Web Extra: Leadership Lessons: More from John Gibson

How do you see social media impacting your company and the industry?
 I think the biggest place it starts to play is in the referral side of our business and can people understand and utilize the referral piece through social media. The biggest challenge for all of us to try and figure out is how to defend ourselves against the rogue or the viral complaint online and in social media. How are we going to defend ourselves? The BBB (Better Business Bureau) has a great process for it. I don’t think Facebook does. So what do we do about those?

So, you’re saying how to stop people from lying about your company?
I wouldn’t say lying, but interpreting their impression of what happen versus really what happened. It’s how they feel. They feel like they got bad service. They feel like there is a bad decision. The format for a company to respond to that, and to say, “Well, yes, you felt like you got bad service. Well, let us tell everybody what we did because we did make a mistake. We went out of our way and fixed it for you,” and they may have posted something about when they were dissatisfied and rarely do they take the time to go back and say, “Well, they made it right.” They are up late one night posting something on Facebook and they haven’t even given us a phone call yet to let us know there is a problem.

How do you fight something like that?
I think our business is looking at whether we do it in house or we have a service outside that starts listening to that social media and trying to help us track the trends and figure out ways to respond to that. We don’t have the answer yet. We’re trying to figure out what does that look like for the future. Ultimately, will we have somebody who is a VP of social media and that is what they do is they pay attention only to the social media stuff, or they have a staff person who all they do all day is respond to things that are posted on line about us? I don’t know.

It really starts coming down to the two biggest ways that we have new business right now is previous customers that buy again from us and referral business. And, I think the referral business, there is something to be said about harnessing the power of social media and how that’s going to help us. It’s a great opportunity, also.

Click here to read John Gibson's 2006 Leadership profile.