Monday, July 30, 2012

Doing Nothing is Worse than Doing Nothing


A lack of a Twitter plan seems to be biting NBC at the Olympics.

The NY Times recently discussed fan’s anger over tape delays and live streaming issues, coming together in a torrent of complaints tagged by #nbcfail.

Not only does NBC not seem to have a fire-fighting response plan to extinguish the blaze of annoyed viewers, its own employees seem to be going rouge: NBC’s chief digital officer re-tweeted an originally Piers Morgan tweet, stating, “the medal for most Olympic whining goes to everyone complaining about what happens every 4 yrs., tape delay.” Posting your own annoyed tweet is not-so-great a plan towards winning over annoyed customers.

Because of the broad-based appeal of the Olympics, taming annoyed viewers could have been a great chance for NBC to respond to a wide demographic of their viewers. If tape delay is always a complaint, NBC should have come up with a plan ahead of the Olympics to 1) address anticipated social media complaints (via pre-set procedures to apologize to customers) and 2) come up with a plan to actually avoid the ire - perhaps consider creating a “prime” online membership where people pay in order to see events ahead of primetime viewing. Or decide that winning customer goodwill by immediately streaming rather than forcing people to wait until ad-laden prime-time TV is simple worth the cost of any lost prime-time ad eyeballs. 

For streaming issues, an IT problem of the moment, proactively tweet about the issue and your plan to fix the problem. Or pull the classic "apologize and redirect" technique by responding to tweets (or other social media venue complatins) with a "I'm sorry to hear you've experienced delays... we are working on fixing the issue by [...] and should have streaming resumed by [...] time"

Either way, NBC seems to be doing the worst option: nothing. 


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