I like nothing more than acknowledging great customer service, and I have been known to make job offers on the spot to those who have given me great service because they are the type of person I want working for my company.

I almost always take the time to tell companies when their service falls short. I choose to believe they simply aren’t aware that their people need more training. I know its difficult to monitor everyone who delivers service, and in their shoes, I’d want to know if service isn’t what it should be.

Training for great customer service is difficult because great customer service requires three key attributes: empathy, creativity and good judgment, and admittedly these are difficult to teach. However “good” customer service can be taught, and when I see the basics lacking, I wonder, not about the people delivering the service, but about the culture of the company and it’s senior management who have clearly lost touch with the most important people of all – THEIR CUSTOMERS!

So this story of my experience with a park warden on my canoe vacation is a reminder to all managers to 1) check in with your customers and ask them how they feel about your product or services, 2) read as many emails, letters, blog posts and tweets about your company as you possibly can, 3) dip in to your customer service organization and sample what they are offering – use a mystery shop service, listen to the voice recordings of their calls, or check out their emails in your CRM system.

How will you know if you don’t take time to listen?

Here is a story that illustrates what I am saying.

The other week, my son and I and 7 friends went white water canoeing for 6 days in the fabulous Algonquin Park. Good campsites are few and far between in the back country and about 3 days in we found our reserved campsite taken by 4 park workers who had not radioed to see if it was taken and who 1) did not feel it was necessary to acknowledge that we were the customer, 2) did not offer to vacate the site in favor of their customer, 3) did not come up with any other suggestion other than for us to continue on down river. We finally suggested that we share the site with them and they reluctantly agreed.

The next morning they came over and issued us a $90 ticket for having 4 tents. Apparently the maximum is 3. No warning, just a ticket for $90. We showed them our reservation receipt made out by Park Staff that accepted and listed our 4 tents which suggests that it was not against the “rules”. Did any of this matter? Nope.

So, we all wrote to his supervisor, polite emails explaining the situation and suggesting that the judgment used in this case was perhaps not the best. We also pointed out that this rule was not posted anywhere. We did not mention that the justice of the peace agreed with us and that the ticket was thrown out when we went to court to fight it.

Here was his answer.

Dear Ms. Yeomans and Ms. Partner

Thank you for your e-mails concerning your recent trip down the Petawawa River and the issue of 4 tents on the campsite at Bypass Falls, it has been forwarded to me to investigate further.

When reserving interior campsites, in most cases it is not possible to reserve a specific campsite. When a reservation is made, a campsite in a particular zone (area) of the park is reserved. Sites in that zone are then occupied on a first come/first served basis. Not all of the sites in a particular zone are reserved/sold, to allow campsites to be available for emergencies or unforeseen circumstances. In the case of Bypass Falls, the sites at either end of the 200m portage are considered to be in that zone of the Petawawa River.

When the Ontario Parks staff arrived at the falls, both campsites were empty and they chose to set up at the site at the bottom of the falls. You indicate that when you arrived, the upper site had been occupied by a camp group. The group could not have had a permit for Bypass Falls.

After considering the time of day and the time required to break camp and safely find another campsite downstream, the Ontario Parks staff decided to vacate the site and set up for the night in the area behind the site.

The park warden indicated that at this time he over heard a discussion concerning the setting up of 4 tents at which time he issued a warning that only 3 tents were permitted on a campsite and that only three tents should be set up. It has been a long standing park regulation that only 3 pieces of shelter equipment are permitted on a campsite.
The next morning he observed that 4 tents had been set up and issued a Provincial Offence Notice for the offence.

A summary of park rules and regulations is printed on page 30 of the Algonquin Park tabloid, which is available at all park access points. In that summary it indicates that the limit of 3 pieces of shelter equipment applies to backcountry and campground campsites.

Should you have any more questions, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Brent Frederick
Achray Group Leader
Algonquin Provincial Park
613-732-5553

It’s not the fact that the warden lied about giving us a warning that got me upset.

