According to Merriam Webster, the definition of fear is: “An unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” Or: “A reason for alarm”.
There is a very marked and prevalent fear of social media in individuals and organizations who have yet to adopt social media in their businesses.
And I doubt that many would actually admit to having such a fear.
Most cover up their apprehension with statements such as “we're looking into it, but haven't decided if it’s right for us” or “we're just not sure about it yet”.
What they are really feeling is the fear of losing control.
Control is a powerful and seductive force, and for many, the loss of control of their organization's brand is paramount to death in the marketplace.
What individuals and organizations need to understand, however, is that social media is not about losing control but rather taking control of one's brand.
In the old days, say ten years ago, if someone talked about a hotel or airline brand in a negative way, chances are they were only talking to a small network of individuals and their influence, for the most part, was limited.
Managing this kind of negative messaging was relatively easy and required limited resources, after all, how much impact could one disgruntled person have on a big brand.
Fast forward ten years to today and the playing field has changed considerably.
Take the example of Heather B Armstrong, aka Dooce, a stay at home mom from Salt Lake City, Utah, who has a very successful blog and massive 1.5 million plus Twitter following.
Although the following example is not specifically travel related, it is similar in context to the United Broke My Guitar incident from a customer service standpoint.
Heather bought a new $1,300 Maytag washing machine which broke after a week.
She tried to deal with Maytag customer service but was stymied by corporate policy and un-empowered customer service representatives.
After almost a month of trying to get her problem resolved and being continuously thwarted, she vented her frustration on Twitter with the following, very simple message.
The resulting firestorm was significant and the negative brand impact for Maytag was immediate.
Heather has an audience of over 1.5 million people, predominately female heads of household, all of whom would potentially be in the market for a washing machine.
With one 140-character message, Dooce influenced one and half million people to buy a different brand of washing machine.
Heather was praised by many, immediately labeled a Twitter Bully by some, and accused of abusing her influence by others. Her response was simple and elegant:
"This is capitalism, y'all. This is how it works. I AM NOT SATISFIED. I DEMAND BETTER SERVICE. PERIOD."
Only a few short hours after her first tweet, Heather received a call from the Manager of the Whirlpool Executive Offices in Michigan apologizing for the problem.
Within twenty four hours and three parts later the washing machine was fixed and the saga was over.
A month of suffering, frustration, and brand degradation was resolved with one simple phone call and a few replacement parts.
So, if it was that simple to resolve why the problems in the beginning?
You need not look further than the United incident to recognize that Heather's scenario is not unique.
What is common in these situations is that the individual customer had to go to extra ordinary lengths and had to cause significant potential damage to the brand before the company would take them seriously.
The other commonality is that both situations could have been avoided much earlier on in the relationship with some well executed customer service.
So what has this got to do with the fear of losing control?
Well, quite simply, the actions that both United and Maytag took in dealing with their respective customer relationships were based on the premise that they, the corporations, controlled the relationship and had the power of influence.
What we have seen in these two examples is that organizations have to understand that their customers have influence as well and that social media technologies have the ability to magnify that influence greatly.
How many consumers have these two incidents influenced: 5.7 million views on the United Broke My Guitar video, 1.5 million twitter followers, and over 25,000 combined comments.
Letting go of your brand doesn't mean losing control of your brand, it means being confident enough in your services or products to know that the majority of customers who talk about you will talk about you positively.
After all, 70% of the reviews on TripAdvisor are positive reviews.
It also means empowering one's employees to make good customer service choices and to understand that they have an impact on how the brand is perceived by customers. Social media is just another channel for communicating with a customer, the only difference is that the brand shares the influence with the customer.
Once an organization can accept the fact that their customer shares influence, the organization can allow their brand to become more engaged in the conversations that are happening about and around them.
It would seem, however, that the first step of letting go is still the hardest one to take.