I talked to one of my Twitter followers recently — haven’t met him in person yet, but I hope to — about a policy his company is implementing called “95 in 5.” Essentially, the plan boils down to this: the company wants to address 95% of customer complaints within 5 days. The goal is to get employees to respond to complaints more completely and more quickly. An admirable goal, to be sure.

But it’s the wrong one.

It’s wrong for one very simple reason. Talking to people isn’t the same thing as solving their problems. When your company screws up, you can say “sorry” till you’re blue in the face. But until you solve the problem, you haven’t done anything substantial.

To be clear: being social is good.

When customers have problems, they want their problems solved. The problems can be solved by robots, humans, friendly woodland creatures, or personified bottles of cough elixir; it doesn’t matter. They want the problem to be fixed, and fixed right this very second. To do that, you have to be social, and you have to engage your users.

But engagement isn’t always the goal of social media, especially not when you’re fighting from your heels. In some situations, engaging is the easy part — your fans will do it for you. This means that their expectations have changed. They now expect service. And they expect it now.

Solving problems is better.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you only talked to your customers when they had a problem, they’d be perfectly fine with that. Granted, that strategy wouldn’t win you any awards, and it wouldn’t improve your new business numbers very much (though it couldn’t hurt). But you wouldn’t lose any customers if that was your only strategy.

Amber Naslund likes to say that if all you did in social media was say “thank you” and “I’m sorry,” you’d be doing better than most businesses in the world. I’ll add to that. If you don’t say “thank you” and “I’m sorry,” you’re failing to meet the basic expectations of your audience. And if you do, you’re only meeting half of their expectations — the other half being that if they come to you with a problem, you will solve it.

A sensible solution:

If you’re starting out in social media, or if you’re new to a piece of business, or if you’re rethinking your social strategy, here’s what I want you to do. It’s a very simple two-step process that should be as intuitive as Amber’s maxim, but often is not. Here it is.

First, figure out how to solve problems.

Then, figure out how to be social about it.

I could cite a bunch of people here — @ComcastCares, @Twelpforce, Vicks, and so on — but I won’t bother. If you’re in the business, you know about all of these already. The point is this: being social is not the same as fixing problems. And you  have to figure out how to do the former before you figure out the latter — because the latter doesn’t cut it all the way, and the former does.

P.S., to all my blogger friends, yes, I suppose this is the obligatory “silver bullet” post. But I hope I’ve spun it enough to be at least moderately interesting. And if not, well, as Carol Bartz once said, “Fuck you.”

Everyone, I’d like you to meet Rose @Vicks, the new community manager for Vicks’s VapoRub and NyQuil. Rose, the guys. That’s Jimmy and Tommy and Sully and Fitzy…

Rose is quite the little rule-breaker. See, when Facebook started requiring pharma brands to open their walls for comments, there was apparently an unspoken command issued from the Secret College of Short-Sighted Pharma Brand Executives (SCSSPBE) for people everywhere to start panicking. On August 15th across this great country of ours at any given moment, if you listened hard enough you could quite literally hear the unmistakable sound of buttholes clenching.

But not Rose. No, Rose met this great challenge head-on. “These are not liabilities,” she said. “They are not fodder to attract the attention of the FDA. They are not cause for the abandonment of Facebook altogether. These are customers, and we’d be fools not to listen to them.”

Honestly, it makes me a little misty.

As ironic as it sounds, what the character of Rose represents is pure, unbridled humanity. It is an acknowledgement that customers are not simply cattle to be herded to your product and told to feed. They are not mindless drones who will at a predictable rate be swayed by our advertisements. They are human beings, with thoughts and concerns, who live and breathe and, yes, consume based on their needs.

Rose also represents a certain street savvy. Vicks is comfortable talking to customers, even while other companies live in abject fear of the FDA doing something that it has never done in it’s or Facebook’s existence: cite a company for a violation due to a comment left by some third party on a social network. Moreover, Rose fits. Sure, we all know she’s a fictional character. But her persona — that of a dowdy but caring school nurse — is brand-appropriate, and it feels like it belongs on Facebook. No small task for a lady who’s new to the neighborhood.

And what of her peers? It’s no secret that many pharma brands have taken the run-and-hide approach since 8/15, and others prefer an ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away strategy. As shocking as it may seem, many companies simply never thought the day would come where they would have to either interact with customers or abandon social media. (Perish the thought.)

