Wrong. The BBC is only one of many outlets telling its journalists to monitor the social media for news stories.

Those who have fallen foul of the mainstream media’s new interest in what’s being said online include the England cricketer Kevin Pietersen, who was forced to apologise after a tirade on Twitter about being dropped from the squad  was picked up by the newspapers. Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant whose temper tantrum has spawned a cottage industry on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, caused all sorts of problems for the airline in more traditional outlets. Even Sky Sports has fallen foul of the trend, after the papers discovered that one of its presenters was posting suggestive tweets on Twitter. The television channel was forced to take action over what it believed was damage to its reputation. The most recent example is the controversy surrounding the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.    

The lesson from all of this? The social media sites no longer exist in isolation from the mainstream media, and old methods of crisis management are dead in the water. You need to stop the problem as soon as it starts, and that’s where gem can help.

Within hours of the device going on sale, Twitter was alight with comments about yellow spots appearing on the screen and a much more serious issue – the fact that holding the phone in your left hand seemed to block the signal to the integrated antenna. I’m monitoring Twitter http://twitter.com/search?q=iphone%204 as I write this, and the comments are coming in at the rate of about 5,000 every 10 seconds. Not all are about the problems people have encountered, but the majority are. Buyers were also quick off the mark in posting videos of the problem on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmVpoccPnc&feature=related. Perhaps the most damaging commentary appeared on the Computerworld blog http://blogs.computerworld.com/16403/iphone_4_early_adopters_just_beta_testers_for_apple. 

All this activity soon turned it into a mainstream news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8759590.stm. It even got the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg into trouble, after he forgot the power of his own site. www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/06/facebook-ceo-deletes-controversial-iphone-4-post.html. 

But you don’t have to launch the most eagerly awaited phone of the year to find your products or your reputation under attack. And as one blogger says, the web never forgets. You might as well carve the criticism in stone.

What if there happened to be a way of monitoring and responding to such negativity? There is. It’s called gem. And it’s one click away.

While in office, Dubya didn’t bother as much with online channels of communication as his successor, Barack Obama (check out his four million followers on Twitter). But he may have realised that if you want to promote an important cause like the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund, (or even your wife’s book) then you need to choose the channel that gives you the most exposure.

It’s an implicit recognition that whether you happen to be in a charity, business or politics, the power now lies with the customer. He or she chooses the preferred method of communication.

As if to underline the point, BP has been fighting a rearguard action on the social media to answer its critics over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Check out the critics’ spoof BP account and the company’s response. The firm says it’s more interested in capping the leak than in online outreach. Maybe it’ll give it a higher priority as time – and the wave of social media coverage – goes on.

Incidentally, within hours of George W signing up to Facebook, he was facing criticism for getting someone else to write his posts.

The lesson: unless you’re part of the conversation, other people’s voices and views carry the day. Want to be part of it? Then why not start by chatting to us at gem?

But everyone in the business world should take note: make a twit of yourself with a few badly-chosen words, and these days Twitter will look after everything else that’s needed to damage your brand.

BBC Northern Ireland presenter Wendy Austin told listeners that news of Mr Brown’s “careless whisper” was doing the rounds in Holland just 30 minutes after it happened. If you’re trying to protect a brand reputation, that’s a scary thought.

Within 24 hours, there were several hundred video clips on YouTube, including a mash-up that set the offending words to a rap music track. And the ridicule has continued ever since.

These days, information travels at the speed of light. Worse still, it doesn’t have to be true to make an impact.

Whatever your brand happens to be, all it takes is one disgruntled customer to start an avalanche that can bury it.

Keeping tabs on all the chatter can be difficult, but at gem we have some unique online tools that can do the job for you. The bottom line is, if you don’t control the message, someone else will.

If you need proof of that, look no further than one of the most infamous examples of brand damage in recent years.

Two employees of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant in the US filmed themselves doing unspeakable things to the food. But that was merely the match that started the fire. The social media added the fuel to turn it into an inferno. The damage wasn’t resolved until the company responded using the same channels – Twitter and YouTube – to talk to its customers in an authentic and sincere way.

Talking to us at gem is a lot easier.

At our last management meeting I broke a plank of wood in two.   First time, no hesitation – I was strong, I was tough, I was focused.  Don’t mess with me!

I should explain that this was not a random act of violence on my part (as if!) but a planned activity to inspire team ability and demonstrate how focus and belief can deliver results.   

