Social Media for Utilities

Texas 'smart meters' accurate, says study.

The vast majority of smart meters currently installed in Texas are accurately measuring and recording electric usage, according to a report released Friday.

Navigant Consulting, hired in March by state regulators in response to complaints about the accuracy of the meters, tested 5,627 meters in use by CenterPoint Energy, Oncor, and AEP Texas.

The firm found that 99.96 percent of the smart meters tested were accurate. Read the full report at here.

"Success rate of 99.96 of advanced meters is much better than that of traditional meters," said Terry Hadley, a spokesman for the Public Utility Commission.

At a meeting Friday, it was announced that Oncor, CenterPoint Energy and AEP will not request rate recovery from customers for the cost of the report, with an indication that the meter manufacturers will cover some or all of the cost, Hadley said.

Despite the benefits touted by the state and industry officials, some lawmakers had raised concerns about the accuracy of the new meters as consumers complained of higher bills following installation of the new meters.

Houston-based CenterPoint, which has said the meters will allow them to pinpoint outages more quickly, praised the study.

"CenterPoint Energy takes the accuracy of all our meters seriously," Kenny Mercado, senior vice president of Smart Grid Deployment, said in a written statement. "So we are extremely pleased with these results. Consumers in Houston can rest assured that their electric consumption is being accurately measured and transmitted to retail electric providers."

As of June 30, CenterPoint had completed installing more than 450,000 meters and plans to have installed more than 2 million in the Houston area by mid-2012.

Smart meters are called that because they contain technology that wirelessly provides real-time power-use information to electricity distributors and customers. They are also touted as allowing retail providers to tailor rate plans to customers' usage habits.

Pat Hammond, a spokeswoman for Houston-based electric retailer Reliant Energy, said the study affirms the results of a study conducted by the company earlier this year.The company study found that complaints of higher bills were linked to increased usage during colder weather, Hammond said, noting that an electric heater uses five times as much electricity in one hour as it takes to operate your air conditioning system for one hour in the summer.

-- Purva Patel

Last year, I spoke of the need to synchronize Social Media and Customer Service channels.  The topic continues to come up.  Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group took up the issue a few months later.  And Pete Blackshaw wrote a book about it, called, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.”  More recently, Jeremiah reminded me of this issue again with a tweet that nails the challenge:

When brands support customers on Twitter, they’re reinforcing the behavior of “complaining to their friends” to get brand attention.

And of course, as you can tell from the title of this post, what marketers need to fear is “complaints among friends” that occur online will translate into a search engine result that could haunt them for a while, especially as real-time results from Twitter, etc., become an increasingly higher-profile part of the mix of organic search results.

But while Jeremiah is absolutely correct that brands are reinforcing “bad” behavior by supporting their customers in public, as we recently learned from Apple, it’s an even worse idea to try to circumvent what has become natural consumer behavior online.

For my part, I think you need to fish where the fish are: if customers complain in public, the brand should triage that issue in public, so that the millions of potential online bystanders can see a diligent, respectful effort is being made. 

That doesn’t mean “engage the haters.” 

The rule of thumb that SHIFT advocates to clients is, “Engage anyone 1 – 2x in public forums; take it offline when possible to resolve the issues in a more practical way; know that ‘haters’ will reveal themselves, so any reasonable person will see that at least the brand made a solid attempt to appease them.”

Yea, this is wildly hard to scale for a consumer company, but it can be done in stages.  Most folks just want to know they are being heard; they’ll be patient for a solution that they know is coming, but tend to grow heated when they feel ignored.  It’s the I-Feel-Ignored customers that you need to be most wary of; they will make it their mission to shame the brand into a public response.  Thus even the most resource-strapped organization should scrape together the resources to be able to monitor and respond with “placeholder” messages to their customers: “Sorry to hear about your frustrations! Let’s take this offline and see how we can help.”

That’s the Google result you want your prospects to see.  Anytime a Google search result rolls up “(Brand) Sucks” the next thing prospects should see is a polite and friendly response.  “Sorry you feel that way.  Let’s talk offline about how we can do better?”

Great advice for approaching engagement.

CNN’s senior editor of Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, was shown the door Wednesday after sending a tweet that expressed respect for the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Despite a lengthy explanation of her 140 character foot-in-mouth, CNN brass stood by their decision. The news organization has pretty clear guidelines about how its employees (and freelancers and interns) should represent themselves on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media destinations.

That got us thinking: Of all the corporate social media policies out there, which are intelligent and balanced, and which are draconian? We've compiled several examples here--but are still looking for more (email us your company's policy to ideas@fastcompany.com and we'll add it to the mix).

Great article

Consumers could cut their household electricity use as much as 12 percent and save $35 billion or more over the next 20 years if U.S. utilities go beyond simple "smart meter" initiatives to include a wide range of energy-use feedback tools that get consumers more involved in the process of using less energy, according to a major new report from the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

ACEEE based its findings on a review of 57 different residential sector feedback programs between 1974 and 2010. The new report concludes: "Advanced metering initiatives alone are neither necessary nor sufficient for providing households with the feedback that they need to achieve energy saving; however, they do offer important opportunities. To realize potential feedback-induced savings, advanced meters must be used in conjunction with in-home (or on-line) displays and well-designed programs that successfully inform, engage, empower, and motivate people."

ACEEE found that three of the most promising approaches in the short- to medium-term include enhanced billing, daily/weekly feedback, and "off line" and Web-based real-time feedback. However, far-reaching programs that go beyond "smart meters" are few and far between. According to ACEEE, no U.S. utilities are currently providing the full range of needed services.