Quick Response is Key

I am currently reading "Real-Time Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott for my social media principles class and Chapter 6 explained how important it is to respond quickly to any complaints customers have. After reading this chapter, I thought about how ONU handled Homecoming this year. In a previous post I discussed the lack of posts from the official ONU Twitter and Facebook profiles during the Homecoming weekend. I feel that Chapter 6 of "Real-Time" could teach the people in charge of the ONU social media a lesson on response and reaction to the community.

Chapter 6 explains a crisis that occurred for Amazon.com when they illegally sold books to their Kindle users and then they abruptly refunded and deleted the books from the customers' Kindle accounts. It took the CEO of Kindle one week to send an apology to customers after they complained on a Kindle user forum. The book emphasizes how important it is for companies to respond quickly to its customer complaints. Although the CEO apologized and was sincere about it, but the apology was sent too late to make a huge difference.

During Homecoming weekend, ONU did not post as much as they should have given the major event that occurred. For my class, I was assigned to live tweet an event from Homecoming and make a blog post about how ONU could have improved their appearance on social media sites. There are about 15 people in my class and we all discussed the same idea that ONU did not post as much as they should have, but no one from ONU has reached out to say anything about why they were not posting. If they were monitoring the content that included anything ONU related, they would see posts about how lacking social media was about Homecoming.

"Real-Time" explains how important it is to move from the old-school, traditional media approach of newspapers and magazines to the new, real-time approach. Social media has evolved the way news spreads and companies need to begin using the new ideas to spread information. Homecoming at ONU is a recent example of how real-time social media was not used effectively to benefit a brand.