Rachel takes on the classic “you’re in marketing, do something” ask this week, the one where a loved one keeps her in their back pocket as a threat to whip out on customer service reps. Cue her husband, who goes in hot on every call and, when all else fails, drops the “my wife works in social media” card (spoiler: it doesn’t work, and it never has). Rachel breaks down why the tag-a-brand-and-watch-them-scramble era is basically over now that social is fragmented across a dozen platforms, and makes the case for remembering the human on the other end of that handle, a marketing person with zero power over billing, refunds, or policy.
Chapter 1: Marketing Threat Intro
[00:00:00] Welcome back to Marketers Barely Managing. It’s Monday when this is coming out, and I’m Rachel Moore, and I’m laughing already about what I’m going to share today. So marketers, do you have loved ones in your life who treat the fact that you’re in marketing like you have some kind of special influence, like you’re an influencer who can sway the powers that be to change the destiny of whatever that person’s trying to do? I speak about this because my husband is guilty of this on so many times, y’all.
Chapter 2: Husband Goes Full Karen
[00:00:43] First of all, to anyone who’s ever had to interact with my husband in a customer service manner over the phone, I apologize. He comes in hot. Like, he’s lit already. I know he’s trying to lead with, like, I’m very upset, and you better give me what I want. That is so not my flave. I’m way more like, hey, I’m just going to believe the best as we get started with this interaction. Now, have I been perfect with that? No. There have been times where I’m like, I’m so upset, or I’m stressed. Maybe it’s a bit more of a fraught thing than, say, like, ooh, I just need, you know, this corrected or something. It just might be a bit more crucial. And then I’m coming in like, okay, I really need a solution. I’m getting intense.
Chapter 3: Social Media Leverage Myth
[00:01:27] He’s intense all the time. And so what he will do is, as a last resort – not that this works, by the way; I just want to point that out. He will, on the phone, tell the person, “Well, my wife works in social media, and I’m going to tell her, and she’s going to,” and he goes on, and I’m just sitting there looking at him across the room like, “The [ __ ] do you think I’m going to do?” And listen, it’s not the same as it used to be when, like, Twitter was new.
[00:01:53] Twitter, you know, and tagging, and oh, I could go out and do a tweet, and all these companies would just rush. Like, you could tag a company on a tweet or a Facebook post or whatever had to be public, remember? But you could tag a company, and they’d come running. But as that got way more prolific, as social media became way more widespread, there’s more apps.
Chapter 4: Why Brands Ignore Tags
[00:02:16] Not even sure if all these, you know, there’s more than like the big three or four apps. There’s more than Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, and there are just way more things: TikTok, Snapchat, blah. What if some of these brands are not on those things? And what if they don’t have a good social team or social monitoring or social listening? You all should, but they’re not as quick to, like, hop to and be like, “Oh, I’d better go take care of this one disgruntled person on social.” And by the way, and I always want to tell them too, I’m like, you know, it all matters. And I have some decent following on social.
[00:02:47] Well, I’m by no means like some kind of massive force. Okay, one of my favorite people, Joe Wilson, is saying that we’re all famous to a few people. I want to emphasize the word few there. We’re all – I’m famous to a few people. Very unlikely that those people happen to, you know, be swayed by, oh, like, well, Rachel got really mad at that one particular, you know, utility company or whatever. But do you all go through this?
[00:03:18] I certainly do. And maybe it’s not your husband, or, you know, it’s a loved one, it’s a friend or whatever, and they just decide to keep you in their back pocket as a threat to whatever they’re having a problem with at the moment. The worst is when it’s in person. It has happened then and I’m like, “Oh my god, I want to sink in the floor right now. Stop.” I do use social. I will use that as a last resort because here, y’all, I realize that on the other end of that handle is a person who has zero control over what I’m going through at the moment.
Chapter 5: Remember the Human
[00:03:50] They’re a marketing and messaging person. Very rarely control policy. They’re not the CEO. They’re not an ops person. They’re not a technician. You know, they’re not an accounting and can’t fix my billing or give me a refund or whatever. They are not that person. They work in the marketing department. They probably are doing more stuff than just responding or monitoring or publishing these posts for this brand. So, I’m always like, I realize the person who is going to read this tweet is not the person I need to be angry at right now. They have no control. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s often to the customer service person.
[00:04:22] They are literally a voice there that is reading a script and going through manuals and protocols for how to process your complaint. Okay? Yes, they’re going to call the manager eventually. Guess who has power? The manager. Not necessarily that person. Anyway, so I would love to hear from y’all. Again, WhatsApp community. The link to it is in the show notes or description.
[00:04:43] Come over. Let’s talk about this. And the fun part is, all these people usually they don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what when we say we work in marketing; they don’t know what that means. They do not know. And then if we try to get granular with it, well, I work in demand.
Chapter 6: They Don’t Get Marketing
[00:04:58] I work in brand, you know, I work in product marketing. I work in, you know, life cycle. They don’t know what any of that [ __ ] means. But the moment that they care about that is like, “Oh, well, I better whip you out and, you know, this is now my new tool in my arsenal to get what I need from a customer service representative. I’m gonna use you to threaten them, even though I don’t know what the hell you do.” So, anyway, I had to laugh about that. And this hasn’t even happened recently. I think it actually may have happened about a week ago. I can’t remember what my husband was calling about, but it happens. It still happens.
[00:05:30] This year it happened, this last month apparently. So, here’s to all the marketers who are the back-pocket threat that all of our loved ones keep in reserve in case it’s needed to threaten their way to get what they want. But also, double that: here’s to everybody who tells your loved ones that you work in marketing. That means they still have no clue what you do or what you’re good at, and explaining it to them just goes right over their head. It’s frustrating. Such is the way.
Chapter 7: Cheers to Back Pocket Marketers
[00:06:01] But anyway, I hope you all have a great rest of your week. I hope that no one tries to use you to strong-arm a customer service representative into getting their way. Hopefully, they let it live on the merits of their own arguments rather than trying to threaten them with some kind of PR disaster that I’m sure all of us could make happen because we have the power to make things go viral like that.
Chapter 8: Weekly Sendoff
[00:06:23] Oh, wait. I need to snap better. Like that. Tried to snap into the microphone, and the first one failed. Anyway, have a great rest of your week. You got this. You will manage your way through the week. We will get there. Have fun being a famous means of threatening your way into success, even if we don’t intend it that way. All right. Talk to you all soon. Bye.
Join the WhatsApp community and share your own back-pocket-threat story — you know you have one.
And… hang in there.
This is just one episode. If you want the full back catalog of marketers barely holding it together, one week at a time, the whole playlist is right here: Marketers Barely Managing. Come for the chaos, stay for the “oh my god, same.”