What caught my attention was AT&T's realization that they had to first deal with significant customer dissatisfaction issues before social media could be effective as a public relations and marketing tool. The story includes this poignant quote from an AT&T marketer - "We started using social media as a PR tool," said Susan Bean, who leads an eight-person social-media strategy and execution team within AT&T corporate communications. "With marketing, we discovered that for social media to be successful we really needed there to be customer care. Otherwise all anyone would want to talk about is: 'solve my problem.'"
One of the wonderful things about social media is the ability to force a brand to acknowledge obvious negative issues prior to engaging us with marketing. If only TV worked like this.
AT&T has a lot of work to do to improve their network performance. An honest and responsive customer care program using social media may help the brand keep customers in the meantime. Just responding and acknowledging an issue can earn a brand points. It will be interesting to see if AT&T can add bandwidth (while soothing customers) fast enough to blunt the eventual defection once Verizon lands the iPhone and iPad.
As marketers we should avoid the temptation to sweep a product performance issue under the rug while promoting our brands as usual (especially in social media). Negative issues generally always emerge from the other side of the rug larger and nastier than ever.
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