Robert Bacal

Social media is...well...social. It's about people talking with people. But what if the users of social media are really not interested in forging relationships, the way it's 'sposed to be? What does it mean if user's "engagement" isn't about interacting with each other? What if it's primarily a one way broadcast medium -- a soundbyte medium where most aren't willing to put the effort in to actually communicate WITH rather than communicate to?

Well, that's not the case, you say. But it is. And the way people actually use social media is quite different from how we're all supposed to be using it. And it has profound implications, not just for the future and how we communicate, but for the present.

While we are told about how people are supposed to be using social media, it's based on how they "could" use it. To forge relationships, to interact about products, services, and to learn from each other. And wouldn't that be great. But it's an assumption that doesn't hold....

Holding Customer Research Firms Accountable For Misleading Research

It's been a bad week in a bad year for customer research and the companies that produce information about customer and consumer behavior. While there's a torrent of research findings coming out of firms like Forrester, The Temkin Group, TOA, Zendesk, and others, much of the research is badly designed, or reported in ways that mislead the reading public and purchasers of reports based on this research.

Point: ZenDesk Infographics

In an blog post dated July 5, customer service company Zendesk posted a rather good looking infographic about the importance of customer service. What's striking about this is that nowhere on the page is there an explanation of where the many numbers mentioned come from. Or disclaimers about the limitations and accuracy of those numbers.

Typical of customer research...

Automate participation on Twitter? Sacrilege, but readers who follow me and read my articles will know that I'm convinced that the time and effort to interact with friends and followers on social media cannot be justified by most businesses. The reason is that human interaction doesn't scale. True interaction with 100 people on Twitter involves 100x the time it takes to interact with one person.

Most of the pundits try to beat business owners and operators over the head by telling them that they MUST interact, rather than broadcast into the social media space, but the hundreds of thousands of silent failures using Twitter suggest that it simply doesn't work well.

So, that leaves automation. Automation refers to using the computer to take on social media/twitter tasks that would normally require a human to do. For example, you can automate following people who follow you, or you can automatically stop following those that stop following you. You can schedule tweets so...

…here’s Tactic 82 from

If It Wasn’t For The Customers I’d Really Like This Job:  Stop Angry, Hostile Customers COLD While Remaining Professional, Stress Free, Efficient and Cool As  A Cucumber

It is incredibly easy for misunderstanding to occur in short form messages due to characters limitations. That’s another reason to switch away from interacting on places like Twitter when dealing with a customer or customers. It’s also important to make sure you “tweet” only one idea/topic per short message, avoid abbreviations if possible, and take time to craft that one topic.  Express the idea simply.

Tweeting and other short forms of communication may look easy, but in fact, they are much harder to write than other longer forms.

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