are still not expired and we do not see why to replace or to refund. The expiration date is not the date for consumption, but a date to sell. We do NOT sell any chocolates with an expired date.

It's not merely that the retailer's contention is factually incorrect ("The expiration date is not the date for consumption"). Or that their policies should concern customers (the implication that they'll ship a time-sensitive product to you up to the date it expires). The thing that makes this particular situation a PR disaster is the tone; they couldn't have told the customer to go screw himself any more clearly had they said, "Go screw yourself."

That would be strikes four, five, and six. The e-tailer's customer service failure is now racing across the Internet. A situation easily solved with an apology and a couple pounds of free chocolate could now cost Belgian Chocolate Online quite a lot in terms of lost sales, PR response, customer retention efforts, and damage to the brand's reputation.

As noted on this blog, brands can no longer afford poor customer service. We're not talking about the kinds of minor missteps that happen every day when dealing with thousands of customers (although these should always be minimized), but the particular variety of compounded mistakes that occur when organizational processes fail.

In this case, add up how many mistakes needed to occur to reach this point:

• Failed to meet expectations in terms of stated response time
• Poor policies or procedures for checking expiration dates on time-sensitive food products
• Failure to respond to customer service inquiries. (Understaffed? Flood of customer complaints swamping their ability to respond? Poor service management tools? All of the above?)
• Erroneous response (No training? Incorrect training? Deliberate misinformation?)
• Rude response (Poor hiring? Poor management? Poor training? Lack of managerial oversight?)

Social media is only going to increase consumers' ability to share problems or to access the complaints of others. Brands need not fear this, since the opposite is also true--consumers have never had a greater ability to share or access praise for a brand. Done poorly, customer service is an Achille's heal that will weaken the strongest of brands; done right, customer service can become the most powerful tool in a brand's arsenal.

Providing poor customer service has always been a dangerous proposition for brands. Failing to meet consumer expectations damages brands, but pre-2005 (before social media began to explode) the risks were relatively small. Any single service event could have destroyed brand loyalty for a single consumer and perhaps may have caused ripples with a few people that consumer knows, but really damaging a brand's reputation before the age of social media required significant, consistent, and long-lasting service failures.

Today the game has changed and any single service event can become a PR disaster of national proportions. Hewlett Packard is the latest brand to learn this. As broadcast on CrunchGear, one of the most influential sites among tech-savvy consumers, an HP customer sent his computer that was still under warranty to HP for service. He received a communication indicating that when a tech opened his computer, fluid spilled out and onto a motherboard, so HP claims the consumer owes them $1,099 to repair or replace their motherboard.

Pre-2005, this consumer's complaint would've been heard by a few dozen people at most. Today, CrunchGear's 34,000 daily visitors now know about HP's rather ridiculous and embarrassing customer service gaffe. As noted on CrunchGear, "I’m sure that for every experience like this, there are a thousand perfectly good interactions with HP’s customer service, but that doesn’t reduce the impact when you hear something as ridiculous as this."

Of course, no company ever believes it is providing poor customer service, but they certainly do seek to balance the level of service versus cost. For example, each organization reaches its own decision on questions such as the cost of adding more customer service reps versus the lost goodwill that occurs when consumers are forced to wait on hold and abandon their calls.

As HP's experience shows (and other brands have also found), social media is changing the way we must think about customer service. The cost of poor service, once measured in single consumers, can now have an immediate impact far and wide.

It should go without saying that the answer isn't to solve every consumer's complaint at any expense required. This is not an effective or even plausible solution. However, improving customer service is no longer a question of just limiting costs but one of enhancing brand equity.

Improving customer service in 2008 requires actions that are both traditional and innovative. As always, it is vital to hire, train, and monitor customer service employees. Each must understand what the brand is about, why their interactions with consumers are important, and what is expected of them. We don't know what happened in the HP example, but it seems obvious an employee or group of employees lacked an awareness of what is acceptable and what is not.

Providing customer service that creates a high-quality customer experience requires even more in 2008 than in the past. How is HP using social media to engage consumers where they are already spending time and discussing their brand experiences with others?