And that’s the world we live in. People taking part in marketing exercise for the ultimate goal of saying they’re interacting with customers. Thanks to Facebook, we’re starting to see how much of a farce that really is, and which brands care enough about their customers to be able to think up new ways to communicate with them on short notice. In the case of Vicks, this story has a happy ending. For many other brands, it does not.

Not every brand needs a Rose @Vicks. And honestly, not every brand can pull her off. Some brands want to improve brand awareness, and they think that by engaging with fans as the brand — as NyQuil instead of Rose, for example — they stand a much better chance. Maybe that’s true, but for the purposes of this conversation, it’s immaterial. Step 1 is caring enough about your customers to want to help them. That’s not a problem that could have been be solved by Rose; rather, it is a prerequisite condition for her existence.

I want to reiterate that, because it’s important. In fact, if you take away nothing else from this article, I want you to take this: In order to make any kind of impact in the social space, you have to care. And you have to be able to demonstrate that you care in a deeply meaningful way. We marketers like to call this Surprise and Delight – giving people something they want without requiring them to earn it. Forget Like-gates and sweepstakes and fancy Welcome pages. Care first. Talk to people. The rest is easy.

It’s been a rough week for me. See, it’s my job to stay on top of the latest social trends and report on them to my agency. It’s a job I take very seriously, and one I like to think I’m pretty good at. So naturally, when I heard that Google was launching Google+ I committed every act shy of a felony to make sure that I got myself an invitation. (A thank you to the wonderful Donna Tocci for the invite, by the way.)

Now I’m on. And I’m so very happy.

Why Google+ is Better (for me) Than Facebook

Okay, look. If you’re my friend on Facebook, you probably don’t even know I’m there. I don’t like to interact with other people very often. I don’t stalk people. I have started a Page for my blog a couple of times, and they never take off. I find Facebook status updates to be bland and formulaic. The photo browser bugs me. I have no idea how I became friends with the 20% of people in my friends list who I don’t actually know, and I get miffed when I see them post stupid stuff that clutters my feed. I hate Facebook’s ad schema. I hate the SPAM that pops up from people I trust. And I can’t tell you how much I hate the idea that Facebook could at any point give away my personal information to people I don’t know, and claim that I “allowed” them to do it.

I DO, however, use Facebook’s Groups function. In fact, the Digitas Social Practice has a private group where we swap links and talk about the latest goings-on in social media, and I love it. And I would use Groups for all of my friends, except that I know they don’t use Facebook the same way I do.

Enter Google+. Now new users are forced to bucketize their entire follower list from the outset. Let’s talk about how beneficial that is for a moment.

Imagine a Facebook environment where you never had to see another post about Farmville, because everyone only sent Farmville status updates to their circle of friends who played Farmville.

That right there is reason enough to join Google+, isn’t it?

Other Fun Baubles

There’s lots of stuff that gets lots of credit by the bloggers and news media, but one oft-overlooked feature is Google+’s handling of photo albums. These things are gorgeous. Just look for yourself:

Facebook can’t do this. I’m big on aesthetics, so this is a big win for Google+ in my book.

This is part of a larger theme, too, which is simply that Google+ has a much better user interface than Facebook. As a digital native, I find it incredibly intuitive. Red notification bubble in the top-right, filters on the left, simple icon-based navigation, @-symbol tagging, etc. I already knew how to use Google+ before I got my invitation.

Wait, let me repeat that, ‘cuz I think it’s really important.

I knew how to use Google+ before I ever got an invitation.

Can I say that about Facebook? Nope. Heck, I still don’t know all the ins and outs of Facebook — and it’s my friggin’ job.

Anyway, I will be keeping my Facebook account because I still need it to do my job properly. But I’m migrating all of the cool, fun, interesting stuff over to Google+. And if you’re anything like me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw you do the same. In fact, I encourage it.

See you on the Plus side.

I’m always looking for the latest social media, mobile, gaming and “other media” stats on the web. Well, thanks to Gary Hayes’s awesome Social Media Counts tool, the world has access to the things that are going on online right now — every second of every day. Here’s what’s happened in the past 10 seconds:

Social Media Stats from the Past 10 Seconds:

Mobile Stats from the Past 10 Seconds:

Gaming Stats from the Past 10 Seconds:

Other Media Stats from the Past 10 Seconds: