Twitter, Second Life, Mafia Wars: Enterprise-Grade Business Tools or Silly Toys for Business Professionals?
Twitter is on top of the world. Twitter is the soup de jour. Twitter is the new black. Twitter is the prom queen and the homecoming king. Twitter is, dare I say, its own religion. Yet in the back of my mind the question remains, is Twitter really a useful business tool, or is it just yet another toy for stressed-out business professionals?
There's probably no easy way to say this without incurring the ire of the #scrm and #MonTwit crowd, and being branded as a heretic in the social CRM blogsphere. So instead of tip-toeing around, I will bravely come out and say it: "Read my lips. I have never Twitted (well, except maybe that one time in college, but I didn't actually inhale)."
I remember just a few years ago everyone was saying that Second Life was going to become the next big thing in Customer Service. Journalists were covering it more than the current Tiger Wood's scandal, and prominent CRM analyst chided CRM software vendors who didn't support it. Today of course no one even talks about Second Life anymore. Today it's Twitter. And I suspect tomorrow it will be something else, perhaps one of the many new Facebook applications that are cropping up and gaining huge followings such as Mafia Wars, FarmVille, FishVille, CaféWorld, Restaurant City, or Roller Coaster Kingdom. Ah yes, soon enough analyst will be scolding companies for not having an online presence in Mafia Wars or Roller Coaster Kingdom.
Whatever happened to Second Life?
Ok, so invariably someone reading this is going to be a huge fan of Second Life (SL) and say something like, "John, you're an idiot. I love SL. You need to get a RL." Fair enough. But before anyone gets too upset, let me be clear, I have nothing against Second Life per se. I think it is a perfectly fine form of entertainment for people who need a wee break from work, school, and other trappings of "real life". My problem is with the pundits who extolled Second Life as the next platform for customer service.
Just a couple of years ago Second Life was all the rage. Leading business publications like Business Week, Information Week, and CNN Money featured it weekly. Analyst and consulting firms considered it as a prerequisite for companies who were serious about customer service. Even traditionally stodgy, conservative powerhouses like IBM and SAP jumped on board, buying islands and holding ribbon-cutting ceremonies for their virtual Second Life headquarters. But alas, the Second Life was no field of dreams. Unlike the Hollywood script promise, "If you build it, they will come", companies built - but no one came. Even at its peak, if you strolled through the Second Life virtual offices of any major company on any given day, you might run into an occasional penguin or dominatrix walking around lost - but there were no lines at the virtual help desk of Second Lifers waiting to speak with virtual customer service agents. That was two years ago. Today, even the penguins and dominatrixes are gone from the corporate lobbies.
Honestly I never saw a great potential for conducting business on Second Life and I ferociously disagreed with journalist and analyst who insisted that any company who didn't join Second Life would be left behind. I was never really sure whether Second Life was some kind of video game, social network, both, or neither. But it was definitely not an E-Commerce or E-Service platform. And let's be perfectly honest. After a long day of work, people who log on to a virtual reality environment to relax and have fun are probably not interested in sitting through an online Webinar about Blade Server Racks, Desktop Virtualization, Vitamin Supplements, or whatever companies are peddling.
Even though I didn't see much potential for Second Life as a business tool, I was at least curious to find out what all the fuss was about. So I created an account, designed a cool-looking avatar (a slightly taller, tanner, more muscular, shirtless version of myself - with devil horns and tail for added effect) and got started. Half an hour later I gave up. I could never really figure out how the controls worked and I ended up stuck on an island wandering in circles, occasionally getting accosted (perhaps even molested) by half-human, half-animal avatars. I understand that some people love Second Life. However, personally I would agree with one guy who summed it up by saying "Half the time you're just wandering around talking to weirdos".
Twitter - Glorified Internet Forum Without any of the Useful Discussion Board Features?
To me Twitter is what happens when you take an online discussion board and remove all of the structure, organization, and rules and policies - and then throw a search engine on top (that could arguably be a good thing or bad thing depending on your perspective). I personally view Twitter a bit like TMZ - the celebrity-news gossip web site and television show. Both Twitter and TMZ allow people to stalk (ahem, "follow") celebrities and pop-culture icons like Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, Lance Armstrong, Paul Greenberg, President Obama. Which is fine. And fun. But is Twitter really a professional-strength business tool? Or is Twitter more akin to one of those fun, holiday-themed web Sites that lets you super-impose your own face into a video of dancing Elf?
Sure, in all fairness, Twitter is a great for gathering information, conducting research, and keeping current with fast-moving topics and trends. In this respect it is as - or more - useful than Wikipedia or Google. But can Twitter really cross over and make the transition to a professional-strength business tool? And more importantly, as consumers, do we really want companies with whom we do business with once or twice a year sending us daily spam-tweets? We get bombarded with hundreds of advertisements a day - on the radio on the drive to work, on the Internet while reading daily news and blogs, and in the evening watching television. Do we really want to open up yet another channel for the marketers to invade our personal lives - on perhaps the last private device we still have, our cell phones?
Which Brings me to the Next Point: Don't Stalk Your Customers on Twitter! Just Pick Up the $#@! Telephone When They Call
Michael Maoz from Gartner hit the nail on the head back in May 7, 2009 with an article he wrote entitled, "Why your Twitter and Social CRM efforts will fail". Maoz brought up an incredibly brilliant point that companies have spent tremendous amounts of effort and money to distance customers by offloading them to self-service sites and external online communities - and now ironically those same companies are spending additional time and effort to try and build integration in order to listen to what those off-loaded customers are saying. But if we really want to "listen" to what our customers are saying, we don't need to stalk (ahem, "follow") them on Twitter. We don't need to eavesdrop and monitor their Facebook conversations between them and their mother, co-workers, and old lost (but re-found) high school flames and college beer-drinking buddies. All we have to do is pick up the telephone the next time they try to call us with a question, a request for help, or a technical issue. That's right. Instead of sending them into IVR phone tree hell and berating them with incessant prompts to visit our Web site for faster (self) service - we just need to pick up the damn phone. Crazy isn't it?
Ok, who wants to comment? Feel free to flame away ;)