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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Some rank-and-file congressional Democrats favor starting impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Even Democrats who don’t favor impeachment, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have suggested that Trump’s behavior could be impeachment-worthy, pointing to his administration’s refusal to comply with Congress’s requests for documents and testimony from key officials and the Mueller report’s references to potential obstruction of justice by the president. But Pelosi has downplayed the possibility of pursuing impeachment, hinting that such a move would hurt Democrats electorally.

Put simply, the impeachment of Bill Clinton hangs over everything — Republicans impeached Clinton in 1998, and voters rallied to his defense. Pelosi and other senior Democrats probably fear a similar backlash.

But are they right to?

In the short term, yes. Polls show that impeachment proceedings, at least at their start, would probably be opposed by a plurality of the public. The long term is more complicated, however. If House Democrats impeached Trump sometime in 2019 but he remained in office, would the process meaningfully decrease the party’s chances of retaining the House and winning the Senate or presidency in November 2020? That’s not so obvious. (We’re assuming for this article that a House vote to impeach Trump would be followed by an acquittal in the Senate, so the president would not be removed from office.)1

Let’s unpack the electoral politics of impeachment in more detail, with a few precise questions.

Would impeachment hurt congressional Democrats in the near term?

Probably.

Since the release of the (redacted) Mueller report, some news and polling organizations have asked the public questions about impeachment.2 There is a clear pattern in the results:

Republicans overwhelmingly oppose impeachment (91 percent to 5 percent in a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll that asked whether impeachment hearings should be started in response to the Mueller report).

Independents oppose impeachment but by a narrower margin than Republicans do (51-40, according to the Marist poll).

Democrats largely support impeachment (70 percent, in the Marist survey), but there is still a sizable anti-impeachment bloc among Democrats (23 percent opposed).

So at least for now, impeachment doesn’t look like a great idea for Democrats politically — it divides the party, unifies Republicans and pushes independents toward the GOP.

But those who favor impeachment argue that these poll results should not be taken too seriously. “People don’t have preformed opinions about what merits impeachment the way they know their health care sucks or whatever,” wrote Brian Beutler, editor-in-chief of Crooked Media, the company that produces the popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America.” “Support for impeachment has dropped since the Mueller report … because Democratic leaders aggressively crapped all over the idea from the word ‘go.’ Having successfully eroded public support for impeachment, those same leaders can now point to the polling they shaped as a reason not to act.”

Is Beutler right? Maybe. In this era of deep partisan polarization, I would assume that support for impeachment among Democrats would increase if party elites — particularly people who are aligned with the party’s moderate voters like Joe Biden — all started pushing for it. Also, the process itself, which would probably include nationally televised hearings in which Mueller and others described the allegations against Trump in detail, could increase support for impeachment among the public. That’s what happened in the 1970s: Public support for the idea that Richard Nixon should be removed from office surged in 1973 and 1974 as Congress investigated the president and laid out the evidence against him.

But the polarized politics of today work in the other direction, too — it’s difficult to imagine Republican elected officials or GOP voters breaking with Trump as they (eventually) did with Nixon. By 1974, Nixon’s approval rating among Republican voters was in the mid-50s. Trump’s has been mostly in the upper 80s throughout his presidency despite a seemingly endless list of controversies that the media has cast as politically damaging.

In terms of public opinion, probably the best that Democrats can hope for is a 50-50 split on impeachment — basically, Clinton voters in favor and Trump voters opposed. But it’s entirely possible that impeachment remains a net political loser for Democrats.

Which leads us to another argument against impeachment, that Democrats should instead focus on issues where a clear majority of the public is on the party’s side. This is Pelosi’s strategy, pushing more popular proposals like defending the Affordable Care Act provision that bars insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher prices for people with preexisting conditions, and making it easier for Americans to register to vote on Election Day.

So even if impeachment is basically a 50-50 issue and wouldn’t hurt Democrats’ standing all that much, you could argue that it’s a bad political move because Democrats could be focusing on issues where, say, 70 percent of Americans agree with them.

Would impeachment boost Trump’s job approval ratings in the near term?

Probably not.

Pelosi has suggested that Trump’s base would be extra energized by impeachment. I’m skeptical of this claim simply because Republicans are already strongly behind Trump. Trump’s job approval rating among Republicans is at 91 percent, according to Gallup. Could it increase by a couple of percentage points? Sure. But he has only so much upside left.

Could Trump become more popular among independents, who might view impeachment as an overreach by Democrats? Maybe. But I think the much safer prediction is that Trump’s poll numbers wouldn’t change much. Indeed, that’s been the norm during his presidency so far.

“Sentiments towards President Trump seem remarkably stable given the often tumultuous nature of his time in office,” Robert Griffin of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a group of scholars who research the views of American voters, wrote in a recent analysis of the president’s public standing.

Would impeachment hurt Democrats electorally in November 2020?

Maybe in down-ballot races.

Midterms are usually won by the party that doesn’t control the presidency. It’s as close to a universal rule as politics has. But in November 1998, when Clinton was in the White House, Democrats gained a net of five House seats. Exit polls that year found that the public was wary of the GOP push to impeach Clinton, and Democrats at the time believed that anti-impeachment sentiment helped them.

Pelosi was in Congress in 1998, so she may be particularly inclined to see the potential for an impeachment backlash. And Pelosi has reason to be attuned to the potential dangers of pushing for impeachment — she is speaker in part because 31 Democratic candidates in 2018 won districts that Trump won in 2016. For those House members, deciding how to vote on impeachment would be really challenging — reject the president who was supported by most of your constituents or reject your party’s most intense supporters. Democrats running in gubernatorial and Senate races in states where they clearly need Trump voters to win (Montana, for example) might also be leery about supporting impeachment.

That said, we shouldn’t overstate the impeachment backlash from two decades ago. Even though the impeachment effort against Clinton was unpopular, Republicans kept control of the House and won back the presidency in 2000. And even though Clinton’s approval rating remained high, the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2000, Al Gore, distanced himself from Clinton. Gore reportedly felt that the controversy around the president and his impeachment made voters wary of Clinton even if they said they approved of him.

If Trump were impeached, would that hurt the general election prospects of the Democratic candidate, especially if the nominee had supported impeachment? There are swing voters, and they matter. The question is what issues will be motivating them in 2020. Republicans will probably campaign against what they cast as Democratic extremism, both on policy (the Green New Deal and “Medicare for all,” for example) and politics (anti-Trump fervor).

