Groups Suck
What I’ve found is that sending one email and cc’ing multiple people routinely fails at generating anything. They all stare at each other and assume someone else who is less busy than them will take care of it. And after all, it’s just the blog. It’s not like the earth will stop turning if we don’t post something.

Oops, You Made a Committee
Worse, they’ll turn it into a committee. “Should we be talking about this?” or “Shouldn’t we do more research around this?” or “Perhaps we can come to consensus. Let’s call a meeting.”

Bang, your blog post is dead. Get out the shovel and bury it.

Individuals Do Things
The more successful route is to send a very similar email to one person at a time, asking them to weigh in on something. In it, I usually emphasize a few points:

1. Minimal effort: I just need a paragraph response. I’ll handle the rest.
2. No writing: They can swing by my desk and we’ll write it together.
3. Flattery: They said something about this to me earlier that was BRILLIANT, but I can’t get it quite right. What was it again?
4. Secrecy: I’m working with a few other people, but I’m really interested in YOUR opinion.
5. Leverage + Flattery: I talked to your boss, and s/he couldn’t say enough about how much you totally understand this topic.

The problem with this route is when you’re fishing, and the person maybe isn’t the best resource. And they forward the email to someone else you’ve already sent it to.

This is just one of the many ways to get people off their ass to write something. I’m sure I’ll cover a few more.

Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com

Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It

For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.

For example, what’s the best way to transfer a problem to the right person at Qwest? Perhaps when the social media team is small, transferring a customer to another department or to the normal customer service group makes sense. But once everyone in customer service has social media access, transfers should follow the normal problem resolution processes.

Use Your Social Media Team to Teach and Build

Starting small will also allow the social media team at Qwest to help develop the processes and technologies needed to integrate this technology to the Qwest CRM systems (the holy grail of customer service and social media).

The team will also be able to train other customer service reps in the ins-and-outs of Twitter as a medium (in the same way that the phone has ins-and-outs, and email has ins-and-outs, etc).

Social Media is Broadcast Customer Service

In a normal customer service situation, typically your conversation is relatively private (it’s recorded, but no one’s really going to use it unless things go COMPLETELY WRONG). But with social media, every customer interaction is out there in the open. You’re broadcasting your customer service.

Transparency good. Whining bad.

Thus, if I could make one suggestion to Qwest: tweets that say, “10 minutes until we go home for the night!” make a bad impression. Transparency is great. Whining is not.

Have you seen other examples? Is your company considering it? What questions or concerns do you have?

I’d love to hear other case studies of using social media for customer service.

Here’s why: Putting that point of view and main message right at the top of a web page allows your reader to quickly decide if the information you’re providing is the information they want. If it is, they read on. If it’s not, you haven’t wasted their time.

This concept isn’t really new, but it was driven home to me during a two-day course on presentation and public speaking skills. Putting your point of view and punchline first was one of several skills that overlap between online copywriting and public speaking.

During the seminar from Blue Dragon Communications, we practiced again and again stating our point of view right off the bat. “Point of view, action requested, benefit of the action,” coach Denise Harrington would remind us. Again and again.

When it comes to applying this to online text, copywriters need to remember this sequence because they’re typically funny people. It’s usually the copywriter who’s loudly telling a joke in the office. It’s usually the writer who’s got the amazing story that keeps the clients and co-workers in stitches.

And that’s part of their job. A quiet copywriter is a writer who isn’t testing his ideas, constructions, and interpretations out in the real world.

But when it comes to putting that information online, the punchline and the point must lead. Putting the core of your message first is almost never the way you’d speak casually. But if you’re presenting publicly or writing for the web, you should.