It’s not the stupidity of suggesting we should all read at least to page 30 of a tabloid at the park entrance after we’ve registered, packed our gear and driven several hours to get there

It’s the utter lack of awareness of us as the customer, much less a valued customer. Note to file: ALWAYS acknowledge the value of your customer, without them you don’t have a busines.

It’s the “not my fault” attitude suggesting that the people on the other campsite were to blame. Note to file: Blaming other people NEVER makes the customer feel better.

It’s the lack of judgment in taking an uncomfortable situation for everyone (we certainly didn’t like asking them to share the site) and then making it worse by issuing a ticket instead of a thank you for sharing and have a great trip. Note to file: Your job is to make the customer feel better, using your best judgment. Choosing to punish the customer is almost always the wrong decision.

You owe it to yourself to check in on your customer service team – chances are they could use your help.

The survey is done, and I find myself unable to push the GO button because I am afraid.  There, I said it.  I AM AFRAID.

I am afraid that nobody will complete the survey
I am afraid that nobody will retweet my posts
I am afraid that I’ll annoy my followers if I talk about it
I am afraid that my voice is so very tiny that nobody will even hear it, and that will hurt

Where did this fear come from?  Since when did I become too polite and too timid to “Just Do It”.  I think it must have something to do with using a personal brand instead of a corporate brand. It’s MY NAME on this project.  If it fails, it’s all on me.  It’s like that feeling when you throw a party and for 30 minutes before people show up you are convinced nobody will.

Or is this a Canadian thing?  Too polite and too timid to “Just Do It”?  Is that why Nike is not a Canadian company? But I digress.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also truly believe that far too many people (especially marketers) jump into things prematurely – throwing up a website without thinking through who the target audience is and what they want to do on it, opening a twitter account and only tweeting about themselves, writing press releases in 20 minutes that are so full of Blah, Blah Blah text that you couldn’t pay a reader to understand what they’re saying.  The real challenge is finding that perfect balance of Preparation and Planning vs Doing It without thinking.

I know I am too far on one side of that continuum.  I have been sitting on this project, coming up with reasons why I should delay – It’s the 4th of July, Summer is a slow time, It’s raining, I have a headache – you get the idea.  Then I watched Danny Brown run a live 24 hour Tweetathon to raise money for charity. Now that took guts. He had no idea if anyone would show up and 24 hours is a lot of dead air to fill if they didn’t.  But he did it, he pushed the GO button. I actually have no idea how successful he was but I think that’s my entire point.  I have no idea how successful his event was but I am left admiring him for not being afraid, for believing in what he does, for going out and asking people to participate, for Just Doing It.

I  have never met Danny except on Twitter,  but he was my inspiration, the one thing that got me over my fear of failing, the person who virtually put his hand over mind and helped me push that Go button.

There – I’ve done it.

Now we’ll see what happens but for better or for worse, I am no longer afraid.

I hope you’ll join in and take the survey.   This survey is for us, the curious people who use social media.  It will tell us more about us, who are we, what we have in common.  It’s a not-for-profit project, all the results will be shared with anyone who asks and all the questions were contributed by folks like you and me.  Instead of a prize, I have also decided to donate $1 for every completed survey to Danny Brown’s 12for12K charity of the month, so why not do some good – for you and for others.

Logically I know I was reading a description of what XZY company does, emotionally all I heard was “Blah Blah Blah”. I had no idea what this company did, none! Be honest, you’ve done it too right? Read something and had absolutely no idea what the product was or why you might benefit from buying it. You’re probably like most of us, who don’t admit this for fear of looking dumb or uninformed.

How easy it is for many marketing people I know to pump out words, they can jump right up and start writing, often on their first day on the job or project. Their words simply flow onto the page, looping into just the right sized paragraphs, nicely spell checked and usually containing an abundance of the latest buzz words.

These words turn into product brochures, web sites, press releases, white papers and blog posts, and prolific marketing writers are praised for their ability to “produce” and “deliver”. They measure their clicks and down loads and honestly believe they’ve done well.

I beg to differ.