I’m not sure impeachment would change that dynamic too much. Even if Democrats do not try to remove the president, Republicans can easily cast Democrats as extremely anti-Trump, because they are. Impeachment or not, 2020 is likely to be a referendum on Trump’s leadership and whether voters feel Democrats would govern the country better.

Would impeachment help Trump’s reelection prospects?

Maybe, but probably not.

Above, I dismissed the idea that Trump would get a short-term boost from impeachment. But what if he can spend a year saying the Democrats tried to remove him from office? Well, here’s the thing: Impeachment or not, Trump is likely to act as though Democrats tried to get rid of him. He has already cast the Mueller investigation as akin to a “coup.” The idea that Democrats are obsessed with taking Trump down will likely be in the president’s campaign commercials and echoed by Republicans in Congress and on Fox News no matter what Democrats do in the next 17 months.

Americans’ views on Trump’s presidency appear to be fairly set — the safest bet is that impeachment doesn’t change them too much.

To emphasize the obvious: The electoral impact of impeachment is really difficult to predict. It’s not clear that an impeachment push would hurt Democrats electorally (or help them).

So that leaves Democrats with an underlying question: How strongly do they believe in the case for impeaching Trump, electoral considerations aside? As long as Republicans remain behind Trump, impeachment would be a symbolic action to some extent. But it’s still a powerful and important symbolic act.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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ericvick · 3 years

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Bond Market’s ‘Game of Chicken’ With Fed Is Set for a Reckoning

