social media is like sex

I was trying to explain social media to a friend in advertising the other day. She's one of the smartest art directors I know, who can ferret out meaning from the most obtusely written brief.

"I don't get social media," she said. "What the heck is it, anyway?"

I told my friend not to feel bad. Lots people still don't get social media. Even those who claim that they do. I quoted something making the rounds on twitter recently: Social media is like teen sex. Everyone says they're getting it, but few really do. (An adaptation of another tweet from a Google analytics guru.)

As I began describing Twitter streams and Facebook widgets and analytics and vlogs, her eyes glazed over. And I realized another reason social media is like sex. You can talk all you want about the mechanics to people. But until they do it, they can't know what all the fuss is about.

Last week Joseph Jaffee wrote a piece on social media for Adweek. Many commenters accused him of being condescending to ad agency types by writing a primer too basic for them. Some of the comments were personally insulting and Alan Wolk referred to this backlash in an article on a new era of meanspiritedness on Madison Avenue. Surely, for negative commenters, the piece was too basic. But I think those of us immersed in SM often overestimate the degree of conversance normal people have with it.

Ad agency revenue models are still tied to client spending on media. And social media is still perceived to be free. (Fred Wilson called it "earned" media, but isn't that PR? How about the more robust CGM--Consumer Generated Media.) Not surprising if creatives at global AORs are still encouraged to think of social media as just one more shiny charm to add to their campaign bracelet.

problems with twitter? welcome to the twilight zone

You may have heard that Twitter is revolutionizing customer service, providing the platform whereby companies riddled with terrible reputations for customer service are now redeeming their good names. Comcast, Home Depot, Dell and others have set up Twitter accounts and assigned employees to lurk online, browsing Twitter Search for disgruntled consumers having trouble with their service, enabling the company to swoop in to solve a complaint instantly or put the complainer in touch with someone who can help.

You'd think that Twitter, ultimately responsible for changing the customer service paradigm, would be at the forefront of customer service themselves. You would be wrong.

A week ago, my twitter account began to have problems. At first, things went well. Help on Twitter's dashboard launched me into a website with the promising name of Get Satisfaction. But, it turned out to be a dispiriting place-- a repository for complaints about not just Twitter but "thousands of companies" where questions go unanswered for weeks, even even though the site claims "Twitter is here! 21 people are listening and participating!" A complaint similar to mine posted 2 months ago is followed by a happy face inviting me "to be the first to reply!" A sidebar asks the dispiriting question: "Know any helpful people? Email this question to them!"

It takes some time to post my complaint because, as is par for Twitter, parameters must be strictly adhered to. The first is: Give your problem a great title. Really? Seems just when your service is pissing me off, Twitter, is not the right moment to ask me to be creative. But. Whatever. I fill in a description of the problem, ("one or two paragraphs work best!"), come up with tags (couldn't Twitter make a bot do this?) then comes the most annoying parameter of all. "One last thing before you post…how does this problem make you feel?" My choices are four emoticons (I hate emoticons) : smiley, sad, serious, tongue sticking out. After choosing one (you can guess) I must "describe my feelings in words" to "increase the likelihood of my problem getting noticed." Really? Questions aren't answered in queue, Twitter decides which to answer depending on how people articulate their feelings?

Luckily, I must have chosen the right words, because my problem is addressed within the hour. Unfortunately, the answer is: we can't answer this, you have to post this problem on the twitter help site. But I thought this was the twitter help site? I log onto the new URL provided and go through the "fill in the boxes" thing again.

Days go by. (Days in twitter-time are equivalent to centuries.) I log back into Get Satisfaction (which must be the world's most ironically named website) to ask when I might be hearing from Twitter. It takes several more days for them to respond. Vaguely: "Unfortunately, it really does take some time before we see a response from Twitter Support because they're dealing with a backlog."

Twitter has no customer service phone number (naturally) but they do post a snail mail address. So I sit down and write an old-fashioned letter. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out that snail-mail is what it takes to get Twitter's attention? It's been 7 days and still no word from them. C'mon, Twitter. If you care about users (and some say that you don't) why not put some of that $15 million of venture into dealing with the customers you already have?

UPDATE
Twitter's @crystal (who kindly replied in a comment) worked doggedly to fix the problem and solved it w/in 24 hours. Thanks, Crystal! The lesson? If you've got a problem with twitter, forget their help desk. Post your problem to @crystal to Get Satisfaction.