by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

Can two of the hottest organizational and operational trends from the last 20 years – Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma – be adapted to pharma? That’s a trick question: They already have been, and quite successfully.

But, how about online pharma marketing? It’s a more interesting proposition.

First, some definitions for the majority of us who aren’t steeped in business-optimization methodologies: There are differences between Lean and Six Sigma methods of business, but both emphasize continuous improvement and a formal process of review and correction. Lean is sometimes seen as less time-consuming than Six Sigma; the easiest way to boil it down is that Six Sigma seeks reduced process variation, and Lean strives for improved process flow.

All of which sounds great if you’re running a manufacturing facility – who wouldn’t want fewer variations from an optimized process or an improved process flow? And they’re proven: Top-flight Six Sigma implementation is one of the factors that helped General Electric become a leader across many industries.

Applying these principles to digital pharma marketing isn’t quite the stretch you’d imagine. And while implementing a full Lean or Six Sigma strategy in your marketing efforts requires more than a lone blog entry for guidance, you can grasp some of the broad brush strokes pretty quickly:

Get good at measuring, and then measure everything. Whether you’re drawn to the Lean or Six Sigma model – and there’s a case to be made for both when it comes to pharma marketing – you’ll want to figure out how to measure things, both more comprehensively and more accurately.

Anyone exposed to social media or Web analytics knows you can measure online activity, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by these easy numbers. The sort of comprehensive measurement that these processes call for cover things like median and mean sales growth per sales rep in the weeks following an advertising campaign’s launch, or ROI per dollar spent on paid media in category-leading drugs (which might have much higher public awareness) versus secondary drugs.

Bottom line: You can’t track what you can’t measure and you can’t improve what you can’t track.

Round up your black belts. Six Sigma relies heavily on small groups of professionals, sometimes called black belts or green belts, empowered to review data, brainstorm improvements and then implement them. They operate with management’s approval, but they are also empowered to suggest changes outside of their department or division if that’s what it takes to improve quality.

Note a couple of key differences from many marketing processes: First, there’s an understanding that solving a problem might mean changes outside of the department or area of business operation – a big change for some marketing operations. Second and equally important is the idea of the small force of change agents, something that is necessary for breaking down organizational silos and stimulating overall movement of social initiatives.

Bottom line: Even if an organization’s social media strategy is centralized, training the entire organization can mistake-proof social execution.

Commitment to the process matters more than implementing it everywhere. Make no mistake: It’s a huge commitment to undertake either Lean or Six Sigma methodologies. That’s why it’s acceptable – advisable, even – to dip your organizational toe into the water slowly, with project-level and department level test projects. Try, fail, analyze, iterate and try again – get the process right for your team and your challenges, and then you can roll it out to more of your digital marketing efforts.

Bottom line: Every business is different. As new technologies, platforms and devices expand the digital experience, flexibility is necessary for managing a fast-moving, changing environment.

Marketing has always been a simple proposition: Deliver value in order to capture value. Within that context, business-optimization regimens like Lean and Six Sigma not only have a place in digital marketing, they’re just one more step in a long tradition of figuring out the most effective, efficient way to get the right value proposition into the right prospect’s hands so they can take action.

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Krissy Goelz (@krisgoelz)

In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone lambasts a Mafia crime family member following an attempted hit on his life.

“In my home!” he rages. “In my bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys.”

Even in the mob, business doesn’t belong in personal quarters. The same is true for how professional communicators should handle their social media presence. If your business role requires you to participate in social media, you need to lock down your personal profile, tailor privacy settings and keep what you do on the off hours separate from your job.

In my father’s day it was easier to compartmentalize work. You left the office at 5 p.m. and your personal life was your own. In the digital age, segregating personal details from professional ones is harder, and it takes a great deal of diligence. But, it’s worth it if you want to build an image as a thought leader, trusted advisor or esteemed professional.

When participating in social media you have to enact the grandma rule. In the fields of Behavior and Psychology, this is known as the “Premack Principle.” What it means is conduct yourself properly and never post anything that you aren’t willing to shout from a rooftop or say in front of your grandmother. This is true of all social media users, but especially those who post on behalf of their organizations.

