Engaging Customers with Social Media: Tips from Lisa Hartwick

Hartwick's Kitchen Store does a great job of engaging customers via social media. This can be used for both customer problems but also ensuring a positive customer experience.
Kim: I noticed in your tweets you have a mix of sort of sales messages and kind of more informational message like the cooking contest and things like that. Do you think kind of strategically about mixing those messages up?
Lisa Hartwick: No. It’s just whatever the message is from the store because we have a lot of events that go on especially the baking contest. You know we always blast out the winner, blasting out the gift card information, who’s the winner. And it just kind of depends. I mean if we have something hot in the store or the item of the week or what we’re demoing for the week, we’ll put those out. So it just kind of depends.
Kim: So let’s talk about engaging with customers because one tweet I noticed that you engaged someone saying thank you and if you ever have a problem let me know. Do you get a lot of people posting negative things or is it mostly questions?
Lisa Hartwick: I don’t have any negative comments at all. It was somebody that was commenting about how wonderful the store was. And I said, “Thank you so much. I’ll make sure I pass the word on to the rest of the team. We appreciate your business. But if you ever should not have a great experience with us please let me know directly,” was my response. So I don’t have a lot. I have people asking about products, do you have this? Do you have that? And usually I try and just go direct. I do a direct tweet back to them. But yes, we haven’t had any negative comments on the tweet. We have a couple on Yelp, a couple of customers that were not happy, one with the bridal registry and I think someone else was just saying the store had too much in it, too overwhelming. Everyone has their own opinion. So everything else, I think, on Yelp has been positive. But you don’t learn unless you hear those negative feedback, hear that information.

Kim: And so the people on Yelp, did you contact them or you responded to the Yelp page?
Lisa Hartwick: I did not respond to the person that had the wedding registry because there was a whole gamut of issues and they were not necessarily the friendliest of customers.
Kim: So you were aware of the problem before they went to Yelp?
Lisa Hartwick: Yes. And I would say there were problems on both sides. And so people are going to rant and rave and express themselves and that’s fine. And the other person they were just saying yes, it’s a great store but it’s just too much, you can’t see anything. It’s too overwhelming for me. So there’s not too much you can respond on that. That’s how they personally feel.

Kim: My research into those types of communities where people review products and services and stores is that most customers of scan the overall number of comments and kind of assess the ratio of positive to negative.
Lisa Hartwick: Right, I would agree with that. Yes, I think so too because everyone has had experiences with customer services or being in a store and they like the associate or they don’t or they absolutely love the store. Everyone knows that things go wrong. I mean there’s no perfect science. I t’s just like you can go eat at your favorite restaurant and one night it’s just awful you’re so disappointed. Chances are you’re probably going to give them another try and it may be great again. So I think most people understand that.

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