In 1868, writer Mark Twain said “Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

In an age where attention spans are shrinking, and 140 word sound bites are all you are allowed on marketing vehicles like Twitter, it is once again time for writing less to become a valued marketing skill.

Writing less actually requires more work, not less, but here are 10 tips to help you along.

1) Start with what your company does and describe your company’s focus in no more than 3 words. Yes, you heard me correctly – 3 WORDS, not 30 and not 300. Mine is “Results-based marketing”. Disney’s is “innovative story telling”. Coca Cola’s is “liquid refreshment”.

2) Before you start writing your next piece, write a summary using less than 100 words. Make sure you don’t cheat – less than 100 words, and then make sure that these words support the 3 word focus phrase you came up with in point #1.

3) After you’ve done your summary, go back and highlight the one thing that you want your reader to remember after reading your piece. If you can’t find the one thing, go back and rewrite your 100 word summary.

4) If your document is going to be more than 500 words, write an outline before you start to keep your thoughts organized – your readers will thank you for it.

5) Use simple words. If you make software, say you make software. The people who like software will want to read more. If it takes me an entire paragraph to figure out that you make software, even if I like software, I won’t be reading it. People don’t like their heads to ache when they read and they don’t like feeling stupid because they can’t figure out what you are saying.

6) Once you’ve written your piece, cut at least 1/3 of the words out. The best place to look is the first paragraph, for some reason it’s usually the weakest. If you can’t cut your precious words, ask a colleague to do it for you.

7) Count how many times you used your product or company name or the word “we” , if it’s more than once in every 500 words, ask yourself if you are writing about you or for your reader. For every statement you write, answer the question “what does this mean for my reader”.

Find a way to add words that complete this sentence “what this means to you is…..” after every statement you make.

9) Let your words sit before you finalize them. It’s amazing how much easier it is to edit your work after you’ve stepped away from it for a day or two.

10) Go back and chop some more – yes you can do it!

I won’t tell you how long it took me to write this blog post and it’s still not even close to crisp enough, but I hope I have hunted down and eliminated anything resembling Blah, Blah, Blah. If not, I hope you’ll tell me!

Things got even worse 11 days later when Twitter support finally got around to sending me an email (luckily to my new email address!) that included a new password and that I should log in and reset it. Predictably the password didn’t work and I got a message saying that my account had been temporarily disabled because of too many attempts to access it even after one attempt. After using up my entire swear word vocabulary in a 5 minute rant, I finally calmed down, used the “forgot my password” feature and had a new password sent along. Of course, had I not sorted out my first problem with a dead email address on file, I’d still Twitterless almost 2 weeks later.

Consistency and reliability are key components of any marketing campaign, yet to have your Twitter voice suddenly silenced without warning, to suddenly stop answering those who tweet you is sending a message you don’t want sent. Your followers may interpret this inactivity as being unreliable or non-responsive, certainly not the brand positioning you’ve worked hard to establish.

So for those of us who use Twitter as a business tool, not just a plaything, a few interesting lessons come to mind.

1) Make sure the email you have on file is one that you have full and complete control over.

2) Write down your password and keep it safe (yah,yah, I know)

3) Encourage the makers of any great software product to develop a revenue model to keep themselves healthy. I know this might seem all wrong, but healthy companies make better products. I’d happily pay Twitter to take my support call and get me back up and running quickly.

In the meantime, I’m back tweeting again and happy to be here, even if my feathers are a bit ruffled.

The Aggregator – They scan, skim and read more quickly than most human beings. Passionate about their particular interest area, they want others to share their interest and happily tweet links to interesting articles. Strangely they don’t retweet as much as you’d think, perhaps because they feel their value comes from the effort they put in to find the articles in the first place – I bet they can all tell you how many tweets they’ve made in the past week.

What’s great about them?  They can be like your own personal clipping service, reading through the dross and finding the juicy interesting articles for you.  A good one is invaluable.