To borrow again from The Godfather, when participating in social media you also have to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. There’s always danger of putting information into the wrong person’s hands – whether that’s competitive details, revealing personal health information or posting personal messages on Facebook during business hours. Even messages that are meant to be private sometimes find their way into the public arena. If you share too much of yourself, you may be surprised when it comes back to haunt you.

Blurring the lines between work and personal life can cost you reputation or financial damage. Just because you qualify something you post with the caveat “the views reflected are my own and not that of my employer” doesn’t mean that a reader is able to maintain that separation. In fact, the more the lines between work and leisure blur, the harder it is to separate our identities.

One way to manage a clean division is to use different platforms for different purposes. For example, keep business relationships and professional content on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use Facebook to connect with college roommates, neighborhood or childhood friends or other personal connections. If you want to use platforms like Facebook or Google+ for both purposes then make sure you create two profiles and work the privacy settings.

While you could argue that we’re all multidimensional human beings and everyone knows people have a work personality and an after-hours persona, there’s still no reason to mix them together.

We’re at work to work and do great things on behalf of our employers. How and when we socialize needs to be kept separate. Also, judiciously parsing information is never a bad thing. It’s good to keep a little mystery about yourself.

There’s no way to know how even the most inane things will be perceived by an outsider, whether it’s having a bad day or not being able to relate to your training for the New York City Marathon or sharing feelings about the NRA. Connecting with others online is critical, but as with anything, perception is reality. Shaping and controlling how you’re received requires a disciplined approach to managing your digital profile.

How are you handing your online presence?

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

As Egon Spengler told us in “Ghostbusters”, “crossing the streams” was a horrific tactical error, one which would create a terrifying explosion of undreamed-of power and destruction. “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light,” he explained.

That’s how a lot of people feel about mixing business and personal personas. Nothing comes of “crossing the streams” except chaos and disaster. Social-media professionals – those of us in the communications and marketing fields who work largely in social digital venues -cross the streams” between personal and business social networking at our peril, and that of our brand. As a result, some people, in representing their brand to the world, put on a brand hat so big that they hide underneath it completely.
In my opinion, all that gives you is a boring hat. I want a hat that’s walking around with a living, breathing, interesting person underneath it. This is what makes the company real: a warm fuzzy personal face. That’s the whole point of social media. It’s social. It has personality and feeling and humanity. If all I wanted to see was the brand hat, I’d go to Wikipedia or to your website.

There is, of course, inherent risk with the personal nature of social-media marketing. If you tie the online brand to one person, you risk losing your whole brand if that person leaves. Or, perhaps worse, if they disgrace themselves somehow, they take the brand down with them.

That simply reinforces why it must be done astutely. Social media is a delicate mix of informal conversation and careful consideration. Deliberation and silliness are never a more necessary couple than when trying to conduct yourself in social channels. Your brand is represented by a person, but your brand isn’t just one person.

One great example of this? Tony Hsieh. He is the Zappos dude, but Zappos’ culture and customer service is bigger than him.

One example to watch? Apple. Is their drive and idealism and vision the company’s, or did that die with Steve Jobs? The next few years will tell us.

To return to the “Ghostbusters” metaphor, do you remember what happened at the end of the movie? (If for some awful reason you haven’t seen this cinema classic, I’ll wait here while you go and do that now.)

The state of affairs had gotten desperate. The old ways weren’t working. People had made mistakes. Nothing they were trying was stopping things from getting worse. As a last resort, they crossed the streams. This new way of doing things, taking their individual energy and combining it in this new and scary way, was finally enough to save the day.

Should you take all your life lessons and business acumen from Ray, Winston, Egon and Dr. Peter Venkman? Well, maybe not. (Although, if someone asks if you’re a god? Say yes.) But in this case – go ahead. Cross the streams. Dare to be yourself as well as your brand.

by DJ Edgerton (@wiltonbound)

The question seems almost nonsensical at first – your Twitter followers may be really outstanding people, but they’re not organic chemists or researchers. And your Facebook fans, while devoted, probably do not, generally speaking, know how to move a new drug through the FDA approval process.