Having focus is important.  It is all too easy in any business to lose focus as there is so much to do and so little time etc.    One of the ways that we at gem maintain focus on issues of importance for our clients is through the use of cross-functional teams who are collectively tasked with business improvement and identifying and implementing best practice across all our clients.  Account Plans are created for all clients and areas of improvement and innovation continuously identified.   These plans are reviewed at senior management team and results carefully monitored. 

Recently this has included implementing new social media strategies, reducing customer contacts through improved First Contact Resolution and smart self-service strategies, introducing community moderation as a primary support model, creating a web reporting portal that provides our clients with real-time flexible reporting and analysing voice of the customer data among thousands of online comments.   

We even make these teams break planks of wood to demonstrate their focus.  A couple of months ago we fire-walked;  some months before that the team abseiled down the largest hotel in town, who knows what our CEO has planned in the next couple of months – cross-channel team relay swimming, anyone?

Despite the bad roads in my area, I choose to live in a remote part of the country and don’t expect the gritters to come right to my door.   However, I do expect them to clear the main roads that I need to travel to get the kids to school and myself to work and that hasn’t always happened.  There are a host of reasons provided – lack of machines, lack of salt, exhausted staff, the duration and severity of the cold spell etc – but I can’t help thinking every time I hear another excuse that this is just bad planning.

And this is not acceptable – we deserve better.  And I feel justified in demanding that because I know that in my professional life, gem delivers better.  gem manages a number of accounts that experience pronounced seasonal fluctuations in volume from the travel, technology, telecoms, retail and media industries.  We create surge management strategies for a number of scenarios for all our clients – in some cases, strategies can be activated within minutes, others within 24 hours.  We expect the unreasonable, we plan for the unexpected and we prioritise for the important contacts.

This might mean that we need to monitor community forums for our technology clients to identify and proactively address any emerging issues for our clients.  It might mean liaising with the operations sides of our telecoms clients to ensure that we understand any problems in the field and disseminate them immediately to their customers.

A good example, we have unfortunately encountered multiple times in the last few years, are security crisis affecting our travel clients which cause us to be both very reactive (handling excess inbound contacts) and also very proactive in dealing with the consequences (making outbound contacts to affected customers, IVR messaging, community forum updates) – manning 24 hour desks, using skill-based routing to direct complex enquiries, setting up triage services, making use of multi-channel communications to minimise handling times and extend our communications reach, using staff that we have previously trained for just such an emergency – in many cases getting all these methods active within 24 hours of the crisis starting.  Our responses then get better over time, not worse.  

We also monitor news sites etc to anticipate any potential problems affecting our customers and immediately start working on managing anticipated surges in volumes – we don’t wait until the cars hit the ditches!

www.the-gem.com

This mentoring and development of people is key to gem’s success also.  We invest a lot of time and energy in recruiting the right people with the right attitude – can-do, energetic, emotionally intelligent, passionate about gem and our clients.  We then develop their ability and give them work and life experiences that will improve them as people and increase their contributions to our company.   On the X-Factor, contestants are expected to publicly sing and dance.  gem develop people without making a song and dance of it.  How?

• We coach people and have won national training awards for our training and coaching programs.
• We foster an entrepreneurial “can-do” attitude within the company and encourage people to take personal responsibility for delivering a great customer experience and adding value to our client’s businesses.  We have even supported our employees in setting up their own businesses.
• We run frequent fund-raising activities with selected charities that encourage social responsibility and develop leadership skills in our work-force
• We support our staff in gaining external qualifications such as ILM, CIPD, CIM.
• We involve our middle management team in strategic decisions and ensure that they are bought into the direction of the company.
• We are Investors in People (and have recently achieved Gold Standard Status in IIP).
• We have fun – locking our CEO up in jail for charity (who wouldn’t enjoy that!), running LAN parties, abseiling down hotels, firewalking, movie nights

Finally, we hold awards nights – our own “live finals” to identify the X-Factor within gem – recognising that little bit extra that makes the difference.    Here, our staff dress up (á la X-Factor) and have a ball of a time recognising achievement within gem – awards that have been voted for by our staff as well as recognised by our senior team.  We don’t ask them to sing and the Karaoke that often accompanies this event would probably be ridiculed by Simon Cowell et al but the standard is usually better than Jedward.    Now, I’m no Danii Minogue but I think we do a good job here.

Recognition is important to everyone, no matter what their age.  And gem does their best to provide our own “Barnaby Bear” recognition. 