National Review

Treasurys Tremble

In a Capital Note last week, I wrote about the debate over inflation (coming or not?). With the minor exception of a $1.9 trillion spending package now passed into law, not much has changed since then, other than the fact that there will be more days when markets focus on inflation risk. Friday was one of those days. The Financial Times (late morning, Friday): A “storm” swept through the US government bond market on Friday, sending a key measure of long-term borrowing costs to the highest level since last February. Treasuries dropped in overnight trading after a large sale of long-dated bond futures in Asia, according to people familiar with the matter. Yields on the benchmark 10-year note, a key marker across global asset markets, jumped to 1.63 per cent, having traded around 1.53 per cent the day before. Analysts said the scale of the move underscored how jittery the $21tn market had become against the backdrop of a more robust economic rebound. Treasuries are the biggest and deepest market in the world, something that typically insulates it from sharp rises and falls in prices. Treasuries have been under pressure since the start of the year, as investors anticipate higher inflation and growth in the coming months following another enormous injection of fiscal stimulus with the passage of the Biden administration’s latest package. It is hard to deny that some anxiety over inflation is called for. With rates as low (in absolute terms) as they are, and with government debt so high, it is not as if there is much margin for error for bondholders. Back in December, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, commented that he would not touch Treasurys at the rates that then prevailed “with a ten-foot pole.” While this was hyperbole (as CNBC pointed out, “a lending institution with $3.2 trillion in assets, JPMorgan has to continually purchase Treasurys and other low-yielding investments to earn a spread, a fact that Dimon acknowledged”), the point he was trying to make was a fair one. Since then, the yield on the ten-year has risen sharply in relative terms (when Dimon spoke, it was yielding around 0.9 percent, against 1.63 percent at the time of writing on Friday), but in absolute terms, meh. Let’s put it another (and wildly over-simplified, yet not) way. Would you lend money to Uncle Sam for ten years at that rate? Would you feel well rewarded for the risk that you were taking? The question, I think, answers itself. In an article for the FT earlier this week, Thushka Maharaj, global multi-asset strategist at, well, JPMorgan Asset Management, notes that, “after taking into account inflation, real 10-year yields remain deeply negative,” and observes how low nominal rates leave little room for maneuver: “As a result, the extent to which they can move lower and provide protection in times of stress is limited.” What is more: The policy mix is changing. Fiscal policy is being used more actively to stimulate growth and monetary policy is prioritising higher average inflation expectations. This implicitly imposes a floor for bond yields. In short, stronger economic growth sparked by unprecedented stimulus or the return of inflation, will eventually lead to a pullback in liquidity support from central banks. Investors today, perhaps, are preoccupied with the risk that the economic recovery is too sharp, rather than not sharp enough. That is a fear that is not well hedged by a large allocation to sovereign bonds. Indeed not, and that is even more the case in the euro zone where any recovery looks set to lag that in the U.S. by quite some while, not least thanks to the mess that the EU has made of COVID-19-vaccine procurement and rollout. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank’s interest-rate policy is forever mired in the contradictions of a monetary union that should never have been born, something at which we will again be taking another look before too long. In the meantime, those interested (and who are able to peer behind the Daily Telegraph’s paywall) should read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s latest article. Evans-Pritchard is not always the calmest columnist there is, but it is hard to push back against his argument that rising yields in the U.S. may well cause problems for the ECB (led by Christine Lagarde, a central bank president with no central-banking experience). Lagarde is being forced into a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, a number of the euro zone’s “northern” milch cows would have little objection to higher rates. On the other hand, at least one of the currency union’s southern laggards might find itself a touch squeezed if it had to pay them. Oh yes, as Evans-Pritchard points out, the ECB’s balance sheet has already ballooned to 71 percent of GDP — twice the levels of that of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Evans-Pritchard: Fear of a German and north European backlash is visibly constraining the ECB. It partly explains why the bank’s decision on Thursday to counter US bond market contagion with more QE pledges degenerated into incoherence, prompting a blizzard of criticism from analysts and veteran ECB-watchers. “The outcome of the governing council meeting does not, in our view, bring any meaningful clarity to what the ECB policy is, in theory or in practice,” said Citigroup. You can see the statement after the Governing Council meeting here. And here’s an account of the press conference that followed. Enjoy! Evans-Pritchard: Lagarde contradicted herself. She said the ECB is trying to control financial conditions (to ease stress) but is definitely not pursuing “yield curve control”. Citigroup said these two concepts are “substantially the same thing”, so what is she talking about? “It’s not QE, it’s not yield curve control, so what is it?” asked Ruben Segura-Cayuela and Evelyn Herrmann from Bank of America. “We now have more doubts about the ECB’s reaction function than we did before. Do they target prices? Do they target quantities? Both? None? The compromise today leaves us nowhere.” The ECB’s pledge did succeed in lowering bond yields for a few hours, but the effect has mostly dissipated. Bund yields are higher than they were before the announcement. Bank of America said the EU had inadvertently created a cliff-edge that will be tested by markets and could make matters worse: “We worry beyond the next few months. At a time when a long-term commitment is needed, the ECB has shortened the guidance to one quarter.” Pimco called it a “muddle-through compromise of a highly-divided governing council”. Axa’s Apolline Menut tried to be polite: “ECB will have to get lucky, as they are not targeting quantities and they are not targeting prices either.” What it reflects is intellectual chaos at a split institution that no longer knows what it is trying to do. All the while, the external threat builds. Yield contagion and imported monetary tightening from the US is only going to get worse this year. Looking at it from a purely selfish American perspective, perceptions of trouble in the euro zone might increase demand for Treasurys, as, among the safe havens, the U.S. is still seen as the healthiest horse in the glue factory, so there is that. This might come in handy, not least, possibly, in the very short term if a short-term break given to the banks last March is allowed to expire. The FT: Investors are also on edge about the potential for a regulatory change at the end of the month that may hamper Treasury market functioning, with Scott Thiel, chief fixed-income strategist at BlackRock calling it a “significant factor” contributing to the recent volatility. At the height of the coronavirus-induced financial ructions last year, US regulators introduced a temporary rule change that allowed banks to exclude Treasuries and cash reserves when calculating how much additional capital they need to hold. The aim, in part, was to encourage banks to step in more forcefully to stabilise whipsawing markets without worrying about balance sheet constraints. The exemption is set to expire at the end of the month, and analysts warn a failure to extend it could magnify the problems in the Treasury market, especially given the sheer size of the supply set to flood the market this year in order to fund the record-sized stimulus programmes passed to support the economic recovery. “If the rule is not extended, it is certainly possible, maybe even probable, that illiquidity returns to the Treasury market,” said Kelcie Gerson, an interest rate strategist at Morgan Stanley. The rule should be extended. Some say that this is an irrelevance (I don’t agree), but even risking a rerun of last March’s shambles in the Treasury market would be unwise at this point, even if it could give banker-bashers on the populist left (Hullo, Senator Warren!) a potentially useful talking point. Bloomberg’s Brian Chappatta details the issues involved in an excellent article here. The whole thing is well worth reading, but some key extracts: As a way to push banks to help the country get through the Covid-19 pandemic, regulators allowed them to temporarily exclude U.S. Treasuries and deposits at the Federal Reserve from the SLR denominator because they are the closest thing to risk-free assets. In addition to helping banks continue to take deposits and lend during the health crisis, it also served to ensure they would help backstop the unprecedented fiscal and monetary policy support that flooded the financial system with cash . . . The Fed has been unusually silent about the SLR’s fate ahead