When Aggregators go bad… they figure out how to use the “tweet this” button on bogs and news sites and suddenly the frequency of their tweets increases to a feverish pitch.  They begin to think they can only win if they tweet more than anyone else and they start tweeting more and more obscure articles.

The Life Detailer – You know them instantly when you get to their twitter page, not a single link to be found among the vast numbers of tweets that chronicle their life in minute detail.  The entire twitterverse knows what sports team they follow (not the San Jose Sharks anymore – hah!), what they had for breakfast (nothing as they were too hung over) and what they think of their mother-in-law (not much and someone should tell them tweets never die!)

What’s great about them?  Any time you think your life is really boring, you can reassure yourself knowing there are more people out there with even more boring lives.

When Detailers go bad – They become obsessed with adding more and more detail for public consumption. They are exhibitionists with a keyboard and we just know that they have tweeted while doing their business in that room where computers simply don’t belong.

The Promoter – every tweet is about their business, every tweet.  Did I mention it was every tweet?  Subtlety is not their strong suit.  Rarely are they subtle but they are almost always incredibly persistent. You know them, they are the same ones who email you a press release every 2 weeks and who don’t include an opt-out.

What’s great about them? – You gotta admire their persistence.

When Promoters go bad – they start bad, don’t they?

The Commentator – they tweet their opinions, they tweet other people’s opinions, they tweet what they see happening around them.   They are like bloggers with an attention deficit, not quite ready to invest the time required to write an entire article or post with a beginning, a middle and an ending.

What’s great about them?  Finally some original content on twitter – often funny and sometimes insightful, if you can find and follow a good one, you’ll be well rewarded.

When Commentators go bad – they start to turn into Detailers, it’s a fine line folks, walk it carefully.

The Socialite – you know them by their ratio of @ in their tweets.  A ratio of more than 1 @ per 100 characters is a dead giveway.  They are the folks who love CC: on email, the more people who hear them the better. They tend to be the group leaders and organizers and twitter is just another tool to help them communicate.

What’s great about them?  If you find a socialite you respect and admire, you may also enjoy their friends and want to follow them too. Click through to their @names and see who is out there, I’ve added many people to my follow list using indirect referrals from Socialites.

When Socialites go bad – They start tweeting famous people, suggesting that they actually have a relationship with these famous people, thereby increasing their Twitter status (would that be a twatus?)  At some point you gotta wonder why anyone wants to follow one side of a bunch of conversations even if it’s with a celebrity – it smacks of teenage girl talk. (Note added May 5th, my friend Gillian Brouse (@gilliebee) pointed out that every twitter account owner can choose not to see all these replies with only a few simple key strokes – RTFM Lynda!)

The Lurker – representing the majority of twitter users, the lurker follows many people (a friend told me yesterday he follows over 1000 in each of two accounts) but doesn’t tweet himself.  Lurkers are sponges, soaking up knowledge, gossip, news and creating impressions of people and products without feeling any need to contribute to the noise.

What’s great about them?  I believe they are the reason Twitter will survive long term. They are the ones who actually absorb what’s going on. They will eventually become your customers, your champions, your supporters and even your friends.  Let them lurk, and if they ever tweet you, be 100% sure to tweet them back.

When Lurkers go bad – they start to think they know you from reading your tweets. Recently I was being twitter-stalked (OK, I made that term up).  A lurker came out of the closet at a business event I was at and felt that his understanding of my tweets afforded him some special privileges.  It was a bit weird talking to someone I had never met who felt he knew me well.

So what’s the best Twitter type?  It really depends on why you use twitter.  I started out using twitter to learn from others who shared my business interests so I tend to follow Aggregators and Commentators, especially Commentators who have figured out how to add value in their tweets. I also learned that Aggregators and Commentators who don’t add any personal life tidbits quickly become boring, so a touch of Life Detailer is really important to me too.  I really don’t enjoy Socialites but I can see how others would.  The good news is that there are so many people out there that matching followers to your most comfortable twitter style is just a question of patience and persistence.

Why not follow me at www.twitter.com/lpartner and you can tell me what type I am and whether it works for you.