Every week gem highlight in our weekly staff newsletter “High Fives” – recognition from managers/peers to staff who have achieved something special or delivered above and beyond the call of duty.   Every month, gem applaud and award our high performers at our monthly management meetings.   And each year we have our gemmys – an award night that gives the Oscars a run for their money, hosted by two of our staff (dressed for the red carpet) who should really be in show-business and with most of the categories voted for by all our staff.   

gem also goes to a lot of effort to recognise and reward good ideas.  A recent restructuring of our BIG Ideas scheme means that we now recognise and reward ideas at multiple stages – bronze, silver, gold and platinum – depending upon how adopted and successful the new idea is within the company. 

And we know that all this recognition is valued by our staff through the responses we receive in our regular employee surveys.  

It’s also nice for the company to receive industry recognition for our efforts – recently we have either won or are finalists in national competitions for Coaching and Training, Innovative Use of Technology, Employer of the Year, Outsourced Contact Centre of the Year, Professional of the Year, Action in the Community and Customer Service Team of the Year.  As an employer and a provider of quality contact centre services we value any industry accolade that we get and know that it re-emphasises to our employees and clients that they made the right choice to work with us. 

I also know that many of our clients run similar schemes.  I recently visited a client site and sitting on one of their desks was the most enormous silver trophy (this impressive display of bling proving that the Celtic Tiger may be down but it’s definitely not out).   Every month the employee of the month gets to display the trophy and every visitor notices and comments.  I was proudly told about their achievements the previous month.  

Barnaby Bear was only with us for the weekend and has now been returned to the class-room where all the pupils can clearly see him and hope that this weekend they too will be considered the “Best in Class”. 

I recently approached Ryanair’s “bag drop” desk at Stansted Airport just before the flight closed.  They took my bag and paperwork and asked for my passport.  As I bent down to retrieve my passport from my bag they closed the flight with no apologies and no respect for me as a customer or even as a fellow human being.  The decision cost me £100 and resulted in me spending an extra five hours in Stansted Airport.  But what was worse was the “I don’t care” attitude displayed by the Ryanair staff at the airport.  I felt completely devalued as a customer.

Ryanair would no doubt claim that they have processes to follow, timetables to meet, costs to minimise and “what do you expect for a £19.99 flight?” (although with all their extra charges my flight costs were considerably more than first advertised).  My response is that I still expect to be treated with respect.

Thankfully, gem’s experience as a contact centre indicates that most other companies do respect their customers. 

Customers want good value and a good customer experience, they want you to empathise with their problems, they want you to provide them with solutions, in many cases they want to interact with a real human being (especially where the problem is complex or urgent or emotive) and they want to be treated with respect.  And if they don’t get the right customer experience they will leave – a recent YouGov service stated that 61% of customers will abandon a purchase if the service is less than satisfactory and an Accenture survey this year showed that 20% of customers will immediately leave a company on receiving a poor customer experience.

gem’s corporate clients understand this and recognise that delivering a good customer experience and building customer loyalty is vital to their long-term success.  They also care about what their customers say, both directly via e-mail or voice and indirectly through community blogs and support sites which is why gem spend a lot of time gathering customer intelligence for our clients, analysing it for patterns and trends and using it to suggest improvements to our client’s services and products as well as improving how we support their customers.  gem care about our customers and our clients care about their customers. 

Ryanair is not one of our clients.

This is much more than just speaking the language, it’s appreciating national differences, interpreting cultural nuance and, in the contact centre world, designing and delivering customer experiences that are appropriate for each nationality.

At gem we manage customer contacts with consumers from almost 30 countries and some of our experiences in designing multi-cultural customer experience include:

• Spanish consumers like to talk so make sure you plan for lots of time on the phone but Dutch consumers like “no nonsense, no frills” in their answers, get straight to the point;
• The Swedish language has no word for please and sometimes that means they can seem more blunt than they mean to be but they still like you to be empathetic about their problem
• The Dutch like you to be informal in your communications with them, the Germans formal
• The French like you to spend some time apologising for any inconvenience whereas Americans and Indians tend to want you to go directly to the point

However, above all, everyone (no matter what their nationality) wants to be treated like an individual. gem is an interesting place to work with almost 50% of our staff multi-lingual and over 95% of them native speakers. We thrive on diversity and delivering a multi-lingual, multi-cultural service which recognises and respects diversity.

Meanwhile, at home, my five year old daughter is demonstrating her own diversity and can say “Hola”, “Fantastico”, “Gracias”, “Me llamo Aisling” and “Vámonos”. She tells me she’s Spanish. Should I tell her that it takes more than speaking the language?

Ciao.