Yesterday I got engaged. It went like this. I have been looking for a new 64 degree wedge with a bounce of less than 5 degrees. Stay with me non golfers. As part of my search I sent out a tweet, it read as follows:
“Need best price and place to buy a Vokey wedge 64 degrees loft, less than 5 degrees bounce, pref oil can finish?”
I inserted the brand name Vokey in my tweet because in my humble 13 handicap opinion, they make the best wedges in town. Now within 13 minutes I received a response, which taking into account the fact that I was on a train with intermittent reception on my iPhone, Twitter was up and down a bit yesterday and that somebody had to receive my tweet and get back to me was pretty impressive. Great customer service I thought. Then when I read the response I was disappointed; twice over. The response was as follows:
@jonkeefe, Our new Spin Milled 64 degree wedge is only offered with 7 degrees of bounce
My first let down was that Vokey didn’t make what I wanted. Despite this, and because of our interest here at KMP in social media engagement, I was disappointed that Vokey didn’t maximise the engagement opportunity in their response. They had me, there and then, giving out big buying signals but there was no alternative offered or a even short URL presented for me to click on and see what else was available.
At KMP we are talking with clients about the process of engagement and as part of that specifically how to get the most out of engagement. Ultimately all engagement should be focussed on a set of objectives. It is an extensive subject in itself but for the purpose of this post the lesson to be learned is that as part of your engagement guidelines your team must be trained in reading and responding with the correct information to the qualitative as well as the quantitative content of a request/post/comment or tweet. In my tweet above the quantitative bit was the type of wedge etc, the qualitative bit, that is as important, was that I was wanting to buy something! Vokey got the former but didn’t react successfully to the latter. Don’t make the same mistake.