of its policy decision next week . . . Some background: First, it’s important to understand the mechanics behind the Fed’s bond-buying program. When it purchases Treasuries from a money manager, those securities become an asset on the central bank’s balance sheet. The seller will deposit the cash it received at a bank, which, left as reserves at the Fed, is an asset for that bank and a liability for the Fed. In other words, quantitative easing boosts the asset levels of U.S. banks, which, in turn, means they need to hold more capital. There’s nothing wrong with the Fed, as a regulator, requiring that banks maintain adequate capital to avoid another financial crisis. But it’s a hard sell when the Fed, as the nation’s monetary policy authority, is forcibly increasing the asset base. This kind of internal struggle explains why the SLR [Supplementary Leverage Ratio] exemption was put in place; it’s anyone’s guess what might have happened without it as the Fed expanded its balance sheet by almost $3 trillion in three months. So, what to do? At first glance, the easy answer seems to be to just extend the SLR exemptions for Treasuries and reserves to avoid disrupting this market plumbing. By some measures, this break allowed banks to expand their balance sheets by as much as $600 billion — why mess with that? However, the Fed created its own political problem by loosening its restrictions on banks’ cash distributions, which had been put in place after the pandemic. Banks are now buying back stock and distributing capital to shareholders, or, in SLR terms, willfully reducing their numerator. It stands to reason, then, that they could afford to have the denominator return to its usual form. This is the argument from Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio . . . That, I suppose, depends on how those numbers pan out, but even then, there is the issue of the banks being “forced” to increase their asset base. Please note this: Dimon, for his part, raised the specter of having to turn away deposits at some point without SLR relief during the bank’s earnings call in January, which would obviously be quite a drastic business decision. Indeed. To Cabana [Mark Cabana, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America], the recent angst over the SLR extension has less to do with the actual mechanics and is more about the rapid increase in Treasury yields over the past two months, which happened to coincide with the expiring exemption. “What all of this indicates to me is there’s heightened sensitivity over where Treasury demand is going to come from and whether Treasury rates can remain here,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of debt out there, and it��s only going to keep growing.” Just the time to spend $1.9 trillion. On a brighter note, the Dow Jones Industrial and the S&P 500 closed up on Friday. The NASDAQ composite was off a little. GameStop (no note can pass without a mention of GameStop) was up around 1.73 percent on the day and closed at $264.50, compared with its close on March 5 of $137.74, and an intra-day peak of $295.50. All is well. The Capital Record We recently launched a new series of podcasts, the Capital Record. Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record, which will appear weekly, is designed to make use of another medium to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. Financier and NRI trustee David L. Bahnsen hosts discussions on economics and finance in this National Review Capital Matters podcast, sponsored by National Review Institute. Episodes feature interviews with thenation’s top business leaders, entrepreneurs, investment professionals, and financial commentators. In the eighth episode, David Bahnsen (joined by himself and himself alone this week) examined the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, looking at what it means to markets, to national debt, to economic growth, and more. And the Capital Matters week that was . . . The week began, gloomily as always, on this occasion with Wayne Crews looking at “the hidden tax of regulation”, and how the Biden administration seems set on increasing it. The Swamp floats thousands of other rafts, too. These are the guidance documents, memoranda, interpretative bulletins, circulars, letters, and various other kinds of “regulatory dark matter” that spew from agencies, that, while not law, add to federal regulatory-compliance burdens. In addition to striking one-in, two-out, Biden eliminated a Trump executive order requiring that these myriad proclamations be made readily available to the public . . . There is some time to correct course, if Congress takes note. As part of his order, Trump also directed executive agencies to issue a final rule on guidance — we’ve taken to calling them “FROGs” — and specifically to set up internal procedures for their creation and posting. Thirty agencies issued FROGs, all of which provided for searchable disclosures, by the time Biden took office. Since these “rules on rules” are part of the Code of Federal Regulations, Biden cannot strike them out with his pen as he did the underlying Trump order. Nonetheless, Biden has directed agencies to “promptly take steps to rescind any orders, rules, regulations, guidelines, or policies, or portions thereof, implementing or enforcing” the Trump orders that he rescinded. When asked at a briefing why President Biden rescinded an order aimed at transparency, White House press secretary Jen Psaki ducked and accused the Trump White House of erecting “unnecessary hurdles and cumbersome processes for agencies.” That is a clear signal that the Biden White House prioritizes the convenience of bureaucrats over the public’s right to know about the rules they are being told to follow. Of course it does. In the next in our Supply & Demand series, John Cochrane asked whether the Fed’s monetary policy threatens inflation: By conventional measures, yes. But those conventional measures have failed in the past. I believe that the short-run danger is less than it appears, but the long-run danger is larger . . . Brainard, like other Fed officials, speaks of “anchored” inflation expectations. Anchored by what? Are expectations an anchor, or a balloon in a temporarily windless sky? Given the number of words coming out of the Fed on this long-run strategy, perhaps they believe inflation expectations are anchored by great speeches. So did their predecessors in the 1970s, culminating in President Ford’s ludicrous Whip Inflation Now (“WIN”) buttons. Anchoring is important. If people do not expect inflation to continue, when they eventually see some of it, they treat it as a transitory blip and do not build inflation into the prices they charge or are willing to pay, the wages they offer or demand, and the prices of assets they buy and sell. Once people expect inflation in the future, we have inflation now. There is only one “anchoring” that makes sense: anchoring by actions. People must believe that if inflation got out of hand, the Fed would quickly do what it takes to bring it back. If that means reliving the awful recessions of 1980–1982, people must believe the Fed would do it. Today, anchored expectations depend on fiscal policy as well. People must believe that if inflation were to break out, the federal government would swiftly retrench, stop spreading money around like fertilizer, and put its house in order with a tax and entitlement reform. Indeed, Brainard writes, “If, in the future, inflation rises immoderately or persistently above target, and there is evidence that longer-term inflation expectations are moving above our longer-run goal, I would not hesitate to act and believe we have the tools to carefully guide inflation down to target.” It matters that people believe this, even if the actions cause immense short-term pain. Do people still believe the Fed has that will? Do people believe that the Treasury Department and Congress have the parallel will to take fiscal steps to contain inflation if it should come? Does the Fed really have the tools to do it? I am doubtful. For ten years, interest rates were zero. (Interest rates were either too high or too low, depending on your view of things, but stuck at zero in any case.) For ten years, the Fed ran massive quantitative easing after quantitative easing. Inflation just sailed along slightly below 2 percent. This episode suggests the Fed has a lot less power than it thinks. But that is also a cheery view, as if the Fed’s interest-rate and bond-purchase tools are relatively powerless, then not much of what the Fed is doing will cause inflation either. In the current economy, fiscal policy and fiscal anchoring seem the greater danger to inflation than even the monetary mistakes of the 1970s. Veronique de Rugy cast a skeptical eye over the administration’s climate policies, focusing on the role of the Ex-Im Bank: At the end of January, President Biden issued an executive order to combat climate change. The whole thing is what you’d expect from this administration. The EO is lots of signaling to the climate crowd, and it will likely offer fertile grounds for government failures and nasty unintended consequences . . . In the end, I predict that all we are likely to get from this EO is bad climate policies such as subsidies to well-connected green companies (see the 1705 loan program) and measures to destroy the domestic oil and gas industries while Ex-Im will continue to subsidize corrupt PEMEX. It’s messed up. Veronique returned to the topic of the administration’s greenery a few days later and explained that more contradiction and