Yelling at the Players

Posted September 20th, 2007 by Char Lyn

I just read a great article in a paper I’ve never read before thanks to the Freakonomics blog. It was an inspirational story about a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has pancreatic cancer and is unlikely to live more than a year. In the article, he quoted something the assistant football coach told him in high school when the head coach kept yelling at him for his mistakes:

“When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”

While the article touched me, that one quote stuck. I started to think about the work we do at DIG and the number of companies afraid to engage with their customers through social media. Businesses are so often afraid of their customers “yelling at them,” but they forget that people only yell because they are engaged—they haven’t given up hope that the company will give them what they want. If they want something within your power to give, then you can gain loyal followers by giving it to them. If customers want something they aren’t getting from you, their lack of yelling means they are getting it somewhere else.

Freakonomics’ recent move to the New York Times blog is a perfect example of this idea. When they moved to the NYT, they lost the full-post RSS feed. The readers, 90% of whom were reading through RSS readers, revolted in the comments of every post for at least the first week. The authors were open in their communications about the reduced feed through three posts on the topic here, here, and here. They were not able to make everyone happy and lost some readers (customers), but the NYT readership should compensate for the loss.

So, where is your company at? Are you on the field getting yelled at, and getting the cheers when you make the touchdown? Or are you still sitting on the sidelines of the real game and only playing in the safety of the friendly flag football game at the company outing?

Entry Filed under: Blogs, Consumer Marketing