Just the same, it’s a mistake to discount your social audiences as a source for insight and innovation. In fact, a wide range of category-leading companies do just that. While social media is not as planned or controlled as a focus group, there’s potential in polling the audience when it comes to research and development – and along the way you can even benefit the very people you’re polling.

Doing it right requires a three-step plan:

Understand what you want to accomplish. In this regard, social media is no different than traditional R&D research: Don’t ask existing or potential customers anything without a clear purpose behind “the ask.” What do you want to accomplish? Are you looking for feedback on a service (such as when consumers call into the customer care center) or improvement on a product or direction for a new advertising campaign? What about new products: Are you exploring the potential for one or looking at whether your customers have a need for a product that you have not thought of?

A solid roadmap will have goals covering what you hope to accomplish and clear indications of which social channels are – and are not – appropriate. Need to demo a product? You Tube makes sense. On the other hand, Twitter may be a better fit for simple questions requiring quick feedback. And tools like custom Facebook apps offer ways to bring customers and fans into the content creation process.

Be relevant in your questions and rigorous in your data collection. A solid roadmap lays out needs and expectations, but even the best plans can go astray if your research questions don’t balance your needs with the realities of social media, which often boil down to: Don’t be boring.

Tweets sending people to a 50-question survey or requests that Facebook followers sit through six sample commercials in search of the one they like best are unlikely to go anywhere. Instead, keep things short, clear and – most importantly – be ready to monitor and take feedback from the conversations that grow out of your public questions. They can be the source of tremendous insight.

Crunch the data and don’t leave the audience in the dark. One of the unique aspects of social media is that a lot of silos get knocked down – people have a great (and sometimes unreasonable) desire to peek behind the corporate curtain and know what’s going on. This is a powerful force and can jump-start your social-driven research – people love to be treated like insiders, and promising to give them a first peek at a new innovation, a new campaign or even just a slight change in how your company does something will motivate participation in your research.

The key is: You have to deliver on your promise. If you tell participants you’re working on a new way to talk about an established product and want their input, give them a peek before it’s rolled out to the public. Not doing so is bad form in the social landscape; promising to do it and then not delivering is an even bigger faux pas.

Whether it’s a one-drug boutique company or a global powerhouse, research and development is a constant part of pharma’s product and service lifecycles. While social media isn’t a substitute for formalized marketing research, it can be a powerful, low-cost augmentation to the toolbox.

by Sven Larsen

We spend quite a bit of time on Pixels & Pills talking about the benefits of technology. And why not? From e-prescribing to the rise of social media as a marketing tool and digital tools for salespeople, technology has driven an unprecedented wave of productivity, economic growth and improvement in our quality of life.

So what happens when it goes off the rails?

As anyone with a home computer knows, things happen. Power goes out in the middle of an important project. Printers run out of ink. Hard drives die. And sometimes, files just disappear. And that’s just at home – what happens when a day’s productivity for the sales team is at risk, or a multi-million dollar marketing launch? Or, for the doctor moving to electronic health records, what happens when he or she can’t get to a patient’s record?

If a huge amount of our personal livelihood and business success relies on electrons flying around on copper and silicon, then there’s good news as well: Modern offices, enterprises and medical technologies are, on the whole, very reliable and robust. Still, it’s important to have a plan for dealing with unexpected downtime:

One-channel initiatives involve more risk: Got a big marketing pushed planned for Facebook? Then you’re completely beholden to Facebook’s ability to stay up and running on the date and time you need it. Facebook is pretty good at maintaining high availability, but neither they nor any other big online site is perfect. Plan campaigns in such a way that one channel’s temporary downtime won’t derail a whole campaign.

Revenue drivers in the organization need a plan for technology downtime. At the enterprise level, this means that the chief technology officer or someone similar has a strategic plan in place for business continuity. But the same principle applies at the division, department and team level. Thought exercise: How productive would your sales team be if their Blackberries were out for a day or the CRM system went down unexpectedly? The answer shouldn’t be: “They’d be dead in the water.”

