August 23, 2010

Misspellings and other Misadventures in Today’s Social World

Finding misspellings on signs is a pet peeve of mine.  Granted, in today’s world of texts, tweets, blogs and emails, I’m as guilty as the next person of making grammatical and spelling errors.  But on signs? Come on now.  These have to be proofed by many people.

So the other day, I’m sitting and having lunch outside at the California Pizza Kitchen at the Natick Mall when I gaze over at the sign on the side of the building.  I’m glancing through the list of stores when one catches my eye — Athropologie.  Hmm.  There is a really cool store I like to go to but I always thought it was Anthropologie.  It made me question myself…is it really Athropologie? So I took a picture and put it out on Twitter then looked it up on my iPhone.  No, I was right, it is Anthropologie, with a “n.”

I was hoping they’d be a social savvy brand and monitor Twitter for their name and possibly respond.  They do have a Twitter account, although they are following only 86 people and it is clearly a broadcast channel.  But, since I didn’t hear from them, I tried to be a considerate citizen and took the trouble to go to their website and submit a contact form with the picture letting them know about the mistake.  I got a fairly standard email back thanking me for contacting them, stating that they would alert the local store, and providing me with customer service contact info should I have any questions.

I was pretty underwhelmed.  Here you are, embarrassing yourself with this blatant misspelling of your store name — ok, maybe it was the mall’s fault but seriously, no one noticed this?  I go out of my way to help out and I get a lame thank you?  There is such a gap between brands actively monitoring the social streams and engaged with their community and those that aren’t.  I mentioned this to my husband and the first thing he said was, “are they sending you a gift certificate?”

I don’t need a gift certificate but here is how I think it should have been handled:

• Anthropologie community manager/brand evangelist sees my tweet and shows apparent dismay, then eat some humble pie, admit everyone makes mistakes, and let the community know they are fixing it.  Something like “Oops, thanks @tgruber for finding our name misspelled <blush>, getting it fixed now. Glad we have friends like you helping out.”
• Customer service account reps trained on corporate social media policies and culture so that when receiving an email/form like mine, they could respond in the same authentic, human tone.
• Possibly send a discount coupon as a thank you and gain a lot of good will.

That type of response would have generated a different blog post.  So if you haven’t heard it yet, can you please make sure you have a community manager, you engage, you respond, you are authentic and human, and you act like you care as much about your customers as you want them to care about you.

Update:  I received an email about 12 hours after this posted from Anthropologie’s Community Manager:

Tamara,

Thank you very much for tweeting to us about the misspelling of our brand name at the Natick Mall. Unfortunately we did not see your original tweet, but greatly appreciate you bringing it to our attention. We are contacting the mall to correct the error.

If I can ever be of assistance to you in the future, please let me know.

Best regards,

Kelly

Anthropologie Community Manager

I’m glad to see that they are monitoring blogs and responded in a sincere way.  Remember to make sure your Community Manager and Customer Service departments are in synch to communicate in the same voice.

What do you do when you see a misspelling?