confusion was going to be added to a situation where both flourish already: On Tuesday, I mentioned that it is likely that the Biden administration will continue misguided green policies pursued by other Democrats of heavy green subsidies and attacks on gas and oil industries, all the while the federal government will continue to subsidize state-owned and private oil and gas companies abroad. Today, I came across this video from this brand new company Kite & Key Media, which touches on the internal conflict of the U.S. green-energy policy. This video, which is their first, is about such minerals as graphite, lithium, or manganese that are needed to produce many of the modern life products we love as well as several of the “green products” that environmentalists are so fond of. As the video narrator explains “the greener we try to be, the more mining it requires.” The Biden administration has made it clear that it will force more green energy on the U.S. through the regulatory process. In doing so, it will also both be making it harder to mine these minerals here at home and it will increase the amount of mining we buy from these less than environmentally friendly countries. That, of course, will happen all the while the administration continues to insist on idiotic “made in America” requirements and to demand repatriation of our supply chains in the name of propping up manufacturing jobs and national security . . . Good times. Michelle Minton highlighted yet another counter-productive move by Congress (in this case, the last one): Amid the economic devastation caused by COVID-19, one industry has actually thrived: the cigarette business. Some people are smoking to relieve the emotional and economic stress of lockdowns. But many others returned to smoking when the lower-risk options they relied on, such as nicotine vapor products, became too expensive or hard to find when compared with the combustible tobacco available at every gas station and corner store. Now, Congress wants to eliminate the ability for adults to receive e-cigarettes by mail, a measure that will reduce access to these life-saving options even after the lockdowns end. Buried within the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of last year was the “Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act.” The Act, colloquially called the “vape mail ban,” prohibits the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from delivering nicotine or cannabis vaping products. One might think that e-cigarette makers could simply switch to private carriers, such as FedEx or UPS. But these private carriers don’t deliver to all addresses, particularly in rural areas. Private carriers actually rely on USPS to make “last mile” deliveries. Even if private carriers did deliver everywhere in the U.S., most — including FedEx, UPS, and DHL — have yielded to the anti-vaping mob, voluntarily ending e-cigarette deliveries . . . Robert VerBruggen wasn’t too sure about the polling on the Democrats’ expanded child tax credits: The Democrats’ COVID bill will send a lot of money to most parents — $3,600 for each kid under six, plus $3,000 for older kids up to age 17 — for the next year, the plan being to make it permanent in the future. This is controversial not only because it’s big new federal spending, but also because the money goes to parents regardless of whether they’re working. Skeptics say this basically brings back the pre-reform welfare system. A lot of liberals have convinced themselves this policy will be a huge hit. A CNN poll says it has 85 percent support! I’m not so sure. CNN asked people if they support “providing larger tax credits for families and making them easier for low-income households to claim,” which, er, doesn’t quite get at why this is controversial. By contrast, back in 2019 I wrote up a survey that asked people about several different options and was clearer about whether work was required. (It also offered a “neither favor nor oppose” response that was far more common than the “no opinion” answers in the CNN survey.) Two options were reasonably popular, garnering much more support than opposition: A tax credit that goes to all parents who pay income taxes, and a tax credit where parents with lower incomes “get back” relatively more. The former is framed as broad tax relief for parents and was popular across the political spectrum; the latter is framed a little more as welfare and was much more popular with Democrats. You know what bombed? A child allowance for everyone “whether they pay income taxes or not.” Only about 30 percent of respondents favored this; about 40 percent opposed it . . . And David Harsanyi wasn’t too sure about the polling on the Biden spending package: There is overwhelming bipartisan support for the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” No doubt about it. Every poll says so. The latest Morning Consult poll, for instance, informs us that Americans support the bill by a wide 75–18 percent margin. Among Democrats, it’s 90–5. Among the GOP, it’s 59–35. Among independents, it’s 71–20. As the Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler put it recently on Twitter, presidents dream “of getting numbers like this for a major piece of legislation — especially if no one from the opposition party votes for it.” Indeed, they do. But the dream can be made reality only if the media abdicate their responsibility of critically reporting and properly highlighting the partisan boondoggles in trillion-dollar legislation. How popular would the “American Rescue Plan” be if pollsters asked voters grown-up questions rather than push-polling for Democrats? I’ll take one of David’s questions: Do you support an emergency-rescue bill that spends a third of proposed funding, around $700 billion, in 2022 or later, rather than right now? Ought to answer itself. Ought to. Robert P. O’Quinn thought the package was a waste of over a trillion dollars: At a time when Dr. Seuss is being canceled, it might seem as if nothing could be more ridiculous. But consider this: The economy is currently growing at an annual rate of 8.4 percent, and Democrats have decided, nevertheless, that it is time for a massive stimulus. Never has such a massive policy come at a time that is more inconsistent witheconomic reason. Why the rush to have a stimulus when none is needed? You guessed it. Democrats won the election and are engaged in an effort, in the false name of stimulus, to transfer a massive pile of taxpayer cash to their pet projects and constituencies. Indeed, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is loaded with more than $700 billion in payoffs to such causes, completely unrelated to the pandemic. Claiming that any of this wasteful spending is stimulative is laughable. In another Supply & Demand, Casey Mulligan and Tomas Philipson made clear that they didn’t think too much of it either: As an economic stabilizer, Congress has long been recognized to be notoriously bad in its timing. Such packages take a long time to debate, and many of its projects are not within a year of being “shovel ready,” long after downturns have subsided. Lawmakers can’t keep up and often end up either stimulating an already growing economy or restraining an economy that is already contracting. Meanwhile, the private sector steams ahead as we saw in the February job gains and in the surprisingly low unemployment claims that were reported last week. Failing to argue that the Recovery Act is a stimulus, some economists have instead resorted to arguing that it should be viewed as a liquidity bridge. In other words, the measures harm economic incentives but provide a bridge to an economy saved by the vaccines that the private sector produced with record speed under Operation Warp Speed . . . Since last summer, we have argued that there has been a massive fiscal overreaction to COVID in terms of liquidity. Bothe the CARES Act and the December bailout was subject to this and the same is true of the Recovery Act. At first glance, it would seem that the $1.9 trillion would increase national spending as Americans begin to cash the government checks. But aggregate spending includes not only the spending of government-program participants, but also the spending (both consumption and investment) of those who finance the government. When government redistributes, the taxpayers and lenders to our government have less to spend and save. Even a foreign lender who decides to lend that extra $1 million to our government may well be lending less to U.S. households and companies. At best, redistribution from workers to the unemployed reallocates aggregate demand rather than increases its total. Indeed, retail sales really started to grow in August and September when parts of the March 2020 CARES Act began to expire, in direct contradiction to the “Keynesian” predictions. Maybe a better path for mitigating harm to the economy would be for Congress to acknowledge its own handicaps and stop inflicting more damage. Less is more when it comes to governments helping economies. Robert VerBruggen noted a revealing catch amid all the largesse: Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation has a fascinating blog post about one of the amendments that made it into the COVID-relief bill. The bill doles out $350 billion to state and local governments, nearly $200 billion of it to states. (There’s also, separately, money for schools and public transportation.) But states haven’t seen their revenues decline anywhere near that much, and some states aren’t hurting at all. So for many governments this is just a big