Cross-training means tech is less of an issue. Whether the team is in sales, marketing, administration or elsewhere, technology tends to make specialists out of all of us – something that’s possible because it enhances productivity – meaning, a single specialist knowledge worker can handle the work that may, in the past, have taken a whole team of people to do. While there’s no arguing that this specialization drives results, it also means that the absence of enabling technology leaves workers more stranded than in the past. Cross-training can be as simple as making sure your social media specialist also knows how to assist with traditional offline marketing tasks, or your sales assistants know how to assist with social-media responses – small steps to keep productivity up when part of the tech infrastructure goes down.

We think of ourselves as living in an always-on world, but the reality is more like “always on … except when trouble strikes.” Are you prepared?

As we come to the end of 2011, we also come to the end of our year-long Defining Moments series. Once a month, all this year, we’ve looked back at the biggest events from exactly 12 months prior, and noticed how we can relate what’s been changing our world to what we can do in our work. We’d love it if you were to check back over the series and let us know what you think:

January – Haiti earthquake

February – Tiger Woods scandal

March – Iceland volcano

April – Deepwater Horizon oil spill

May – United/Continental merger

June – vuvuzelas at the World Cup

July – Afghanistan Wikileaks documents

August – end of H1N1

September – Tyler Clementi’s death and the It Gets Better project

October – Chilean miner rescue

November – antimatter discovery

And now, December – when scientists announced that they had discovered arsenic-based life. What excited us about this story was not only its ground-breaking interest at the time, but the controversy that still swirls around it. It was startlingly important because, as New Scientist explained, “Until now, all known life has been built around… six major chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur… which make up proteins, lipids and DNA. In all normal life forms, phosphorus is a major part of the backbone of the genetic material.”

Saying that an element that is not one of these six, and which is extremely toxic, could be swapped in – well, it sounded a bit like saying that gravity had an alternative, or that the sun didn’t have to rise in the east. Scientists last December were essentially implying that life could be completely foreign to the way we always imagined it – not on some other planet in some other galaxy, but right here on Earth.

Commentators were reduced to unscientific reactions in their surprise: comments like “really weird” and “shocking” showed the startling nature of the news.

However, nearly as soon as the study was published, it was met with vehement criticism. Some said it shouldn’t even have been published, as the science was done messily, with contaminants that could have given false results, or alternate explanations that were not addressed. The jury is out on whether arsenic-based life is as simple, and as groundbreaking, of a discovery as it first seemed.

However, this study and the reaction to it highlighted how social media is changing science. As the journal noted sniffily five months after the study’s publication, the debate was “finally being aired in the scientific literature rather than on blogs”. The implication was that peer-reviewed scientific journalism was worth notice, and commentary hastily posted on blogs wasn’t.

But isn’t there something to be said for scientific debate happening rapidly and publicly? Certainly, there’s no shortcut for thorough and accurate methods, for proper data analysis or for uninfluenced science.

But what if this study was on an anti-angiogenic molecule, instead of on a bacteria in a desolate lakebed? Would it be appropriate to react as this study’s lead author did, saying “We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time”? I would say no.

There’s an argument to be made that the biggest leap we need to take in science and medicine is one in timeliness. The academics themselves are saying that “Online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication.” The story of arsenic-based life showed us both the pros and cons of speeding the process up.

We’re glad you stuck with us for a year of Defining Moments. What would you choose for this year’s notable events?

by Russ Ward (@russcward)

What does it feel like to have a heart attack? What’s the cure for muscle soreness post-workout?  What one daily habit has the most positive effect on your health?

These are real questions asked on the popular question and answer site Quora. Question sites such as Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Fluther are proliferating on the internet. On these sites members can ask or answers questions on a wide range of subject matter. Other sites such as Healthysparx are more narrow-focused.

Crowdsourcing opinions and guidance for health and wellness information gives patients much more control over their own health care than they ever had before. It also empowers them to help other patients, especially when a question matches their experience or expertise. But, a lot of time answers may be inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent. And, everyone’s experience can be different.

Pharma has an opportunity on the question sites, especially as patients seek an authoritative voice and accurate information. But, is pharma prepared to participate?

Customers are going to talk and research products so it makes sense for pharma to figure out how to be part of the conversation. A lack of social media guidelines will likely limit participation for the time being, but it doesn’t mean question sites should be ignored.

