By Caroline Dangson, social media research analyst, IDC

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 4, 2009 — The most recent IDC primary research shows that 64 percent of full-time working adults worldwide have participated in an online community on social networking services in the past year (for personal and/or professional use). Social media can now be considered mainstream, with more working adults in their 30s and 40s joining and participating.

Real-time status updates on Twitter and Facebook mean that people are frequently commenting about all aspects of their day – what they’re doing or how they’re feeling. Chances are good that one of your customers is commenting online about an experience with your brand.

For example, consider this tweet I discovered by searching “JetBlue” on Twitter this past March:

Marc Pitman complains on Twitter, “I’ve tried at least 6 times to book my flight to SLC on JetBlue. It’s not going through. And the phone support is a 25 MINUTE wait + $15.”

Source: Twitter.com/marcapitman

Once @JetBlue responds to Mr. Pitman on Twitter, the company grabs an opportunity to turn his complaint into a message of appreciation.

Customers just want to be heard.

Social media makes this possible and they know it. Does your company have a process to respond to comments like this one from Mr. Pitman, in order to have a voice in the online conversation(s) about your brand?

Notice that I said voice in the conversation, not control of the conversation. The power of your company to control the messages about its brand is diminishing with the rise of social media. Your customers will comment and complain about your services on social media no matter what. That’s what creates so much anxiety for businesses today. Yes, this is hard work. If your company uses social media to broadcast messages but doesn’t listen or respond to customer questions or complaints, the strategy will backfire and your company will look fake.

Notice how Mr. Pitman above compares @JetBlue to @comcastcares in one of his comments. Luckily, @JetBlue did get ‘on it,” thereby exceeding his expectations.

To be fair, I recognize JetBlue as being one of the first organizations to establish a Twitter account in order to respond to customer complaints like the one above. Here’s a recent interview with Morgan Johnston, who manages the @JetBlue Twitter account (courtesy of @CoTweet on Twitter):

JetBlue first embraced social media two years ago, in response to the February 2007 ice-storm crisis that forced the airline to cancel about 1,000 flights in five days, leaving thousands of customers stranded at airports across the country.

To combat all of the negative press, JetBlue CEO David Neeleman brilliantly leveraged his corporate blog and YouTube to:

• directly address customer concerns,
• openly admit inadequate response, and
• outline operational changes (including a “Customer Bill of Rights”) the company would implement to prevent any reoccurrence of such an unfortunate event.
  

  JetBlue Customer Bill of Rights

Here’s Neeleman’s February 2007 video:

So this is not a post to pick on JetBlue, but to illustrate that even highly regarded customer brands that are savvy in social media have somewhat-delayed responses to customers who are complaining about their services online.

Any delayed response is a product of the random feedback and siloed transactional data of social media today (see the lower right quadrant of CRM magazine’s Social Media Maturity Model).

In addition, JetBlue has someone from the corporate communications team monitoring Twitter and then routing any customer complaints to the customer service team. This reflects the current state of manual and reactive processes of social CRM. It’s the reason why so many social media managers are currently overwhelmed.

The good news is that we expect response times to improve with future technologies that automate, filter, and centralize customer feedback from wherever it is posted on the Web. These feedback management tools will allow organizations to be more proactive. At the same time, the enterprise will have had more time and experience to establish structure, support and processes around social CRM once we leave this experimental phase to enter a more mature phase of social CRM in the next few years.

Caroline Dangson (@CarolineDangson on Twitter) is a research analyst at IDC who tracks the enterprise social media market. In this role, Ms. Dangson advises clients on how to leverage social media to effectively communicate and collaborate with target customers and business partners based on actionable research.