For example, just a couple hours ago a consumer on Twitter warned others that they shouldn't "use HP Premium or Pre.Plus papers as they're meant ONLY for Dye printers, no matter what HP says." If HP was on Twitter, they could address this concern or correct the bad information. They could also be participating in the dialogs underway about HP's new TouchSmart technology, which is seeing some positive buzz on Twitter. Alas, HP seems to be nowhere to be found on Twitter, so they are not part of the consumer discussions.

Another way HP can use social media is to be aware of problems and to address them before they become PR disasters. Let's see how they respond to today's post on CrunchGear. Will they be unaware of this issue until it is viewed hundreds of thousands of times and is shared across dozens or hundreds of blogs? Or are they monitoring social media and prepared to take action to either make this consumer happy or to fight what may be incorrect information with positive and proactive communications?

Brands can no longer wait until an issue hits mainstream media to react, nor can they rely on their positive relations with editors at a few media outlets to help protect their brand. Social media is changing the way brands must manage and monitor their brands.

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

Mario Andretti probably has no idea what social media is, but he may have provided us with the best quote ever on the topic. Control is an illusion, and I don't mean that in some zen-like philosophical way; I mean that the speed of the Internet combined with the power of personal networks is making control an unachievable and useless goal.

In the brief history of social media, we've already seen many high-profile missteps caused by the mistaken belief that the flow of communications can be controlled. In the past six months:

• A Burger King Vice President thought he could control his anonymity when he used his daughter's screen name to make blog posts that included discredited accusations against labor activists; he couldn't.
  
  
• Johnson and Johnson thought they could control the fallout from uninviting mom bloggers to a PR event they scheduled for mothers active in Web 2.0; they couldn't.
  
  
• And Target believed it could ask a group of students to "keep it like a secret" that the company directed the young adults to sing the praises of the company on Facebook; they were, of course, unable to control the bad PR that resulted.

These examples demonstrate one of the more troubling aspects of Social Media to large organizations: the actions and decisions of a single employee or small group of workers can result in the kind of PR that can damage reputations, harm brands, suppress sales, increase costs, and potentially impact stock prices. Burger King, Target, and Johnson and Johnson aren't clueless and in fact have all made smart use of social media. The lesson of these PR disasters isn't to strive for more control (since we already know this is the problem and not the answer), but to concentrate on educating the workforce on appropriate and ethical behavior and communications.

NBC became the latest organization to learn difficult lessons about control in the era of Social Media. The news organization tried to control the timing of the news of Tim Russert's passing so that they could inform the family before the news hit the wires.

We can all appreciate NBC's intentions, but this is 2008 and their plan didn't work. An employee of a partner organization updated Russert's Wikipedia entry with news of his death 40 minutes before NBC announced the news. NBC, upon learning of the Wikipedia update, changed Russert's entry back, erasing the accurate information that had been posted. NBC is now embarrassed by the incident, and the person who leaked the news has reportedly lost his job.

The blogosphere isn't being kind to NBC. High-profile blogs and Internet media outlets are broadcasting comments such as:

• MediaPost: "It seems that NBC, much like The Associated Press and other old-media businesses, hasn’t yet grasped that news is no longer published in a top-down manner."
  
  
• Silicon Alley Insider: "It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record...which is what (they) apparently did."
  
  
• CrunchGear: "NBC, of all organizations, should know what to do with news. They have been a trusted source for decades. For them to fumble in this way - to not be able to pick up the phone to call the family immediately, to fail to keep in contact with folks who could tell them it’s OK to run the story, to have to get the news out of an reporter’s death and to presumably get the exclusive - is an egregious chain of failure that led to what can only be described as a debacle."

Interestingly, old-school media outlet US News & World Report provided the most insightful observations about the NBC situation: "Employers can no longer assume that employees have their policies, privacy, and best interests at heart. Employers today need to offer clear direction on what employees can and cannot communicate, along with a frank explanation of the consequences of violating the policy."

The implications of Social Media cannot be ignored, nor can they be controlled. The quicker organizations define and educate their employees on expected standards of behavior and communication policies, the sooner they can minimize the likelihood of a Social Media embarrassment. As Mario Andretti knows, the faster you move, the more likely you are to win the race.