Pharma can train social media spokespeople to respond with consistent, compliant messages, such as a link back to the company website. Because question sites often show up in the first page of search results, having a presence and quality content can bring patients to other properties such as a branded Facebook page or YouTube Channel.

Right now, the bigger opportunity lies in listening. Even under legal scrutiny, pharma marketers should be tracking and monitoring question sites to gather valuable business insight.

Users reveal data about themselves. What is every marketer looking for? To understand their customer’s pain points. On question sites, users are communicating the problems they’re looking to have solved. Keeping an ear to the ground can pinpoint opportunities for education, new customer segments or product uses or reveal disconnect between product messaging and public perception.

Learn who your influencers are. Who are your most vocal adversaries and advocates? Monitor frequency of occurrence to understand who and what is being posted and to ensure message accuracy. Gain insight into influencers and craft a communication strategy to ensure your products are promoted properly and that consumers have the education they need to make informed decisions.

Connect with people at key decision points. For the mother deciding which cough syrup formula is right for her congested three year old, receiving a coupon or information on how to keep her child comfortable during illness from a brand she trusts could influence a purchase decision. Companies such as New York-based Hunch are developing algorithms to recommend certain products when people pose commerce-related queries. By knowing what patients are asking, pharma companies can respond appropriately and ensure their actions and answers resonate with customer needs.

Pharmaceutical companies have a challenge responding via any social media, but they can get the listening component in place and develop internal social media guidelines that enable them to proceed in a compliant manner.

Any questions?

by Sven Larsen

#Adaptordie is an apt hashtag to sum up the teachings of digital-media pundit Brian Solis. It’s also an apt hashtag to describe the current state of affairs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Solis’s new book, The End of Business as Usual, a follow-up to the popular Engage, focuses on this need of business to change the old ways and become adept at dealing with consumers in new ways – as part of individual conversations that provide value, rather than as stoic entities that wait for customers to come to them.

Solis’s “Conversation Prism” is a hugely popular graphic that illustrates that point – that conversations are happening all at once, in a lot of different places, and digital engagement must be in the same vein.

This is hard for any old business to hear – especially one that has been made large and powerful by doing things the old ways. For pharma, with roots in old-fashioned strongholds like medicine and manufacturing, these are painful changes.

As anyone in the industry can tell you, though, these changes have begun. Just as just-in-time manufacturing took over in the 1980s and 1990s, engagement is slowly, slowly becoming the way that marketers and communicators are learning to work with their audiences.

It’s not, as the hashtag goes, optional. #Adaptordie might sound pithy and edgy, but it’s true. Imagine a pharmaceutical company that refused to have any website presence – no corporate site, no brand sites, nothing. Do you think it would be taken seriously? Do you think it would be around for long? Probably not. Yet if you tried to make that argument 15 years ago, you’d have been met with utter skepticism.

We’re in the midst of that same conversation. Convincing pharma companies of the need to join social media is a battle that is, if not won, at least well underway, thank goodness. But what to do once you get there? That’s the big battleground at present.

Yes indeed, companies would be far more comfortable without open Facebook walls, only posting links to pre-approved press releases. But the best are starting to realize that engagement is not a terrifying, ticking time bomb. (For proof, see BI’s Facebook page.)

The next step is to proactively start engaging conversations.

#Adaptordie brings to mind dramatic spear-rattling movie-montage scenes of action and drama. In practice, the current pharma “adaptation” is not much like that. It’s more like trying to lure a scared pet out from under a bed. No sudden movements, no loud noises, and let them see that there’s nothing scary that’s going to swoop down upon them.

Dramatic or not, Solis is right. If pharma doesn’t get the hang of engaging their customers in a real way – and in good time – they will, indeed, die. Slow or fast, dramatically or quietly.

The Defining Moments series looks back at the biggest events of 2010 to see what we can learn from them here at P&P, to work better in our calling, in 2011 and beyond.

Antimatter has been a long-running plot device, used in TV shows and movies for about fifty years. But a year ago, it became important in the real world for about 170 milliseconds, or half of the blink of an eye. In November 2010, scientists were first able to “trap” 38 atoms of anti-hydrogen and keep them for that brief space of time.

