Carnival Cruise Lines One Ups Royal Caribbean with Customer Service

She blew over our houses, tore apart our businesses, flooded our streets and cancelled our San Juan Cruise….Hurricane Irene showed travelers who’s boss. With the threat of Hurricane Irene approaching, popular cruise lines Carnival and Royal Caribbean were forced to leave the San Juan area earlier than scheduled on Sunday August 29th. While Royal Caribbean left 145 of their passengers behind, Carnival made the effort to personally call each one of their 300 travelers to let them know of the early departure. Royal Caribbean guests claimed that they were never contacted by the cruise line about the early departure. With this mishap the social media pages for the two cruise lines have been filled with both positive and negative comments about the situation.

Carnival Cruise Lines’ Facebook page didn’t post any updates about the schedule change on its social media outlet. Instead, they chose to directly call each passenger and offer to give them a complimentary two night’s stay in San Juan as well as a flight to meet the missed cruise ship in the Bahamas.

Royal Caribbean had a different approach. Instead of contacting stranded passengers, they decided to post the changed schedule on their Facebook page. However, due to the decision to provide customer service through their social media outlet, Royal Caribbean dealt with many negative comments to their post such as, “don’t leave your guests stranded blow the horns next time” and “Please make sure you make provisions like Carnival did for all the passengers that don’t go on FACEBOOK and get the message.” The cruise line said they would not offer a deal like Carnival, because the early departure was weather related.

The Cruise Critic Facebook Page took most of the hits from disgruntled passengers. The most intense statements ranging from “Disappointed with our favorite line RCL…really handled poorly… I am thinking they will respond, but it’s going to be too late for many with any sort of apology…silence is never good”, to comments like, “Wow! I am a RCCL fan, but this makes me second guess any future travel with them. Especially after Carnival’s proper response.”

Carnival displayed great customer service, choosing traditional methods of engagement over social media, which showed the most when the cruise’s audiences started posting on Facebook. The personal level of direct calling each cruise member showed that in complicated situations people need one on one contact. Social media is perfect for reaching large amounts of active social network users. Customers who use the networks must actively take the step to log in and go to the site to receive information. In a time crunch situation, no matter how fast a post can be sent, it doesn’t do any good if the audience reciprocating the information isn’t paying attention.

The repercussions on Royal Caribbean have now forced the company to rethink their decision to not compensate their “left behind” passengers. The cruise line has now confirmed they will offer a compensation package to those travelers left behind. However, is this strategy to try and fix things too little too late?

How to Deal with Negative Comments on Your Page

Tip 1: Never Delete a Negative Comment. The #1 rule of responding to social media comments is never to delete a negative post. If you must delete a post, due to certain circumstances such as it’s profane, threatening or violent, provide an explanation on the site so that followers that did see the post can see why it was removed. The best way is to mitigate the situation as much as you can, rather than completely ignoring it.

Tip 2: Address the Problem. Listen to the respondent’s side of the story. More than anything when someone is upset it’s most likely they want to be heard and wish to have the company’s attention on fixing the situation.

Tip 3: Apologize and Fix the Problem. Sounds simple right? That’s because it usually is. Addressing the situation in a calm manner and showing empathy for what the customer is saying can make the difference when resolving a complaint. By reacting quickly with a solution to the person’s problem, the issue can usually be resolved peacefully.

Tip 4: Respond Positively to a Negative Commenter. When other followers can see how you fixed the problem quickly and professionally, it cannot only sustain your reputation but improve it. Not to say having several complaints is going to boost your reputation, but if more than a handful of people are having complaints some company changes may need to be made.

Tip 5: Dilute Negative Comments with Positive Ones. Run campaigns to get customers who have had a great experience, with your business, to post about it. A few negative comments can be overlooked when there are outweighed by positive comments.

Tip 6: Not Everyone is Going to Like What You Say. Accept the fact that not everyone is going to have the most positive experience they can, even when complete customer satisfaction is the goal. Dealing with unhappy customers will happen in any business. As long as you are prepared with a plan on how to deal with customer service issues and negative feedback, a successful social media network can be maintained.

Tip 7: Keep the Conversation Going on the Same Medium. Keep the conversation going on the same medium that the negative comment was posted. For example, if the negative comment was put on Facebook, allow the conversation thread to be seen underneath the complaint. Followers that have already seen the complaint can read how the company dealt with the problem and fixed the situation.

Below is a great example of how a company should respond to a negative comment. The best part about this is that a customer jumps in and defends the company, which shows customer loyalty to other fans reading the page. Another way the company could have improved this situation is to respond stating that they would be sure to emphasize the rescan procedure when someone signs up for the program. Apologize for the inconvenience and satisfy the customers need for a change.

Is there a time when someone posted a negative comment on your company profile? How did you deal with this situation?

You’ve created a social media profile, now what? Unless you are one of the biggest brands in the world such as Coca-Cola or Apple, people most likely haven’t heard of you and attracting brand advocates is going to be difficult. This means it will take some work to get noticed and as well as keeping visitors coming back.  However, with these easy to follow tips, you’ll be on your way to success.