windfall to spend. But not so fast! The Democrats who passed the bill don’t want the free money to go to something icky, and they especially don’t want it to go to something really icky like tax cuts . . . We ran a lightly edited extract from Donald Devine’s new book, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order: When 60 percent of stock-market gains have come on dates that the Fed made a policy announcement, the stock markets have been driven not by capitalist supply and demand, but by investor reactions to mostly misguided governmental calculations. Earlier, in 2014, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) observed that it once appeared that “economic science had conquered the business cycle” after the Great Depression. There had been inflationary recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, but “long expansionist runs” from 1961 to 1969, and from 1991 to 2001. BIS noted, however, that even with multiple billions of dollars of stimulus spending, Federal Reserve policy since 2007 had failed to increase U.S. output, which was then 13 percent below where it would have been if previous growth rates had continued. The pattern was similar in other capitalist countries: output was 19 percent below earlier projections in Britain, 12 percent below in France, and 3 percent below in Germany. In fact, analysts had ignored the fact that bank and treasury stimulus did not work in the 1930s, 1970s, or 1980s either. By 2014, the idea that central banks could actually control economies was seriously in question. As early as the financial crisis of 2007–08, it seemed clear that those in charge at Treasury and the Fed were operating by the seat of their pants each day, without any guiding plan, in the face of enormous market complexity. Indeed, all three top managers of the crisis — Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson — would later essentially admit as much in their book on the subject, Firefighting. As the title suggests, they conceded that they had simply been putting out fires on the spot, with no comprehensive, rationalized plan to direct the markets. Casey B. Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, argued that the unintended effects of firefighting based on instinct might even have made things worse. He maintained that the incentives to work, earn, and recover had been reduced by the stimulus programs, the six-year “emergency assistance” for the long-term unemployed, the expansion of the food-stamp program, the mortgage-assistance programs, and the like. The result was the lowest labor-force-participation rate in 30 years and a historically slow recovery . . . Kevin Williamson discussed the contemporary cult of asceticism (which bears quite a resemblance to a good number of its predecessors): Like its cousin misery, asceticism loves company, and so Manjoo proposes to begin his campaign of moral improvement with . . . you peons, of course. “Do you really need to fly?” the headline asks. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you need to mind your own goddamned business. But, why not play the game? Do you really need a tomato? You can live a perfectly happy life without one. The tomato, too, was once regarded as sinful: Europeans once thought of it as excessively voluptuous, associating it with the forbidden fruit of the Bible, believing alternately that it was poisonous or an aphrodisiac. Tomatoes apparently used to be sexy, which probably is why “tomato” used to be slang for an attractive woman. Nobody needs a tomato. Nobody needs fine Au Lit sheets or a Tesla. Nobody needs to go to the moon. Nobody needs more than one pair of shoes. Nobody needs another self-righteous New York Times columnist. How about another book? How about an Internet connection? Do you really need . . . to be a blue-nosed busybody? We are in the midst of a great national moral panic. It is a secular moral panic, but one of the interesting things about American political culture is that our secular social movements almost always simply recapitulate old-fashioned Christian practice in some bizarre new way. The green cathedral has its own stations of the cross and liturgy, its sacrament of reconciliation (carbon offsets), its saints and martyrs (Greta Thunberg), its sacred scripture, its confession of faith and apostles’ creed . . . Michael Brendan Dougherty approved of Marco Rubio’s support for the unionization drive among Amazon workers in Alabama: Lots of the talk about the Republican Party becoming a “multi-ethnic workers’ party” has been a little premature, even if I’ve been hoping for it all my life. The great populist GOP president passed a corporate tax cut that wasn’t even popular when it passed. Everyone can recognize that affluent and educated voters are moving en masse into the Democratic Party, and some downwardly mobile people are trickling in to the GOP. But what does it mean? All this talk of workers has been met with taunts from liberals in the media: “Fine, but when will the GOP ever take the side of workers against an owner?” Marco Rubio has done just that in an op-ed today, supporting the unionization drive among Amazon’s workers in Alabama. Rubio’s critics have been quick to point out that he doesn’t offer a pro-worker rationale and doesn’t even seem to like unions. All the rhetorical emphasis seems to be on spite. “For decades, companies like Amazon have been allies of the left in the culture war,” Rubio writes, “but when their bottom line is threatened they turn to conservatives to save them.” Rubio is looking down and whispering “No.” And listen, it’s high time that conservatives recognize that corporate America is not a friend. And Rubio is right to recognize that this enmity isn’t just over culture-war issues — like censorship of conservative views — but also at an international level, where global corporations feel empowered to push around democratically elected governments at home, while serving the interests of dictators like Xi Jinping abroad . . . Veronique de Rugy is no more impressed by the third airline bailout than she was by its two predecessors: No one seems to care anymore but airlines will receive their third bailout in a year thanks to the new COVID-19 relief bill. That will make a total of $79 billion in airline bailout: $50 billion in the CARES Act ($25 billion in payroll support and $25 billion in subsidized loans), $15 billion in December 2020, and finally $14 billion for commercial airlines as part of the American Rescue Plan. I have written many times about why most of the money goes to bailing out shareholders and creditors rather than workers. In part, it is because the amount of each bailout covers more than the payroll costs of those workers who would have gotten furloughed. Oh, and by the way, airlines are receiving subsidies even when they have committed not to furlough anyone in 2021 even without a bailout, like Southwest has. Gary Leff of View from the Wing also notes that while the airlines are picking our pockets, “Delta is even paying out large management bonuses” and that “American even figured out how to keep workers they let go from collecting on payroll support.” . . . It being that time of year, Steve Hanke and Christopher Arena argued that it was time to scrap the move to Daylight Savings Time, and then took it a step further with the suggestion that we all adopt UTC, a harder sell. It’s that time of year when we “spring ahead” and switch to daylight saving time (DST). There is a good chance that this annual adjustment of the clock will damage not only your wallet but your health, too. Before the adoption of standard measures of time, churches, city halls, and trains kept solar time. Every city, depending on its location, observed its own solar time, once referred to as “true time” in the United States. In the early 19th century, there were more than 300 “sun zones” in the U.S. alone. It wasn’t until the proliferation of railways that time standardization arose to resolve logistical and scheduling nightmares and passenger confusion, not to mention fatal railroad accidents. In 1875, there were 75 different railway times in the United States, with three in Chicago and six in St. Louis alone. In 1883, the time zones we know today were introduced as Standard Railway Time. It wasn’t until 1918, with the passage of the Standard Time Act, that our five current time zones (excluding Hawaii) were enacted into law. In an attempt to conserve energy during World War I, the United States, armed with the Standard Time Act, followed Germany’s lead and adopted daylight saving time. The idea was that if daylight lasted for one more hour, that was one hour less of darkness during which people would need to use artificial lighting. But in today’s highly technological world, we are plugged in whether or not the sun is up. As a result, this original energy-conservation rationale for daylight saving no longer makes sense . . . Finally, we produced the Capital Note, our “daily” (well, Tuesday–Friday, anyway). Topics covered included: GameStop, ice-cream cones, sock puppets and other fundamentals, China’s coal, Tesla and Texas, ghost kitchens, no, the financial markets are not “rigged,” retail investors calling the shots, sidewalk robots, DNA’s day in court, pay toilets, the bombing of Wall Street, $1.9 trillion, you say, the coming attack on Big Tech, inflation, when the selling starts, accounting for Bitcoin, woke capitalism, it’s here to stay; working from home, not the route to promotion; Germany’s energy mess (and India’s coal); bubble update; and Cisco’s hard lesson (now being ignored).