Does this mean we have an unending source of energy? A weapon of impressive ability? Not exactly. What it means is that scientists can begin to understand the basic ingredients of the universe. Why is our universe based in matter and not antimatter? Where did antimatter go?

These are deep and powerful questions, but practically speaking, “If you take all the antimatter produced in the history of the world and annihilated it all at once, you wouldn’t have enough energy to boil a cup of tea,”the head of the CERN antimatter project says.

Well, that certainly wouldn’t make a very good movie plot, would it now. Not exactly action-packed. So given the reality of antimatter, why do we care? What can this teach us?

Simple. Think big, and never give up on it.

Scientists had guessed about antimatter for 70 years. They’d even learned how to create it. But antimatter cancels itself out of existence as soon as it meets matter, and you can’t study a thing you can’t keep. Those 170 milliseconds were the result of five years of work.

A lifetime of knowing about something, and half a decade of hard work on it. Who among us can claim that kind of tenacity? How often have you taken on a difficult project only to let yourself be convinced out of it, by some well-meaning friend or colleague who’s sick of seeing you toil away, and gets you to give up?

We all have, and most times, it was the right thing to do. But there have been moments where you knew it was worth sticking to your guns. Sometimes you’ve done it and been glad you did. Other times you let the project get away from you.

These scientists took a giant step toward understanding the basic ingredients of our entire universe: well worth five years, I’m sure you’d agree. Not being particle physicists, we can’t all have goals that lofty, but we can do things that make a difference.

Look at your projects. Do you have bigger end goals in mind, or are you working simply toward the end of each delivery date? What really matters, and what are you doing to get there?

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

Ever since social networking became a popular way to communicate, people have been sharing with gusto, whether that’s the minutia of their daily lives (I had the best corned beef sandwich!) or crowing about significant milestones (I completed my first marathon!). Not only has social media provided an outlet for expression, it’s also given consumers a new way to expose their experiences with products and companies that touch their lives.

Sharing is rewarding for many reasons – it helps people fulfill the role of influencer or connector or taps into their inner social butterfly. But not all feedback is positive, and companies need to prepare for that.

Negative feedback may initially seem scary, particularly for pharmaceutical companies who have shied away from social participation or are just starting to move away from one-way communication strategies to engage with patients. While negative feedback may sting, when social media hands you lemons, there’s opportunity to make lemonade and use the feedback constructively.

Show you’re authentic. Include feedback guidelines on your blog or website, but don’t be in a rush to delete comments that point out flaws. Some less-than-positive feedback is expected as part of authentic communication. Acknowledging the blemishes is also a way to demonstrate the company’s ability to listen and respond.

Feedback lets you tap into customer needs. Sure, the truth hurts, but business is no place for emotions to rule. Listen to what customers are saying because chances are, they’re telling you what they want. Is your advertising misleading? Are your products too expensive, hard to open or foul-tasting? You can file one negative comment under the “you-can’t-please-everyone” school of thought, but if you read a bunch of posts with sympathies or similar complaints, there’s opportunity for improvement.

Paying attention to what employees are saying can help you improve the workplace. Even if your company isn’t participating in social media, chances are your employees are, and they’re talking about your brand, their managers and other factoids from their workday. An employee posting that they’re bored on Twitter might need more challenging work. While a Facebook rant about a manager may not be professional, it can shed light on something that may require further examination. Paying attention to what is being said on the social networks can help managers correct a problem before it escalates, protect the business reputation and cultivate a workplace that meets employee and business needs.

Sorry should not be the hardest word. For some people it’s almost cathartic to send a tweet or post a status update when a business or product has let us down. If you’re monitoring what customers are saying, you can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one by responding in a more personalized manner. Companies that acknowledge what their customers are saying and work to resolve problems can demonstrate empathy and build customers for life.  The next time a customer is making a purchase decision they may not remember the exact issue they had, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.

It would be great if everything was sunshine and lollipops, but social communication is reflective of the real world, and people are going to be dissatisfied. Take advantage of these negative moments and look for opportunities to improve communication, customer service and product development. You may not always like what you hear, but how you respond can be a competitive edge.