The Right and Wrong Way to Treat Your Customers - Sony Vs TypePad

I spend quite a bit of my time these days advising companies about blogging, which is a subset of engagement marketing. Engagement Marketing is about treating your customers with respect and as equals in a conversational relationship. This is harder than it seems, especially for large corporates who tend to be wedded to the old model of interruptive advertising.

A critical element of corporate blogging is the monitoring of blogs and reacting to them, especially in a crisis. So, I can't help being struck by the contrast in the last few days between Sony, in the old-fashioned, "don't get it" corner and TypePad, who certainly do seem to get it.

In case you've been off-planet for the last week, Sony (boo, hiss) upset a lot of people by introducing DRM to its CDs. This proved wildly unpopular, for a variety of reasons - TechDirt has got a good summary of all the issues, but the bottom line is that they screwed up and were eventually forced to swap out "infected" CDs for non-DRM protected ones.

Now, you could argue that they did the right thing in the end. But they've done so with startlingly bad grace, denying all along that there was a problem and never once apologising. Result: An awful lot of pissed off people, who are customers and potential customers. Moreover, it'll be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for Sony to make moves in this direction again - so at least something good might come out of it.

A further piece of good news is that the poor folks at Kryponite bike locks might just give up their Number 1 slot as THE case study for poor new wave, crisis management.

TypePad, make blogging software - we use it at MobHappy. To be honest, it's a little (in Tom Peter's words) ho-fucking-hum but it generally does the job. However, they recently had some technical problems, resulting in less than stellar service.

Typepad should be very aware of potential bad PR, as all their customers are bloggers. And sure enough, they did the right thing very quickly.

Firstly, they wrote to everyone, acknowledging the problem. Secondly, the apologised. Thirdly, they offered compensation.

Their customers are offered a choice of compensation, depending on how they perceive they have been affected. They can choose to say "shucks, it was nothing, don't worry about it" up to claiming 45 days credit to their TypePad account.

Now, this isn't a hagiography of TypePad, by any means - they shouldn't have let their customers down in the first place. But mistakes happen, people understand this and are generally forgiving if you apologise and correct the mistake and/or offer compensation.

But there's more to it than this actually. Ironically, if you screw up and do the right thing next, you can end up better off than you were in the first place, as it's still so damn rare that people start lauding you for it. Just take a look at this, which is practically a petition to canonise Ben and Mena Trott (pictured) of TypePad, albeit mixed with a few sceptics.

So, weirdly TypePad may actually come out of all this better than if they hadn't let their customers down in the first place. This is not an isolated incidence, by any means. Looked at opportunistically and positively, any customer complaint is a chance to create a powerful word of mouth advocate, by following this simple mantra:

Sorry. We fucked up, we fess up and we'll fork out.

Though you might want to think about changing the language.

Beware though. It'll only work once.