Technorati Profile

Curious, I asked him how best to reach him when I was at work and he was at home. His answers, in order of preference were:

• Text me (I always have my phone with me)
• IM me (it’s the first thing I do when I get home from school and it works when I am playing video games on TV too)
• Facebook me (yes Facebook is also a verb)
• Phone me (but not on my cell phone cause it costs me money)

I then asked him how many emails he gets each week – “about 3-6 per week depending on the time of year”, and how many he sends each week – “about 1-2, mostly for school projects and only because Facebook won’t let you send attachments”.

He went on to tell me that aside from sending school attachments, email was just for “work”, adults he doesn’t know well (like his boss) and adults who weren’t on his friends list on Facebook.
If he is the norm, this next generation of kids has completely different internet usage patterns than their parents and these behaviours have huge implications on marketers. How do you reach an audience who live in a connected world but who are trained to talk only to their “friends”. Here are some predictions on what this might mean to consumer marketers in the future:

1)    Opting in to receive product information on facebook is not exactly a staple in the average marketer’s toolkit but it may be the most important next evolution in consumer marketing.

2)    On the bright side, these kids have a lot of “friends” – we’re talking many hundreds and they can reach out to all of them with only a few keystrokes so the possibilities for word of mouth marketing are huge.  Looking for teenage product champions now may well be the best course for the future.

3)    Mobile marketing will also gain in importance as teenagers are glued to their smart phones and i-phones. Special deals and especially electronic coupons may appeal to teenagers with big appetites for “toys” and not much income.

4)    If my son is any indication, these kids love their “apps” so product placement in mobile entertainment applications will surely be something to consider.

It’s easy to extend lead capture to bring something special, that extra value, that can make the difference between a good event and a great event. Using technology-based interactions with event visitors, you can get so much more with little additional effort or cost.

Here are the top 6 reasons you should invest in electronic data capture systems for your next event:

1) Simplifying event registration
If you’re running the entire event, registration is a necessary part of planning but it’s often the most painful. A customized web-based registration for pre-event registration can be combined with on-site registration and/or recognition system to register and track event attendees as they come to the event and even as they move around the event.

2) Learning what’s on consumers’ minds
Knowing what consumers are thinking sure beats guessing when it comes to positioning a brand for success so why not ask them and record their answers? Engage with consumers in such a way that they’ll be happy to provide their thoughts and opinions to you, and if you capture this electronically you can instantly and easily analyze the results and turn them into recommendations that will be statistically sound. Slice and dice the results so you focus only on the “right” segment for your brand at that moment in time.

3) Getting consumer permission to starting a brand relationship
It’s difficult these days to get consumers to opt-in to receive more messages from your brand. Use incentives in creative ways to do just that, from delivering valuable content to sweepstakes, instant win draws, drive to store coupons, incentive coupons, photo marketing and more. Match the incentive to the event and the audience to get the highest opt-in rate imaginable.

4) Measuring how you’ve changed consumer opinions for the better
If you can demonstrate that consumers are more willing to buy, or more aware, or more interested in your brand as a result of the event you are well on your way to demonstrating a positive ROI. Take the time to quantify this – either before and during the event, or even before and after the event.

5) Touching consumers with the best ongoing messages
The best relationships are those where communication is relevant and interesting. Here’s your chance to capitalize on what you now know about your event visitors and to follow up to maintain and grow your relationship. Send email or SMS messages that speak to what you know about the person, their likes or dislikes, when they plan to buy or offer them something to win them back from a competitor. Creating relevant conversation is easy when you know so much about them.

6) Measuring return on event investment
The perfect ROI shows a correlation between engaging with a brand at an event and making a purchase as a result. It may be as simple as showing you how much likely the event visitor is to buy your brand’s product or service or as sophisticated as incorporating sales data and demonstrating exactly who bought what and how many as result. ROI is king when it comes to getting your next budget approved.

Those who get it will win. Going that extra measurement mile will make all the difference when the time comes to allocate budget for the next year’s programs.