What an amazing Shell Houston Open weekend!

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Maggie

At Marion Montgomery, we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have such awesome clients. This past weekend we got to work with the folks from Shell Oil, the Houston Golf Association and Redstone Companies on the Shell Houston Open — and were reminded yet again to thank our lucky stars!

The Shell Houston Open festivities kicked off last month with our first ever Shell Houston Open tweetup at Houston’s beloved Coffee Groundz. JR Cohen was our unofficial host with the most and the awesome PR folks from Shell gave away passes to the tournament. We grilled burgers for everyone and used the event to start spreading the word about all of the things the tournament does for Houston charities and the Houston economy as a whole.

On Tuesday night of tournament week, we got to attend the Legacy Dinner where Shell honors someone for their humanitarian and volunteer service. Last year, First Lady Barbara Bush was honored for her work fighting illiteracy, and this year it was none other than the legendary Emmitt Smith! Pat and Emmitt Smith Charities strives to create educational experiences and enrichment opportunities for underprivileged children. It was a super fun evening and one of our SHO Social Media Ambassadors, Monica Danna, even got in a high five with Emmitt! To top it off, ESPN’s Mike and Mike were there, because Shell had earlier auctioned off a chance to play with them in the Shell Houston Open Pro Am. The money raised by the auction — $48,500! — went to Mike and Mike’s favorite charity, the V Foundation for Cancer Research.

So what was the actual tournament like for the MMI crew?

Leading up to and during the tournament, one of our main jobs was to be the liaison between the Shell Houston Open core charities and the media. MMIer Sarah actually wrote a post on the SHOandTell blog a few months ago about how fulfilling and moving it is to get to work with the charities. Did you know that since 1992, the tournament has raised almost 50 million for charities? Amazing.

During the tournament we worked directly with the producer Shell hired to cover the event, creating end-of-day recap videos that would be posted to ShellTube, the company’s internal YouTube-like site. I had a lot of fun working with Evan (the producer) on the videos. We focused on the charity aspect of the tournament as well as what the tournament brings to Shell as a company.

When we weren’t managing charity interviews or filming with Evan, we were walking from hole to hole and tweeting up a storm and running with all things social media.

A special thank you to Paul from The Loop Scoop, the CultureMap team, Monica, Chris Pitre and Fiery James for coming out to play with the MMI team. We had a blast with y’all!!

And to Shell Oil, Houston Golf Association and Redstone — thanks for hosting this amazing event that does so much good for so many! See you next year!

SXSW: Customer Service in a 140 Character World

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Maggie

Gone are the days of traditional customer support. In a world of Twitter, Facebook, and customer complaint sites like GetSatisfaction, customers are now jumping online to vent and publicize their customer support issues. But does it work for everyone and can complex customer service issues really be resolved within a 140…

Gone

Time for some more MMI live from SXSW Coverage! And it’s time to talk Twitter (and a few other things).

Let’s face it. Traditional customer support is out the window with the advent of sites like Twitter, Facebook and GetSatisfaction. Customers can hop online from anywhere and vent about products or services in real time. Since we encourage our clients to engage with their customers via these platforms, I jumped at the chance to attend Customer Service in a 140 Character World!

The panel was made up of Twitter customer service experts Frank Eliason with Comcast (@comcastcares), Lois Townsend (@ltownsend) with HP, Toby Richards (@TobyRichards) with General Motors and Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) with the Altimeter. The panel was moderated by Caroline McCarthy.

What I liked most about the panel was that there were differing opinions about Twitter. There was a lot to take in! For example, Lois said that HP considers Twitter a way to connect but not converse. If someone complains about your product on Twitter, reach out to them and tell them where to go and be their virtual concierge. As soon as she was done with her explanation, Frank jumped in to totally disagree. If you follow @comcastcares, you know they definitely treat Twitter as a dialogue.

There was also great debate about who handles online customer service… Is it your customer service team or your PR team? There was a consensus among the panelists that BOTH teams need to be involved. Your customer service team needs to be reaching out to those customers that need help while your PR team can monitor the conversation going on about your product and offer relevant information to followers.

The question was asked; what happens when you get someone with a huge Twitter following and a vast number of fans tweeting super negative things about your brand?

The response from the panel was pretty clear. Eventually this is going to happen to your brand and it actually doesn’t take someone with a million followers to effect your brand. In social media, anything can go viral. Always treat people with complaints well. When something bad happens, leverage that by showing people you are responsive and open about the problem and willing to help get their issues resolved. This approach goes a long way to helping turn that unhappy customer into a super fan.

Frank did make one really great point during this part of the conversation. He said “transparency doesn’t always mean say yes to the customer.” He goes on and says that “transparency means that you are listening, responding and being open with your customers. You can’t give everyone free cable just because they complain about it online.”

Here are the biggest takeaways I got from the panel:

It’s important to establish listening systems
Empower your staff to act quickly by creating a best practices guideline
Be genuine
You still need traditional customer service measures
It’s okay to stop responding when someone becomes a troll (some people are just mean)
Integrate. Integrate. Integrate.
Link to solutions
Keep your eyes on where your customers are going
BE THERE!

Tomorrow is the last day of SXSW so expect another post then. I’m going to be sad to say goodbye to Austin but I’m ready to be home in Houston soon.

MMI Live from SXSW Interactive

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Maggie

I’m in Austin for the SXSW Interactive Festival and I’ll be blogging here live when I finish an interesting panel. Don’t know what SXSW is? Don’t worry. I’m pretty new to the festival too. Last year was actually my first conference.

SXSW Interactive is a technology conference in Austin that features some of the brightest minds in the industry. The keynote speakers include Jack Dorsey, the founder of twitter, and Valerie Casey, the Executive Director of the Designers Accord.

I just finished a session called “Beyond Barbecue: The Future of Corporate Culture” with Mallory Messina, one of the culture reps from Southwest Airlines and it was awesome. The fact she opened by singing a song about the power of love definitely helped.

So what is corporate culture, according to Southwest Air? Your corporate culture is what you sell to the people inside of your organization while your product is what you sell to your public. Your company culture is about how you and your employees live everyday and how you run your business.

At Southwest, the culture was designed with the number one customer in mind–the employee.

Yes. You read that right. At Southwest they consider their employees number one. The customer is always right and that customer is their team. All 35,000 employees are responsible for the company culture. Southwest believes if their employees are happy, they will treat customers well and by extension, their customers will be happy.

Southwest has some really great tenants for maintaining their corporate culture.

Hire on attitude, not on skill. The three most important attributes Southwest looks for are a servants heart, a warrior spirit and a fun-loving attitude.

They communicate openly and transparently. Every single employee knows what is going on with the company.

Everyone wants to be recognized. Southwest has several recognition programs in place and they think saying THANK YOU to their team is number one.

At MMI we think company culture is really important too, so we love what Southwest is doing!

Marketers and Geeks unite!

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