Verizon, I hope you’re listening.
by that damn redhead on August 2, 2009
in Case Studies, Social Media, Tech
Recently on Facebook, I posted the story about how Michael Arrington over at TechCruch quit the iPhone. In a nutshell, Arrington loves Google Voice but doesn’t like having two numbers, which is understandable because changing your number is a pain when everybody already has one for you. Soon Google will be introducing number portability, meaning that you can keep your number and transfer it to Google Voice. Well, it turns out that Apple and AT&T are blocking the iPhone app that makes using your one Google Voice number much more seamless between the two. Says Arrington:
Why? Because they absolutely don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing – moving their phone number to Google and using the carrier as a dumb pipe.
So I have to choose between the iPhone and Google Voice. It’s not an easy decision. Except, it sort of is. Google isn’t forcing the decision on me, Apple and AT&T are. So I choose to work with the company that isn’t forcing me to do things their way. And in this case, that’s Google.
I have Google Voice now and so far I like it, but I’ll admit that yes, having two numbers is inconvenient. However, I do not have an iPhone, because my brand loyalty was with Verizon long before it was with Apple. When I posted the story on Facebook, I prefaced it with my own commentary, which was:
I won’t get an iPhone because I refuse to leave Verizon, and I knew that a LOT of iPhone users weren’t happy with AT&T, but whoah … had no idea people were all-out abandoning theirs. I have Google Voice, a different number than my usual one, and now I’m wondering how long it’ll be before I can just transfer my usual number to it.
I had no idea that that little post on Facebook would spark such a conversation among my friends. I know a lot of people who share the same I-love-Apple-but-I-love-Verizon-you-can’t-make-me-switch sentiment as me, but I wasn’t prepared for the comments of some of my friends. Here’s a sampling:
I know, my husband and I just recently had this conversation, and iPhone is cool but I know I cannot beat Verizon! They have proved over and over and over again that they take care of the customers, not to mention the service is great! - Leah McChesney
[My fiancé] & I both have Verizon (LGenV2′s) and we LOVE it. He’s been working in NYC for about 5 years & in that time, we had tried at least 3 different carriers. Verizon is the ONLY company that we didn’t get dropped calls with every five minutes (or less!) I’m sorry, but AT&T SUCKS. I have several friends with iPhones — our calls drop randomly — it’s always THEIR phones dropping the calls, not mine! Even out here in the Poconos, we have friends come to visit & the only company that has a signal consistently out here is Verizon. I’m with them for the long run … I have my iPod Touch … it’s the best of all worlds w/o the pain in the ass service you HAVE to take with the iPhone… – Marilyn
Will have to pry my Verizon service from my cold clammy hands. ATT is the worst. – Michael Spleet
Verizon, are you listening to all this? People love you. People are refusing to get the “Jesus Phone” because they don’t want to give up your service. What are you doing with your marketing to tout this?
I had to Google what Verizon was doing as far as social media. Whaddya know, they have a social media hub that links to their presences elsewhere. Except, I had no idea any of it existed, and I keep up on this kind of stuff. So I decided to take a look at what Verizon was doing on the social web.
The Good News
Verizon has an active community forum where staff and consumers help each other out and discuss things like FAQ, plans, devices, and other products and services. That’s great.
Also, Verizon is blogging. Every day on their PolicyBlog, and at their Verizon At Home blog. Entries look pretty interesting and helpful.
The Bad News
Most entries on the PolicyBlog have zero comments, and they were almost as sparse on the At Home blog. One entry I saw had 24 comments, but the next most popular one had 5, and it went downhill from there.
Nobody is reading them, because nobody knows about them. Here’s why:
As of this writing, Verizon Newsroom has 693 followers on Twitter, FiOSFans have 118 followers (I didn’t know what FiOS was, I had to look that up. It’s only available in New York and New Jersey, apparently), VCast Music has 33 followers. Eric Rabe, the SVP of Verizon Communications – “internet, FiOS TV, all that” is on Twitter with 149 followers.
Facebook
The Verizon Facebook page has 160,000+ fans, but if you think about it, for the nation’s largest network, that’s pretty sad. Even sadder, the Verizon Newsroom Facebook page has 51 fans.
