For Your Edification
Posted by Charlie Trotter on July 5th, 2007
Well, I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July and are reading your emails this morning with all your digits. Mine was excellent despite my back seizing up while I wheeled the smoker out of the garage. He fought me, but the sign clearly read, “No Smoking: Violators will be wheeled out.” BA-DUM! Get it?
But SRSLY, folks.
It’s our custom to keep up with all the bits of the social media we can manage so we can make right-on recommendations to you. One of the communities I’m in is on a video sharing site called Vimeo. It’s very different from YouTube in that you are only allowed to upload a video you made, no TV shows, no commercials, no viral marketing. It’s genuinely just a bunch of folks sharing their videos with each other and their families. They have excellent privacy options if you don’t want everyone to see everything (i.e. baby’s first bath is only for family).
But I’m not just recommending a fun site to surf. They recently redesigned (It’s gorgeous by the way, but not my point either.) and added some new features, and with any major overhaul there comes hiccups. Last Sunday their upload page broke and no one could upload their videos. They got it fixed and the site’s creator wrote a blog post apologizing for the hiccup. His apology and the responses are what I’d like to recommend your reading. The own-uppins from the founder and the love and understanding from the community is an excellent example of cultivating a loyal community. But it doesn’t read like a guy following “best practices” for web community management, but rather like a guy honestly responding to a group of people he’s built a relationship with.
Here’s what I saw when I logged in for my Monday morning surf: Blazing Notification. It was right there in my face when I logged in, not buried in an internal page.
Here’s a little snip of the post:
I want to personally apologize for the problems with the site in the past few days, especially with uploads. It’s the result of a small, careless technical error that had wide-reaching consequences. We screwed up.
And the closing sentence:
If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below and I will address them directly.
Which he did. You can read the whole thing here and see the responses and his directly answering their questions.
So, who cares, right? They aren’t a credit union. But they are members of a community. And the people in charge of that community are very reachable and very visible and shoot straight with their members. Can credit unions learn something from this? Can your CEOs be more reachable, more visible? When you need to address your members, can you do it easily and conspicuously so they don’t have to hunt for it? When they have questions, is it easy for them to get those questions to you and hope for a direct response from someone, or are the sent to an FAQ page?
Bonus Round! Because I have neither the emotional nor social nerve-endings that stop most people from making fools of themselves, I’ll give you my latest video contribution: Don’t Go No Farther (with out-takes).
Have good days.
Charlie,
To answer your question… YES! I know plenty of credit union CEOs and VPs and so on, and 95% are AWESOME! They are funny, smart and glib. They are great fun to be around and to spend time with. I have sat in meetings and heard a CEO say, “Look, if it isn’t something that is going to benefit our members – then we aren’t going to do it.” I felt my heart swell with pride.
These are fun people, but if they ever have to write a letter – it is sanitized, scrutinized and legalized. It is a piece of dry stale toast with no water in sight.
I love the CEO of Jet Blue who went on Letterman and said, “Hey you know, we screwed up and we will do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again. I am embarrassed that we failed our guests in this way” Well he might not have said that exactly, but thats the way I remember it. He seemed sincere and genuine and I dug it!
Lets just fess up, apologize, be sincere, shake hands and agree to get together for coffee together later – like the adults that we are. I am a big boy – I can take it. People make mistakes. Just let me know what you are going to do to prevent it in the future. Please?
Charlie,
As always, a fabulous read.
Diana Dykstra is the perfect example of a CEO who truly cares. Check out the home page of their site. http://www.sffirecu.org/
It really is Diana that gets those emails and she responds to every single one of them.
She truly cares about the community of San Francisco Fire Fighters.
Charlie, I totally agree with everything you have written here.
More importantly, based on your jammin’ video, have you ever heard the Buddy Guy & Junior Wells acoustic disc “Alone & Acoustic?” If not, you should check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Acoustic-Buddy-Guy/dp/customer-reviews/B000000A04
Own up to your mistakes.
I think we invest so much energy and time sustaining a great service, that we neglect owning up to it when things go wrong – sometimes praying and hoping that our customers/members won’t notice.
In reality, our members are quite willing to forgive if we just communicate as vimeo did. It keeps us real, authentic.
It’s kinda like your Don’t Go No Further (with out-takes). Wouldn’t stand a whole hour of out-takes, but It’s kinda refreshing to see that you didn’t nail it on your first attempt (btw, loved the song!)
i really don’t get the joke. is a “smoker” a grill?
@ Joe: it’s cool. The joke was lame. But, yes, a smoker is a type of grill. Mine is a big steel barrel with a little steel barrel on the side where you build a fire and slow-cook meats ‘n’ things with long, low heat and smoke from wet, burning wood like mesquite or hickory or applewood flavors the meats wonderfully.
I just got really hungry for some BBQ.
@ Denise: That’s awesome.
@ Christopher: Boy do you know how to begin a comment! Thanks. And, I’ve heard of the Buddy/Junior album but don’t have it yet. I’m bumping it to the top of my list now. Thanks for the reminder.
@ Tony & Caleb: Great comments, thanks.