Social media continues to revolutionise corporate culture. It opens up new avenues of communication, breaks down barriers between employers, employees and the public, and provides new opportunities for brands to put a human face to their image.

CEOs are no exception to this quiet revolution. Customers want to see that even the big bosses are humans with their own personalities, peculiarities and life stories. Here are two examples of CEOs using social media to communicate their personality to their employees and the general public:

T. Boone Pickens and LinkedIn

The CEO of BP Capital, T.Boone Pickens, has attracted 246,500 followers to his LinkedIn Influencer profile despite having only posted 23 updates. He writes about the economic developments of the energy market, politics as well as sharing his own personal experience of leading a multi-billion dollar business.

LinkedIn users are looking for authenticity and genuine insights into the CEO’s personality. Unsurprisingly, the most engaged post from Pickens is therefore not about his opinion on the free market approach to the energy market, and not on his views of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is in fact about his office desk!

Can there be a better case for corporate authenticity on social media?

George Colony and Twitter

The CEO of Forrester Research is not using Twitter very often – his tweet frequency averages to around 0.2 tweets per day. Despite this, he has attracted over 13,000 followers. How did he do it? Admittedly, his brand name has a role to play in the follower acquisition process but, more importantly, he engages in an authentic conversation.

Interestingly, George Colony mainly posts plain tweets. His posts contain no replies or links, which indicates that the tweets are authentic, designed purely for communication on Twitter.

His tweet distribution considerably differs to that of Richard Branson, who mainly posts links to the corporate pages of his business:

So, what have we learnt from T. Boone Pickens and George Colony? Authenticity trumps frequency and authenticity trumps impersonal corporatism. Be who you are and get out there. Social media users will recognise your honesty and your social authority will grow because of it.

You may also find this infographic on CEOs and social media thought-provoking.

Images courtesy of LinkedIn, Twitter, Twtrland

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Since the introduction of social media, resolving disputes through face to face interaction seems to have become a thing of the past. There appears to be a popular trend in taking to various social platforms to vent frustration towards the situations or people we encounter in everyday life.  From that annoying person sitting next to us on the train, to our food taking forever to arrive in a busy restaurant – the world of social is where we turn to whine and complain. Is it therefore possible to presume that social media has given people a sense of empowerment, allowing them to express opinions that they would normally keep to themselves to avoid confrontation?

This also appears to be the case when complaining about brands, as recently seen when a New York City street photographer took to Facebook to shame the popular fashion label DKNY for displaying his pictures without permission. Like most people today, he chose to take his fight public rather than attempt to resolve the issue privately with the brand. This forced DKNY to publically apologise for the mistake via Tumblr and donate $25,000 to a local YMCA in the photographer’s name. Logging onto Facebook and publically shaming this big brand without approaching them privately clearly paid off. Not only was the brand forced to apologise but they were pressured into making a sizeable donation to avoid receiving a bad reputation.

In the days before social media the manner in which people complained was entirely different. Written feedback appears to be a lot more impulsive and less thought out, as the things we are easily able to say online are a lot harder to say offline. Is it therefore a cowardly approach to make comments via social that we would never dare make in a face to face dispute? Or has social media given us a voice to express opinions that we would otherwise be forced to keep to ourselves?

Image courtesy of Juan Iraola, social-media-bandwagon, Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License

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Engagement is of paramount importance when it comes to getting it right in social media. Your contributions on social networks form the outward representation of your brand or company online and define how you are viewed by others.

Which is why effective and compelling engagement requires scrupulous planning and calls for careful consolidation of your overall social media strategy and content plan.

Three simple recommendations for successful engagement include:

1. Decide your online persona
Your outputs must correspond with your company or brand persona, which should be carefully considered and agreed before launching into online communications. Those engaging on your behalf need to understand and embody your brand or company’s social media personality, so that they reflect this in their tweets, posts and blogs. Bear in mind that social media often requires a different, or slightly more relaxed tone of voice.

2. Establish clear etiquette and workflow guidelines
This should be given careful consideration during strategy planning, however, it’s important to make sure that these rules are maintained and translated in your engagement on social networks. Consistency is key, particularly when you have more than one employee participating on your brand or company’s behalf.

Establishing a clear workflow for handling detractors is also something that requires careful consideration. Your employees need clear guidelines for responding to defamers, general criticisms and social customer service issues in an appropriate manner.

3. Listen & ask questions
Listening to your community can provide you with insight into the kind of engagement that will get them participating. Your followers and fans won’t appreciate it if you bombard them with irrelevant content, which offers no means of getting involved. Social media isn’t about shouting with a megaphone, it’s about generating a conversation, asking questions. If you don’t offer your fans a two-way dialogue then you are failing from the outset.

For further ideas and inspiration for engagement, we recommend a report recently published by Radian6, titled ‘30 ideas for your 2012 social media plan’.