YouTube
There’s a YouTube channel with 10 videos, and it’s been a month since anybody signed in. There is some video on MediaSeed.tv that I stumbled upon accidentally, but if I didn’t know it was there, most people don’t either.
Come on, Verizon. You’re the nation’s largest network. You can do better than this. Here are a few suggestions, from me to you:
Ditch the “Verizon Newsroom”
When I found this a few minutes ago, I was expecting to see a social media newsroom about all things Verizon. [Note: I eventually did find the Verizon Newscenter, which isn't bad for a SMNR, but it wasn't where I expected to find it.] Instead, I saw this page that looks like it’s trying to compete with Yahoo, MSN, and other portals. That’s not your game. You do cell phones and wireless service. Don’t try to compete where you can’t compete. Nobody is going to go to Verizon for news, they’re going to go to get a new phone or change their plan. If I want to change my wireless plan, I don’t go to the Huffington Post, do I?
Don’t call it “PolicyBlog”
That’s misleading and confusing. I was hard pressed to find anything about Verizon policies on the PolicyBlog at all. Call it something Verizon-relevant, but don’t call it something it’s not. Call it “Can you hear us now?” or something. There are 9 authors on that blog, together you can come up with something a little more accurate, I’m sure of it.
Don’t make us register to comment
As a general rule, if people have to take extra steps in order to comment on a blog, they won’t. Oddly, though, the Verizon At Home blog requires registration and the PolicyBlog doesn’t, yet the At Home blog has more comments (though they’re both sparse). Just think of the interaction you’d get on the more popular blog if you didn’t make people jump through that extra hoop.
Please do something about your Twitter problem.
To be fair, Eric Rabe is doing pretty well interacting with people on Twitter. He pimps his blog quite a bit but overall he’s not doing bad. But he could do better if he were listening and responding to when “Verizon” is mentioned, and gain many more followers that way. I also suggest that somebody please do something about http://www.twitter.com/verizon. Is the brand jacked or does someone at Verizon actually have that handle and isn’t doing anything with it? Either way, it’s orphaned and it needs some love.
Integrate online and offline
OK maybe Verizon already does this, I don’t know because I don’t watch TV and I’m not very observant when I go to the Verizon store. But something just as simple as saying “Follow @EricRabe on Twitter” at the end of a commercial will call enough people to action to take notice of other Verizon online stuff. Integrating your marketing campaigns even further can have pretty awesome results.
Listen.
I save for last what you should be doing first. I already suggested the simple act of following a keyword on Twitter. Set up an RSS feed for it. That’s easy. But there are other ways to listen, ways as simple as setting up Google Alerts, blog searches, and stuff like SocialMention to monitor the social web. Since Verizon is ginormous and has the budget, I strongly suggest a professional social search like Radian6 because it’s better and more comprehensive. If you were doing these things, you’d be much more visible on the social web, more people would be commenting on your blogs (hell, more people would know about your blogs), you’d be responding to any concerns people may have with your products and services, and the great customer service I know you have would be bleeding over to your web presence.
If you really were listening, you’d know how awesome you are to people like me who sacrifice having the most kickass phone just because we don’t want to leave you, and you’d be using that to your advantage in your marketing efforts. And you’d be reading this blog post.
Very timely post. Just tonight I was chatting with my neighbor and one of his buddies. One has an iPhone, the other a BlackBerry. They’re both on AT&T, and both were complaining up a storm about how terrible the connection is where I live. In the two years I have lived here, I don’t think I can fill one hand with the number of calls Verizon has lost for me.
I won’t leave Verizon because the coverage has been solid and the customer service has been excellent. I want a Palm Pre, so now I’m frustrated that Palm struck their deal with Sprint.
Your point about Verizon monitoring the Twitstream is good, too. I talked them up on Twitter last night as well. Missed opportunities.
Good post, and good lessons for a lot of companies.
Thanks! I’ll admit that where I live my reception is kinda choppy sometimes, and yes, I update the towers and stuff, but I also live kinda in the boonies and around a lot of water. Not sure if that has anything to do with it. Overall, though, I’ve been happy with Verizon for 10 years and they’ve taken good care of me. iPhone might be the most awesome phone in the world (according to many), but I’m not giving up my VZW service for the world.
