When I saw this video, my first thought was: Sweet Here Come the Jetsons. This innovation from the Koreans is pretty cool on a variety of levels. Unfortunately, it is also pretty scary. Now, I am not talking scary in the sense of the Terminator movies, but rather scary in the machine-like way that we’re shifting as a society.
Think about it, a well performing team and top performers are often called a machine. PR in general is called the propaganda machine that the press corps despises. Looking at this video from Gary Vaynerchuck, I would have to agree that we’re forgetting the little things and the machine-like mentality is setting in for corporate America.
While running the social media efforts of my company, we’re always looking for creative ways to say thank you to our customers and finding ways to help them. However at times, we’ll get a response from a customer noting that they’ve been hit up by a bot. We’ll respond politely that hey we’re a bunch of people not a bot along with some other pleasantries. But to be honest it gets to me every time and I laugh at myself for getting pissed off. Bringing a personality to the company is something that I take pride in.
It is unfortunate that the first thought that a consumer has when dealing with a company on social media is that they are using some kind of robot and there just to be there. We need to change that mentality, after all, public is in our titles.
Here are some little things that we can do right now to make a change:
- Show we care, even if it means admitting you were wrong
- Take action on customer suggestions
- Make releases more human and consumer focused. Get to the point and be relevant
- Take pride in your pitches- getting a good lead to a reporter can improve how consumers perceive the company
Those are just some potential fixes, what do you suggest as a point of change?