FIR Interview: Jillian Beard, Morton’s Steakhouse

The social media world erupted with speculation when Peter Shankman blogged that Morton’s Steakhouse had read his tweet (written in jest) and delivered to him, via tuxedo’d staffer, a porterhouse steak at baggage claim after he’d landed. It was a PR stunt, many claimed, and nothing more. Others argued that the only reason Shankman got special treatment was because of his 100,000-plus Twitter followers. We’ve gone straight to the source to find out what was really behind the gesture and to learn more about how Morton’s approaches social media.

FIR co-host Shel Holtz spoke with Jillian Beard, Chicago-based regional marketing manager… Read More »

FIR Book Review: Customer Service by Peter Shankman

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Customer Service, by Peter Shankman

FIR book review Bob LeDrew reviews Peter Shankman‘s “Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World.” PR Week Magazine has described Peter as “redefining the art of networking”, and Investor’s Business Daily has called him “crazy, but effective”. Peter is best known for founding Help A Reporter Out, (HARO) which in under a year became the de-facto standard for thousands of journalists looking for sources on deadline, offering them more than 200,000 sources around the world looking to be quoted in the media. Peter is also the founder and CEO of The Geek… Read More »

Hey, Zappos, can you teach Microsoft how to treat customers?

UPDATE: I was contacted by Kevin, who must be from the highest tier of support. He let me know he had looked me up and read my blog (including this post) before reaching out to me to replace my 120GB Zune with another 120. (The one that arrived was defective, but he replaced that one in short order.) This is great, but also disconcerting. I would hope you don’t have to be a blogger with a respectable-sized audience to get this kind of attention. Kevin also let me know that the problem from the get-go was with what the first rep I spoke with told me—he should not have assured me that being in warranty would guarantee me an… Read More »

How are you promoting customer literacy among your employees?

In the summer of 1986 (dear God, 24 years ago), I was chatting with a customer service rep at Mattel, my employer at the time. She told me of the thousands of letters the toymaker routinely received from children. I wondered if the employee communications department (for which I was responsible) might be able to take a look at them. Eventually, we culled a few and ran them in a quarterly magazine distributed to employees, shareholders, partners and other Mattel stakeholders under the headline, “Dear Mattel.”

No single other article in any company publication during my tenure at Mattel produced the kind of response from employees this… Read More »

A text question doesn’t have to lead to a text answer

While attention is fragmenting across multiple web channels and formats, there are smart ways to use different pieces of the online puzzle to create a single, unified communication effort, even for something as simple as answering a question.

As copycats began creating cringe-inducing one-offs of the Old Spice Twitter-YouTube experiment, I suggested in a post on this blog that the real lesson from the Old Spice guy responding to tweets with often-hysterical YouTube videos is that queries on Twitter need not be answered solely on Twitter. The response can link to a YouTube video if video is better suited to providing a good answer.

… Read More »

Can you shrink your way to success without annoying your customer?

I had two interesting conversations at a family event last night in my home town in Southern California. (Truth be told, I had a lot of interesting conversations, but only two that warrant discussion here.)

First was my nephew, the oldest of my brother’s three boys. He’s going to school, doing some part-time work in the TV industry, and working more-or-less full-time for a restaurant near his home. He’s a server and formerly host at the restaurant where, he told me, the parent company has cut back on the number of servers and implemented customer charges for “extras.”

For example, he told me, a customer ordered a salad with bleu… Read More »

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