Old School Hip-Hop and Customer Engagement

I picked up my first celebrity Twitter followers this week.  Let me elaborate.  Eric B and Rakim are old school US hip hop artists.  Their 1987, album, Paid in Full, pretty much launched hip-hop’s modern era.  These days, Eric and Rakim are big on personal empowerment, Islam, phat beats and making money.  I’m a UK management consultant who’s big on strategy, service design, innovation and  … well … um, making money.

These guys started following me on Twitter after reading my post on why employees should be entrepreneurs.  My self-esteem went up several notches because of my new and notable Twitter following.  The iTunes store ran up a couple more purchases of Paid in Full (the Deluxe Edition) and I got busy posting stuff about the rappers on my Facebook page.

In short, I’m now thinking that Eric B and Rakim are better than Eminem, Elvis, Grandmaster Flash, the Beatles and potentially Jesus.

Eric B and Rakim are a big deal in hip-hop circles; you could say that they’re a brand.  Which made me think that the point of brand and engagement isn’t what customers think about our brand.  The point is what our brands think about our customers.

Customer respect

A few years ago I did some marketing strategy for a big UK insurer.  It had products for pretty much every socio-demographic and it called it’s poorest customer segment “bottom-feeders”.  Lumping customers into categories with disrespectful names is not good humanity.  There are three reasons why it’s also not good business.

1. Internal language shapes employees’ attitude and attitudes inevitably leak out to customers.  Contemptuous language is a great platform for lousy customer service.
2. Contempt blocks empathy. Customer empathy is the best tool known to man for coming up with new product and service ideas.
3. Marketing is (at least) two-way these days.  If you’re reading this on social media, you know this already.  The days when a consumer brand could run in broadcast-mode only are long gone.

It’s interesting that companies think so much about how to build fans and followers and so little about following the people who buy their products and services.   There are lots of brands that I like.   I’d love them even more if they gave me back a little bit of social media love.

Related posts:

1. Customer service or customer servicide?
2. Bad customer service is dead
3. Three resources for B2B strategic marketing using social media

So here are three good places to start:

Related posts:

1. Aesthetics, statistics and strategic marketing plans
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. Bad customer service is dead

Can any company with bad customer service survive in a world of ubiquitous social media?

Here’s a small round-up of the many ways in which my local train company, First Capital Connect, is committing customer servicide.

• Twitter feed of real-time feed of passenger angst.
• Search YouTube for First Capital Connect and results are full of documentary evidence of lousy customer service.  The most witty reflection is below:

• Online government petition to end First Capital Connect’s franchise here.
• First Capital Connect official Facebook page (364 members).
• I hate First Capital Connect Facebook page (2,548 members).
• FirstCrapitalConnect parody site (Page 1 on Google for ‘First Capital Connect’).

Can’t help but think that as a shareholder, I’d be worried.  I can’t help but think that this weight of authentic, peer condemnation neutralises any investment that FCC could make in its brand.  Putting it another way, your customer service is your brand.

Related posts:

1. Bad customer service is dead
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. New utility customer service challenges

• If it was a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world.
• 50% of UK mobile internet traffic is Facebook.  Imagine what that means for customer service word of mouth.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content.
• 200 million blogs exist and 34% of bloggers post opinions on products and services.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  14% trust advertising.

Bad customer service begins to sound like customer servicide doesn’t it?

There’s a great video here, which explores the social media revolution:

Related posts:

1. Customer service or customer servicide?
2. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron
3. New utility customer service challenges