Overused

When I lived in NY and read NY Magazine religiously, one of my favorite sections of each issue was “overheard.”  You know, random things you hear, completely out of context, that are funny. Now I read the Overheard in New York blog, where I pulled some of these:

“Just because she has a tattoo doesn’t mean she’s an alcoholic!”

“Hey, what month is eleven?”

“I don’t need more drinks to choose from. I’m not that interested in beverages. I like my Diet Coke, I like my vodka, and that’s all I need.”

“Sex with Steven is more boring than church.”

“This is the B train. B like in Bitch.”

For me, the opposite of Overheard is “Overused.” Random words or phrases that become too popular. They start off innocently enough. You only hear or read them occasionally.  Then some kind of social inertia kicks in, and these words seem to be everywhere: spoken in meetings, seen on web pages, blog posts, print ads, even radio spots. Might I dare say they’ve reach a tipping point?  (Hmmm. Tipping Point. Might have to put that on the list, too…)

It’s around this point that I just stop paying attention.

Here are few of my personal “favorite” words and phrases that are overused, approaching overused status or just plain annoying:

• Ecosystem
• Outside my comfort zone
• Join the conversation (Come on. Even Anderson Cooper is using this now.)
• Reach out
• Meet up
• We’re committed to…(insert any company initiative here)
• Paradigm shift
• Across the pond
• Let’s discuss that offline
• Synergy and/or synergistic
• Workflow

What words or phrases drive you nuts?

I’ve Twitter Graded Myself

That sounds dirty.

Hubspot has a site to “rate your Twitter mojo.”  My mojo is 61 out of 100. Given how not a Twitter celebrity I am, I’ll take it. But that doesn’t mean my competitive side won’t try to raise it…

There’s also a tool for ranking for press releases and websites, using a various set of criteria. It’s not that similar tools aren’t already available on the web, but I found these interesting and somewhat entertaining with a bonus nice interface. (I especially liked the dancing logo while waiting for the website review to arrive. What can I say? I’m into cute icons…)

I plopped a recent press release about our new Cloud Summit Executive event into the text box and scored a 90 out of 100. Not bad. The report tells us we should be doing more with SEO and our releases, so we’ll take the advice.

I then ran www.cloudsummit.com in the website grader but on this one, we didn’t fare so well. Just a 62 out of 100. To be fair, we put the site up in about 8 business days, and while we got high ratings in many areas, there are some standard SEO things that need to be fixed.

In a perfect world, we’d have budgets for a fancy SEO agency to help up get our rating up. But since we don’t, tools like these are nice to have so we don’t get lazy and sit around eating bonbons in the afternoon.

But as soon as I’m done with that bonbon, I’m going to work on my Twitter ranking!

Customer Service Is The New Marketing…Except If You’re United Airlines

I guess UAL didn’t get the memo that customer service is an integral part of marketing.

On a flight home from Austin yesterday, I spilled an entire cup of coffee on my husband’s lap. How nice for him that I was too lazy to take out my own tray table, opting instead to put my coffee on his, only to spill it within seconds of placing it there.

The two cocktail napkins given to me with said coffee were of no use, so I jumped up to find something better to soak up the mess. The flight attendants had quickly moved to the back of the cabin serving more delectable beverages, but the first class galley was just three rows ahead of my bulkhead coach seat.

“The galley!” My trying-to-think-fast mind thought. “There must be something in there I can use — and it’s so much closer than the flight attendant.”

Voila. A package of cloth things sat on the galley counter. I grabbed one, rushed back to my husband’s seat and sopped up whatever coffee hadn’t already been absorbed into his jeans, shirt and seat cushion.

A few minutes later, the flight attendant arrived, for what a thought was last minute support. “Is everything OK here?” she asked. “I think I’ve got it under control,” I explained. “I spilled my coffee all over my husband. Sorry, but I grabbed one of these clothes from the galley to clean it up,” I said, as I held the empty coffee cup and soaked rag on top of it.

To my surprise, she snarled back at me: “Well now I’m not going to have enough of those!” referring to the cloth thing.

“Wow,” I thought as she angrily grabbed the remaining mess and disappeared behind the first class cabin curtain. That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.

Imagine my surprise when a few minutes later she reappeared from the behind the curtain. Clearly, she wasn’t through with me.

“You know. I only get a certain amount of place mats for each flight and now, because you went up there and took one, I don’t have enough, ” she said with an attitude that was wrong on so many levels. “I wouldn’t go in your office looking for things and you shouldn’t either. The next time…” she continued before I cut her off.

“The next time?” I asked her. “I don’t really think they’ll be a next time. This was an accident.”

I tried to empathize with her. “My sister’s a flight attendant so I understand that now you’re short — but I think you’re over reacting. It’s just a place mat.”

But she would not give up.

“Oh really?” she asked in a sarcastic voice that said “Yeah. Sure she is. And I’m a skydiver in my spare time.” “And what would your sister say about all this?”

Snap.

Her attitude pushed me over the edge and I was done being apologetic or polite.

“She’d say you were an idiot,” I said, and went back to reading my book, ignoring her as she shut the curtain with a swoosh and went back to first class.

The point of this little tale is not to show that you should keep your own damn coffee on your own damn tray tables. Nor is it to tell you to avoid the weak, this-is-airlines-coffee-what-was-I-thinking beverage because it’s crap anyway and if it spills on your pants or your husband’s pants you’re going to be soggy for the remainder of the flight.

It’s to show that every interaction with a customer is important. Either in the air, on the ground, on the phone or on the web. Every interaction is a chance to have a good exchange (which will bode well for your brand) or a bad exchange (which won’t bode so well – um, see above).

If this United Airlines employee was responding to me in an online United Airlines community site, or through an email exchange, I doubt she would have acted so rudely. But she thought, in the privacy of her cabin 40,000 feet up, she could mouth off to a customer with no ramifications.

Not the case.

This one employee –not a delay, not a crappy seat with no leg room, not the bad coffee– left a bad taste in my mouth (pun intended) about United Airlines. What’s ironic, though, is the announcement at the end of almost every flight today: “We know you have a choice in airlines…blah, blah, blah.”

Yes. I do. And I probably won’t be choosing United again anytime soon.

Think about it.

How are you communicating with your customers? You probably feel good about the communications you have with prospects and clients. But what about the way others in your company communicate? Are they causing good will or bad for your brand?

How can you be confident you don’t have a nasty flight attendant giving your brand a bad name?

As a marketer, it’s worth finding out.