If your employees suck quit blaming social media

Maybe when we’re looking into issues in social media, when we’re doing social listening, maybe we’re missing the most important factors.
Today’s Jay Today video is from Santa Barbara, California, where I was giving a talk for AppFolio, a terrific property management software and one of the sponsors of my new book, “Youtility for Real Estate,” coming out November 4.

Getting out to Santa Barbara, I had a weird experience. I landed at LAX and got rental car with Budget. It took forever for their shuttle to come.
“What is the deal?” There were like four Hertz shuttles that came by, and four of National’s that came by, and three of Avis’ came by. Even Thrifty came by. Thrifty!
Then finally, the Budget shuttle comes. I’m like, “What is going on?” The lady driving the shuttle was super nice, (like nicest lady ever), but the problem was she was too nice. It turns out she’s giving people rides that aren’t even Budget customers. They aren’t even renting a car at all. They were like, “Hey, can you take me over to the Renaissance Hotel?” She was like, “Sure.” “Can you take me to the Hilton?” “Sure.”
So she’s got all these extra passengers, and, for whatever reason, this time they all had tons and tons of luggage. Tons of luggage, like if there was a fire in this van, everybody perishes… EVERYBODY.

If there was a fire in this van, everybody perishes… EVERYBODY.

So much luggage that it’s piled up next to her as she’s driving. I swear to you this is true. She has to drive with one hand, because she has to hold the luggage back with the other hand so it doesn’t crush her while she’s driving the bus.
This is not optimal from a Budget perspective. The guy next to me was completely flummoxed as well. He was like, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He grabs his phone, takes a picture of her driving with the luggage falling down on her with one hand, and he goes to Twitter and starts tweeting it.
It really got me thinking. Budget is going to see this tweet. They’re going to have to try and solve this customer service problem.

Quit Blaming Social Media for Your Employee Problems

But in reality – and this is true all of the time when we’re doing social listening – it’s not a customer service problem. It’s certainly not a social media problem or a social media issue. What you have in that particular circumstance is either:

• a hiring problem
• a training problem
• or a management problem

That’s true every time something manifests itself in social media. Every time somebody comments on Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Instagram, or Vine, or anything else and has a problem with your brand, it’s because a person who works for your company did not do their job adequately.

Every time someone complains about your company social media, it’s because an employee didn’t do their job adequately.

When we’re listening in social media, it’s really easy to stay out of the personal side of it and only look at the data, and only say, “Well, we’ve got to answer that tweet right away.” Yeah, you should answer that tweet right away, but do not forget that somebody messed up.
So if you’re on the front lines of social media, whether you’re a small company or managing social media people for a large company, make sure you’re digging deeper to figure out what the human failure was that caused that person to tweet or reach out in the first place.

Sprout Social Shoutout

Today’s Sprout Social shoutout is for my friend Justin Levy. Justin is a marketing guy at Citrix. Many of you know Justin. He’s been going through a real tough time with his health. I am so happy to say that he’s been through the third of his surgeries, most recently brain surgery, unfortunately, and he seems to be doing great. Thank God for that. He’s a fantastic guy who means a lot to a lot of people in the marketing community. So get well soon, Justin. You should really follow him on social media. He’s a brilliant guy and also a terrific man.

This video is from Jay Today is my near-daily 3-minute video where I talk about social media, content marketing, business and life. JayToday is available on Youtube, iTunes (as a video podcast, and now as an audio podcast too), and at JayToday.tv.
The show is sponsored by Sprout Social (which I use for my social media), and Candidio (a great video editing service).

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