Make sure your other departments back up your social media presence!

I struggled with whether to do this post or not.  Those who know me well know that I'm not a troublemaker or rabble-rouser; I cringe at stirring up trouble, especially for others in their jobs. As a business owner, I know how hard it is to get everything right and make the pieces all fit together. Having said that, I had an experience recently that I really do feel has a good lesson in it and have decided to share it in the spirit of learning and improving, not in attacking or flaming.

Usually companies do a better job in their traditional sales and support services than through social media, simply because people are still getting used to it.  This is a case in reverse.  It is not meant to be an indictment of the company I had the experience with, just an example of how one area can be on top of things but another drop the ball, negating gains made by the one doing a good job. [UPDATE: please read to the end for response from Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social.]

Over the past few weeks we've been researching social media monitoring solutions to help us make recommendations to our clients.  In particular, we were looking for solutions that we could white label so we could more easily help clients manage their accounts and activity. 

Based on searches for white label social media monitoring, one of the sites that we visited was Sprout Social; although several Google search results referred to their white labeling, we couldn't find any info on their site.  (In fairness, as it turns out, we missed where they refer to "Custom Branded Portal" in their bullet points for the Premium package.)

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Anyway, I tweeted to @sproutsocial to ask about it and received a reply that they offer something similar, asking me to contact sales AT sproutsocial for more info.  This is where things went downhill and the disconnect between their social media presence and sales department appeared.

I did email sales@ before lunch that day and hadn't receive a reply by the next morning.  Next I found the email address info@ on their site and emailed that; no answer almost 3 hours later.  Next I called their toll-free number, selected the extension for sales (not sure if that's exactly what they called the extension), and received no answer.  When the call went to voicemail, I received a message that "the subscriber's mailbox is full."  Whoa.  This was not looking good. I'm persistent but my time is also valuable.

I turned to Twitter again to let them know I couldn't get in touch with anyone; the person monitoring their account promptly replied apologetically and asked for my email & phone so they could have someone contact me. Within 10 minutes I received a reply to my original email sent to sales@. The Twitter monitor was obviously on the job and things were looking up.

About a week later, still researching and not able to find many reviews with substantive comparisons of various tools, I returned to Twitter and posted an open question to anyone who had used both Sprout Social and Trackur, asking for comparisons.  Imagine my surprise when Andy Beal, the founder of Trackur, answered me within a few minutes! You can see his reply below.

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Andy's prompt, personal response made me realize he takes customer service seriously so off I went to look at Trackur further.  I did a lot more research, read lots of reviews; I found that he and his company have a great reputation and his white label program is very affordable - hugely important to a small firm. After all, I'm trying to help clients, not go broke trying to offer a  product.

Trackur is located only a little over an hour from us so on a whim, a couple of days later I tweeted to Andy and asked if he would consider having someone from Trackur come up and participate in the free workshops we've been doing if we signed up for their Ultimate plan. I knew it was a lot to ask, but thought maybe he had an intern or some other junior staff who could come up and show business owners the kinds of things they can accomplish with a monitoring tool.

He asked me to email him some info, and this led to a second surpise - he offered to personally do a Skype-in at our next workshop!  This was going way above and beyond, and I couldn't believe he would be so generous.  After all, he's highly in demand throughout the world and consults to huge companies.  We're just a small firm in a rural area of Virginia, trying to help other small businesses learn to compete in the new reality of business. He could have easily said sorry, but no, and I wouldn't have been offended.

Andy followed through on his word and participated in the blogging workshop we did this week. He was so kind and personable, took much more time speaking with us than I had expected, and made the participants feel like they were just as important as his large clients.

This made me really curious, wondering if my issues in reaching the Sprout Social sales department were just a blip; after all, everybody has a bad day or even a bad week. I went back to Twitter and sadly found two other people who were asking the Twitter rep about problems getting through to the sales department - both within the past 18 hours.The screenshots are below.

Every tool is different and each has different needs that it fits better, but I haven't even signed up for a trial of Sprout Social.  I probably will at some point, but if it's hard to get a response when you're a potential customer how hard will it be once you're already a customer? Their product looks good but I wouldn't feel comfortable referring them to clients; at the very least, if things didn't go well we would be the ones having to help the client sort out their issues. The point is probably moot, anyway, because their Premium plan is way out of budget for us and we don't put affiliate banners on our site.

I wish Sprout Social well and am actually sorry for writing this post; I just feel like there are some good lessons in it and we all have room for improvement.

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UPDATE: soon after I posted this, Justyn Howard, CEO of Trackur replied on Twitter. I'm glad they're on top of things and I'm sure they'll get it under control.  Everybody has growing pains and I wish them much success.