The Terrible Trouble with Talking to Tacos

Taco Bell has a reputation for quality, or perhaps more accurately the complete and utter lack there of. But that’s fine. Taco Bell fills a market space that no one else really occupies: The super-cheap, super-fast taco.

No sane person who eats at a Taco Bell has any illusions that they’re doing something healthy (drive through diet menu notwithstanding). I have a friend who pseudo-affectionately refers to their product as “people dogfood.” It’s bad for us, and it’s delicious, and once in a while it’s a fine treat.

But what do you do when even the low expectations of a Taco Bell meal aren’t met? What do you do when you get a couple of seriously soggy tacos? Like, somehow-dunked-in-mystery-liqued-and-then-wrapped-in-paper-bad. We’re talking about totally inedible tacos. Full stop. If you’re a friend of mine who also happens to be a social media engagement specialist you post about the experience on Taco Bell’s facebook wall.

Companies (like Taco Bell) pay people (like my friend) an awful lot of money to monitor their social media channels for things like this. The idea being that if a customer has a negative experience with your product, you reach out to them, offer them an apology and perhaps a reparation (coupon, return info, etc.) and try to turn that experience around. Correcting a mistake –and admitting when you screw up– goes a long way towards retaining the loyalty of your customers.

Instead of any of that, the Bell’s people simply deleted the “offending” comment.

Avoiding behavior of this sort is like social media 101 (1, 2, 3). By engaging with your customers you can mitigate their disappointment, and control the conversation. By ignoring them out-of-hand you only engender further frustration, often inspiring people to vocalize this frustration in places where you don’t have any controls on the conversation. In this case my friend broadcast her terrible taco time to all of her facebook and twitter followers, and now you’re reading a blog post about it. That’s a way bigger impact than a comment on the companies wall, wouldn’t you say?

Social media is about conversations and personal engagement. That’s obvious when you’re tagging grandma in your birthday photos, but it can be less so when you’re dealing with a multi-national corporation’s social presence. The rules though, are the EXACT SAME. Be nice, not rude. Be confident, cool, and hospitable, not arrogant, dismissive, or passive aggressive.
You wouldn’t treat your grandma like a jerk, so why would you treat your customers that way?

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