#Bond #Chicken #Fed #Game #markets #Reckoning #Set

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celindapontius3-blog · 6 years

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Jon Davis Tree Service

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— Nash Tree Service (@nashtreeservice) March 7, 2018

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glorykrp · 7 years

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SHOWING RESULTS FOR: ISEUL.

✩ Kwon Iseul ✩ April 14th, 1998 ✩ Seoul, South Korea ✩ HEX

RELATED SEARCHES.

» Nebula Silver » HEXAGON Album » Iseul Fancam

PERSONAL LIFE.

iseul was the middle child of three, born into a fairly privileged family in seoul. his mother is a successful c.e.o and his father, a trot singer. his older brother (who is unnamed for now!) was born around five years before him, and his sister five years after, so neither are especially close in age to iseul, but growing up he looked up to his brother quite a lot.

when iseul was around ten years old and his brother fifteen, they both got into dancing – they would practise and post dance covers online just for fun, with the encouragement of their parents (and their sister, who was their first fan.) they gained a little bit of a following, with most of their fans being around his brother’s age – tiny iseul, who was smaller than average for his age at the time, added the ‘aww’ factor that pushed them to having their views reach the high thousands for each video.

one year and 10k subscribers later, his brother is scouted by a small, relatively unknown entertainment company. he signs their contract and, within a few months, leaves to live in a dorm with other trainees. with only iseul left, they don’t think the channel will stay as popular – so he and his brother say their goodbyes, shut down the channel, and iseul gives up on dancing for a while.

for two years, iseul’s brother is seldom seen around the house – he misses him dearly, but he’s excited and proud whenever he hears news of his upcoming debut. his brother.. a real idol? wow! he chats about it at school, to his friends, who are only really impressed the first three times iseul brings it up.

it isn’t until iseul is fourteen, on the day of his brother’s debut that iseul starts to get jealous.

suddenly, his middle school friends – and classmates who don’t even talk to him on a regular basis – are chasing him down on the schoolyard, asking him about the brother he could swear he told them about already, asking if he can get them pictures with him, asking him questions about his personal life. iseul is compliant at first, and not all too bothered because he is becoming more popular through his brother’s success – but when his parents start to praise his brother more, and pay less attention to iseul’s own efforts, he starts feeling bitter about it. why is his brother allowed to drop out of high school to become an idol, but iseul has to get perfect grades on every test or he gets punished? why are they praising his dancing onstage, when they used to tell iseul to stop ‘playing around’ when he was trying to practise?

out of frustration – and maybe spite – iseul starts dancing again. if he can do it, so can i. his intentions weren’t to become an idol, he just wanted to gain some recognition on his own. something that would prove to his friends and his parents (and most importantly, to himself) that he was just as good as his brother. for once, instead of doing a dance cover, he attempts to choreograph something himself to a favourite hip hop tune.

one night, he lies to his parents, telling them that he’s going to cram school when he’s really going out to perform on the street. he sets up a little speaker, his phone on a tripod in front of him and wears a hat pulled down almost completely over his face in an almost goofy-looking fashion, but he is completely serious. he’s also incredibly nervous, but he closes his eyes and imagines that he’s just in his living room, dancing in front of his camera with his brother, carefree and happy just to show off his moves…

and it works, for the most part. once he gets into his routine, he takes it away – he dances through it flawlessly, paying little attention to the passersby… which is probably a good thing, considering only one or two of them actually stop to watch him. when he’s done, he takes the hat and stands there, winded but smiling into the camera. off to the side, there’s a smattering of clapping from a group of schoolgirls that caught the end of his dance. Iseul picks up his tripod and speaker and heads toward a coffee shop, where he spends the rest of the evening trying to figure out how to upload a mobile video to youtube.

his video reaches 10k views in just a week, from old fans startled by the new upload from a seemingly closed channel, from fans of his brother excited to see that the younger boy is talented as well, from other random viewers. iseul is filled with confidence, coming to a peak when he gets a kakaotalk message from his brother praising him. you should be auditioning when you get the chance too, seulie, wouldn’t that be cool??

as if his brother predicted it, only a few weeks later a friend forwards an ad to him on facebook – a popular company by the name of ‘nebula’ is looking for young boys, singers and dancers who could potentially end up in a boy group later on. iseul’s heart skips a beat when he sees it – this is his chance…

he passes the audition, but when he brings the contract home to his parents, they’re shocked. they never expected iseul to copy his brother. they wanted at least one of their kids to succeed in academics. iseul pleads with them and annoys them until they finally agree to sign, and iseul soons become one of the company’s youngest trainees at fourteen years old.

STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES.

when iseul first auditioned at fourteen, he was not a strong vocalist at all. he was able to hold notes decently enough, but like any inexperienced singer his voice lacked fullness, and his range was very limited. but the company saw potential in him, saying his tone was warm and pleasant enough – and that with vigorous training, he could be a really good vocalist by the time he gets to debut. he did really well for the dancing segment, executing each move with precision packed with energy and charisma, with only one minor mistake. It was clear that dancing was his specialty, and he was very happy to hear that the judges thought he was good.

though they didn’t tell him right away that it was something they noticed, the company noted that iseul had strong natural visuals and charisma, which later helped iseul to gain the huge fanbase that he has today, but every silver cloud has a gray lining – critics of the group and fans who are ‘biased’ towards the other members will claim that iseul was only given his spot as main dancer due to his looks, nebula shoving him into the spotlight even before his debut by having him appear in a jewel box MV.. this does damage iseul’s self esteem a little, as he’d rather be known for his talents than for his looks; but he eats up the positive attention he gets nonetheless, trying his best to ignore the bitter comments from fans saying other members of the group deserve the screen time that he gets…

2017 INTERVIEW.

iseul loves and seeks positive attention and validation, both from his fans and from the other members of hex, and he hates being the recipient of anti’s negativity; he has a hard time accepting criticism without taking it personally.

getting to debut with the many talented members of hex was maybe the happiest and most important moment of his life, something he’ll always look back upon fondly. after all that they’ve been through, there is tension and maybe even distrust among the members, but not with iseul – he loves his hyungs dearly and tries his best to diffuse conflicts in the group. at first, iseul had a really hard time with the negative press that fame brought to them- he once got in trouble when he impulsively tried to tweet at antis to stop spreading rumours (luckily, another member stopped him before he sent any tweet.) he was still young when the group suffered from all their backlash, and didn’t really understand the implications of being famous before it happened. It took him several months to grow thicker skin, with the help of the other members.

their skyrocket in popularity was, of course, primarily exciting for iseul, but it quickly became bittersweet for him when, not even a month after their release of hexagon, his brother’s group disbanded. iseul felt guilty, feeling as though their group’s failure had something to do with hex’s success, and that his brother deserved his place in hex more than himself. some fans have picked up on iseul’s reluctance to talk about his brother on variety when the emcees ask about him; he’ll always answer, of course, it’s rude not to – but it’s hard to miss how he shifts uncomfortably, his smile fades a little, his nervous laughter. his brother is a touchy subject for him, especially since their relationship has been strained ever since the other group’s disbandment.

though he has a large amount of fans and a secured place in hex as the cute, charismatic maknae, jungmin suffers from the same self-esteem issues he developed as a teen, which have only been slightly subdued over the years. he tries to ignore the netizens’ talk about his weaker vocals and about him being a “superficial idol” but it’s hard, especially when he needs so much approval. he seeks comfort and validation from the other members quite often, to the point where it might be a little annoying. he shows a lot of love and gratitude towards fans that believe in his singing and dancing abilities, and interacts with them wholeheartedly whenever he can, but he’s been told that he cares too much about what people are saying about him online. most fans can’t tell he has this “dark side” because he tries to cover it up by acting bubbly and egotistical. (posting social media updates with captions like “i’m cute, right??”), but particularly perceptive people (and those closest to him, like the rest of hex) can see through it.