I’m still waiting to find my perfect phone. I have the Voyager now and it’s OK, but I’d like something a lot more. Maybe I’ll “design” my perfect phone soon just for fun.
Stacy,
This post rocks. I’m on the other side of the fence where the iPhone has become SUCH a must-have in my world that I’m suffering through the AT&T service until eventually it’s available on Verizon (who I was with for almost 15 years). It’s spotty but not disastrous, and one thing I will say is that AT&Ts customer service has impressed me so far. I suppose it’s all about what you value more.
But I sure do love your suggestions for Verizon and social media. Some astute observations in there. Let’s hope they’re listening.
Cheers,
Amber
Thanks, Amber! That means a lot, especially coming from you! I’m glad to know that AT&T’s customer service has been good to you. My exbf was die-hard Cingular before they merged because of that, it’s nice to know they haven’t lost it.
Indeed they are listening, as I came home from work and found out, and that makes me happy.
I’m not really a fan of AT&T by any means; their service has issues, no question. However, Verizon users should realize a couple things: The Verizon network cannot do simultaneous voice and data, which is a requirement for the iPhone.
Verizon has refused to do this because it would crush their network just as bad as AT&Ts. The reason Verizon’s network is so robust partly has to do with the fact that they just don’t let their users do as much on it.
Part of this has to do with the fact that CDMA is really kind of a dying technology. I’m not an expert on it, but I would like to see how it would hold up to the kind of traffic volumes that AT&T is dealing with because they accepted Apple’s terms.
So, I’m willing to give AT&T some small amount of credit for agreeing to push the envelope, even if they’re doing a generally bad job of it.
Another friend of mine tried to explain the differences of the whys and why-nots between the two and the network differences, but I didn’t quite follow it. You’ve explained it a lot better for me, thank you. I hope that someday our technologies or capabilities or whatever is advanced enough to handle both voice and data seamlessly. I think I heard a story about this on NPR not long ago. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Good post– they should be capitalizing more on social media, especially as, like you said, the biggest national network.
As far as Twitter goes, it’s a conundrum. You can do a lot of really clever things with Twitter, beyond just status updates. For a corporation, it’s hard to commit to a course of action. If they set it up as a typical “news about Verizon” account, but then they have a really great idea for using it a different way (say, letting customers tweet at it to manage account settings or something) then it’s really hard to make the switch in functionality.
You’re right — Twitter is being used in more and more clever ways every day, and with such a big company, it probably is hard to coordinate and execute a working plan. However, not to beat a dead horse, but Zappos has done an amazing job with it and recently I was surprised with how well Charter Communications is using it — if it weren’t for them listening to me on Twitter I might still be pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the hell is going on with my internet connection. (It’s on my To Do list to write up that story, and I know they ARE listening, so guys — don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you!)
What VZW should do is when monitoring their name on Twitter, collect data about what people are saying — positive comments, negative comments, what those comments are actually saying — to determine how they should use it. There may be a need unfulfilled en masse that hasn’t been addressed yet. What’s important to note is that we’re all still learning and inventing new uses for this versatile app, and also what works for some may not work for others.
You make a lot of good points here, so thank you for sharing We are learning from customers, readers and experts — and we’re trying new things almost daily. Social media are something we discuss, strategize and work on every day. Rest assured, we are listening and we can hear you — and all our customers — loud and clear.
- Eric
I am so glad that you are!!
Please understand that I wasn’t trying to criticize, only trying to help. I’m a big fan of your brand and I want to see it live up to its full potential online. See my comments above to Rex re: Twitter. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Twitter Comment
Great critique of Verizon’s social media (or lack thereof) by @damnredhead: [link to post] Verizon needs to feel the love!
– Posted using Chat Catcher
I should of course follow up with the fact that what I say doesn’t invalidate any of the great points you raised in your post as well. Verizon should do a better job of engaging their customer base, regardless of AT&T.
Understood. You brought up good points, though, and they’re appreciated.