Leave Your Ego at Home

Most sites won’t maintain a solid following base if they only put out egocentric content. Avoid this ego trip by providing current content that will allow your followers to gain insight into your business and industry without being plagued with messages and advertisements about your company.

Don’t Advertise

It may sound counterproductive, but you don’t want your postings to sound like you are advertising to your followers.  Just like you don’t like to follow people that talk about every little thing that goes on in their life and never give you a chance to respond, people don’t like to follow a business that is egocentric. People log into Facebook to be entertained and to create and maintain relationships, so sending them your advertisements may make your followers annoyed. If your followers see that all you are posting are things about your company and boasting about what you have accomplished people may get bored and either block or unfollow you.

Provide Interesting Content

Instead of creating all of your posts to let people know about what is going on at your company, use this space to post about things that relate to the industry you’re in. This means, for instance, if you’re in the music industry and there is news about a band, you can inform your followers of the current event. This could also be something as simple as hearing that a band is giving away a free song download; you can let your audience know about it and provide a link to the download site. (If possible, it might be a good idea to make the link open in a new tab to ensure the customer isn’t straying away from your site).

Stay tuned– Part 2 will include the final three steps that may help bring your social media marketing plan full circle without drowning your audience in egocentric posts.

Part 3:  How can I harness the power of Social Media Marketing?

To answer this critical question, we need to start by understanding that the social media landscape is at best chaotic, made up of a number of elements, and continually evolving.  Here is a thumbnail sketch, a current “snap shop” of how I see the social media landscape.

The Elements:

• Social Networks like MySpace, Facebook & Classmates.com – enable users to make and find “friends”, express who they are with pictures, music, etc., keep up and reconnect with old classmates and friends

• Video Sharing Sites like YouTube & Flickr – enable users to manage and share their photos

• Social Directories like iTunes (podcasts), Best of the Web (blogs), iBlogBusiness (business blogs), and iBizRadio (business podcasts) – make social media like blogs and podcasts available on the Internet

• Networking Sites like LinkedIn & Merchant Circle – enable people to strengthen and extend their networks and contacts

• Bookmarking Sites like del.icio.us and Digg – allow people to discover and share content

• Social Media like blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter), audio/video/photographic media, and podcasts

I provided the above list to enable just a glimpse of what’s available in the social media landscape.  It is not intended to be a complete list, but just a sample of some of the most popular sites and technologies.  So, now that we’ve taken a glimpse of the social media landscape, let’s discuss how to proceed to harness its power for business success.

One size doesn’t fit all.

A company’s social media marketing (much like a public relations or multi-media advertising campaign using Internet/TV/radio/print) has to be carefully planned, including defining objectives and measuring success.  In addition, some of the most successful companies using Social Media Marketing (such as Disney and Frito-Lay) are combining Social Media Marketing with their other traditional and online marketing thrusts.  The key elements of a social media marketing plan would be guided by the company’s objectives and typically include one or more of the following:

• Establishing the company’s presence in key Social Media Networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.  I feel it is critical to set up a profile to claim your company name before someone else does.

• Utilizing social media “tools,” such as blogs, podcasts, viral video, viral articles, and “widgets” (i.e. small software applications intended to spread virally).

• Building a social “community” for the company’s products and services in key social media networks.

• Upgrading the company’s Website to include a Media News Room (i.e. links to its social media networks, online videos & podcasts; blogs; a LinkedIn invitation; del.icio.us and Digg bookmark links and press releases and articles).  In effect, the Media News Room becomes an expanded version of what many Websites currently call the “News Room”, which typically only provided content on its traditional media services.

• Measuring results – such as downloads of a viral video or podcast, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, “friends” on Facebook or a  social media monitoring “clipping service” for a comprehensive measurement.

The Payoff

It’s a formidable task to have a comprehensive Social Media Marketing Plan.  However, the payoff is potentially enormous and includes:

• Achieving a mass media reach similar to television

• Building a community around your brand

• Engaging your clients/prospects

• Immersing your clients/prospects in your brand

• Fostering communication & networking

• Selling without “selling”

• Developing  a platform for other forms of marketing such as viral marketing (example: viral video)

• Supporting other Internet marketing thrusts, such as link building for search engine optimization campaigns

• Supporting traditional marketing thrusts (i.e. a fully integrated marketing campaign)

I believe Social Media Marketing represents the beginning of a major new movement in business communications.  It embodies the best elements of marketing, advertising, and public relations.  I also believe those companies with the foresight to become early adopters will reap the greatest benefits.

I’m looking forward to developing a social media relationship with you!

Welcome to iBlogMarketing, an online Internet marketing blog updated by TMA E-Marketing.  We launched this blog early 2006 as a place to share online marketing articles and resources.  As you may have noticed, this appears to be the first post to iBlogMarketing.  Hence, if you are reading this post 06’, you may be wondering where all the content is.  To keep a long story short, iBlogMarketing has been through a series of several sever migrations which in turn had affected much of the quality content that we had provided.  Additionally, we decided to change the scope of iBlogMarketing to be more future forward thinking versus providing online marketing tips and resources (which is now located on our sister online marketing blog.)

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