#glr: profile #glr: silver #glr: hex

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martechadvisor-blog · 7 years

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15 Ways to Stop Failing at Social Media Marketing and Customer Support

Corporate social media channels have the potential to greatly extend brand reach and drive customer traffic to the website — and to create PR nightmares on a scale that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

Social is definitely a double-edged sword. On the one side, social channels are great for pushing content out to an opted-in audience; for promoting products and services; for sharing company milestones, news, and awards.

On the other side, social media hands a megaphone to disgruntled customers, activists, and Internet trolls — and you have no control over what they say about your brand and when.

It’s essential to manage both sides of the social media game, lest you become a cautionary tale (like the infamous “United Breaks Guitars” debacle, where poor customer service from United Airlines inspired a viral music video that has reached well over 16 million views).

As I’ve researched some of the most egregious social media fails from major brands over the last few years, I identified five common categories. Avoid these, and you’ll largely stay out of the path of the circling sharks.

Considering that you probably have loftier goals than simply staying out of trouble in the social media world, I’ve followed up the fails with five tips for improving your social-media marketing efforts and five tips for improving social-based customer support.

Five Types of Social Media Fails

Posting to the Wrong Account. When something outrageous appears on a corporate Twitter account, it’s usually the result of an employee accidentally posting a personal Tweet to the company account. (This has happened to KitchenAid, the Red Cross, and the U.S. Justice Department.) Do you have any checks and balances in place to avoid this kind of innocent but costly mistake?

Copying-and-Pasting the Wrong Link. Both US Airways and an ESPN analyst humiliated themselves by inadvertently embedding unrelated (and wildly inappropriate) links into otherwise benign posts. Even though the ESPN example was deleted within seconds, somebody was poised to screen-capture the offending Tweet. Somebody always is.

Being Tone Deaf. Attempts to capitalize on international tragedies or troubling current events never play well on social. Recent offenders include the Seattle Seahawks comparing the Civil Rights struggle to a football game, American Apparel somehow mistaking a photo of the Challenger explosion for festive fireworks, and Kenneth Cole using the 2011 Cairo uprising to promote his spring collection. Learn from these mistakes.

Asking for It. Your goal may be to appear open and conversational, but attempts to actively invite social feedback can majorly backfire. Just ask SeaWorld how their #AskSeaWorld hashtag panned out, or JPMorgan Chase about #AskJPM, or McDonald’s about #McDStories. If your brand is already suffering from negative public perception, a hashtag campaign will only compound your problems.

Hasty Hashtagging. Before you blindly toss a hashtag into a social post, research why it’s trending and what it means. DiGiornio enraged the Internet when it inserted the #WhyIStayed domestic violence hashtag into a pizza Tweet. Entenmann’s donuts made the same mistake by applying #notguilty to donuts, when the rest of the Internet was using it to vent about an outrageous verdict in a murder trial.

Five Tips for Better Social Marketing

1. Pay Attention to All Relevant Social Media Channels

If you've convinced yourself that Facebook and Twitter are the only channels you need to pay attention to, you could be missing out on great opportunities. Think LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest. Not every channel will be applicable to every industry, however, so don’t spread your team too thin trying to have a presence everywhere. Relevancy is key.

2. Measure the Right Social Media Metric

There’s really one metric that tops all others: referrals to the website. Having a lot of followers and fans means nothing — unless they are authentically interested in your products or services and likely to click through at some point. Gathering cheap, irrelevant likes through contests and other means won’t do anything meaningful for your brand.

3. Make Social Media Somebody’s Top Priority

If social media is nothing more than a side job for someone on your marketing team, you’re not going to get much value out of it. It takes dedicated effort over time to establish a strong presence, connect with relevant influencers, build a following, and learn what does and doesn’t work in your industry. That means putting social media at the top of somebody’s list.

4. Embrace the Unpredictability

Social media is unlike many other marketing efforts in that you don’t get to control it. Your social efforts will take on a life of their own, if you’re lucky. If you create something that goes viral, people are going to add to it and riff on it, and you just have to go with the flow. The goal is to create an environment where your customers can create messages about you, which means you don’t get to manage every aspect of the narrative.

5. Leverage the Rest of Your Employees

You have one person in charge of social media, and a couple of hundred other employees who could be contributing to the cause. If you really want to get a multiplier effect, make it easy for the rest of the company to be socially engaged and helping to promote your business. It never hurts to send out an email that contains links to your most recent online content, encouraging everyone to pick one or two items to share with their own social circles. Better yet, check out some of the social share apps like Smarp. Not everything will resonate with every employee, so the more options, the better.

Five Tips for Improving Social Media Customer Service

1. Have a Plan.

Customers who want to provide feedback or complain publicly about you are going to do it, whether you’re savvy at social media or not, whether you’re engaged and listening or not. It’s coming, so you better figure out what you’re going to do with it. My previous article for MarTech Advisor, “6 Reasons Marketers Should Be More Involved in Customer Experience” offers useful tips for navigating this side of social media.

2. Don’t Be Defensive.

If you messed up, own it immediately and empower your people to resolve the problem quickly. “We’re looking into it” simply doesn’t fly in this era of instant gratification. Customers want answers and solutions, and they want them now. As Forbes reports, “The Ritz-Carlton has for many years given staff $2,000 of discretion (yes, this is per employee per guest) to be used to solve any customer complaint in the manner the employee feels is appropriate.” I don’t know what the right number is for your business, but give your customer support team some room to be creative so that small mistakes don’t escalate into big PR nightmares.

3. Always Be Listening.

People are talking about you online, and you don’t get to choose whether or not to engage. You must be listening and responding. Neglecting comments, concerns and complaints, even for a day or two, is the second worst thing you can do. What’s worse? Deleting them. The backlash will be swift and severe. Just ask Smucker’s.

4. Watch Trends in Complaints

Don’t think of social media customer service issues as isolated problems to be solved one by one. Somebody has to be watching trends. Is this the first time we’ve heard this complaint this month — or the twentieth time? Are we seeing the same problems coming through social that are hitting our other customer service channels? Make sure someone is aggregating the feedback, looking at the root causes, and forwarding the information on to someone who can correct the core issues.

5. Unite Customer Support and Marketing

I’ve said it before, but the two halves of corporate social media efforts (marketing and customer support) are intimately intertwined, and they depend upon each other for their ultimate success. Yet they are completely disconnected from one another in far too many companies. If you want to ensure that core brand values, voice, and visual identity are carried through every customer touch point, then the customer success team and marketing need to be joined at the hip.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

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