Quicken PR Scores One For The Brand

It's one thing for me to talk about how brands can leverage social media. It's quite another to see it in action. And I have a glowing example.

If you've listened to The BeanCast, my marketing podcast, or have worked with me directly at The Cool Beans Group, you know I harp on total customer experience. For my consultancy, I call it the Cadence of Communication -- hitting the right note in a marketing symphony at every touch point with the audience. And one of the key tools of doing this is not about what we say, but what we hear.

You've probably heard the old saying, "God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason." This is all too true in marketing. Taking the time to hear what's being said about you is a powerful thing.

Unfortunately, in the past the only means we had of hearing our customers was either through the artificial confines of a focus group where people are essentially paid to find problems or through in-bound calls which almost always dealing with problems.

But social media platforms enable us to participate in the real conversations going on about our brand -- that is if we're brave enough to go where the conversations are happening and not try to control them.

So what inspired this post? My weather-worn example of the two Philips engineers camping out at the AV Science forum and waiting for a product thread for their TVs to show up, just got another example to share it's ranks.

Yesterday I randomly posted the following on Twitter:

"Quicken on the Mac continues to be the bane of my existence.
But I'm just too invested to change."
It was just a flip comment that was expressing an experience I was having at that moment, not a complaint to customer service or a tirade to a product manager. It was just how I really felt about a product that I have had loyalty for to the point of insanity since version 1.

I thought nothing of it. Until within the hour, I got the following post back from someone named @QuickenPRChels:

@TheBeanCast Hi, Chelsea@Quicken. Are you trying out the
Quicken Financial Life for Mac beta (shipping Summer 2009)?
Shock! Surprise! Gratification! So many words popped to mind. In one simple post, Chesea mitigated my bad impressions of a company that has been turning out inferior versions of their product for the Mac and offered me lousy customer service by phone. She didn't argue. She didn't defend. She just told me that there was Mac love coming and offered me an invite to the beta. Wow!

This added to my post from yesterday about my Amazon experience has encouraged me greatly about the state of customer service. It's a thankless job sitting on Twitter all day, monitoring traffic for product mentions. But for Quicken it was totally worth it. Because they found a brand loyalist thinking about defection and surprised me with the preferential treatment that I deserve.

And not to knock their ads or anything (frankly, I can't remember a single one anyway) but this experience has done more to frame my impressions of their brand than a media saturation campaign ever could.

Way to go, Intuit! Chelsea deserves a raise.