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1. Take it personally

Responding in the heat of the moment may be a very human thing to do. But, when acting as the public persona of a brand or a client of such a response is a sure fire way to get your arse handed to you by the social media community. Just look at the fallout from the Duke Nukem game launch #FAIL. Don’t take a minute to consider the implications of every public post you create.

2. Try and hide the fact you’re selling something.

Woody Harrelson’s ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) on reddit went disastrously wrong. The notoriously cynical and savvy Reddit community, soon sniffed out that Woody was on the sell and swiftly made the most awkward crowdsourced questions the most visible by utilising upvotes.

3. Don’t research your community before you start engaging

The Woody incident also highlights the next key step in ruining your social reputation. Woody’s promotional team were obviously aware that the Reddit community could be hugely influential and had the innate ability to create memes and make them popular in the wider press, but did not recognise that an AMA means ‘Ask me Anything’ rather than ask me only about my latest movie project. Woody’s people raised the ire of the community and there was really no way back from there. In the words of Redditor SailorMoonCake ; “Please inform the rest of Hollywood that Reddit is not a publicity outlet and that Redditors don’t tolerate this kind of crap.”

4. Don’t have any social media staff guidelines

Asda chicken licker. I’ll just leave this here. The man’s obviously an imbecile, but it does highlight the dangers of employees on social media and how if clear dos and don’t aren’t communicated to the whole company you’re reputation can take a battering.

5. Leave your social media identity in the hands of one individual

Finally PhoneDog, a mobile news and reviews company, found themselves forced to sue former employee Noah Kravitz. Why? Well, when Noah left Phonedog in 2010 he took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him, he’d earned them on company time and built up a valuable @phonedog following. Phonedog bosses hadn’t thought ahead of time and allowed him to develop his ‘personal’ account as if it was the brand’s. The $340,000 trial could have been avoided, but as it is it threatens to overshadow the company’s social identity. Type Phonedog in a Google news search. See what pops up.

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Launching into the realm of social customer service may seem like a daunting prospect, however, failing to take the leap may actually lead to even more frightening consequences.

A shocking statistic from a recent consumer survey commissioned by Conversocial, revealed that: “If confronted with unanswered customer complaints on a company’s social media site, 88.3% of respondents said they’d be either somewhat less likely or far less likely to buy from that brand”.

That same study found that: “78% of respondents believe that social media platforms would either soon entirely replace other means of customer service altogether or become the dominant way for consumers to communicate with corporations”.

Still not convinced that you need to consider your social service offering? Bain & Company may persuade you. They discovered that companies, who engage with their customers through social media, score an average 33 points higher NPS score than those who don’t.

So, now is the time to act. Particularly as the social customer service revolution is more or less still in its infancy. Sooner rather than later, all customers, not just the early adopters and digitally savvy, will begin to reject the original customer service channels and, in turn, the volume of social customer service queries will grow exponentially.

Customers will expect to be able to communicate with brands, both big and small, through social mediums and so the assimilation of social customer service into your existing multichannel offering becomes paramount. Take control of your customers’ social experience to improve brand sentiment tenfold.

A word of warning: ensure that your social customer service adoption is paced. Do not just dive in at the deep end without considering the technology, process and resourcing implications.

If you don’t want to pay the price for poor social customer service, we can offer you expert guidance and training, so give us a call. 

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You may notice that the internet is slightly quieter than you are used to tomorrow.  This is due to numerous internet giants protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Opponents to the bills state that if passed into law, they will stifle innovation and undermine free speech through unreasonable internet censorship.

On 18/01/12: Wikipedia, user-submitted news site Reddit, the blog Boing Boing and the Cheezburger network of comedy sites all plan to participate in the blackout.  They will follow in the web steps of the Italian Wikipedia site following similar anti piracy legislation proposed in Italy last year.

According to Wikipedia, SOPA “would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.  Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators, such as PayPal, from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.  The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months.”

I urge you to read this today as Wikipedia will be ‘dark’ tomorrow.  You can find more about the Wikipedia: SOPA initiative here.

Both bills appear ill thought through and have been condemned by the internet at large.  You can see a pretty reasoned argument against both bills in this video by Cynical Brit, a UK gaming journalist and learn more about the bills themselves in this handy infographic from AmericanCensorship.org.

As a social media consultancy that generates revenue and jobs directly through a healthy and free web, both of these bills need to go back to the drawing board.  It is obvious that companies that produce games, music, film and other IP need to be protected from piracy, but knee jerk legislation is not the answer. There needs to be future consultation with the internet big guns, Facebook et al.

SOPA was ‘shelved’ yesterday awaiting consensus on the bill. PIPA advocate and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a vote on the bill on 24/01/12.  Swot up on this subject, because if you operate online this does effect you.

Tweet #stopsopa

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So in the first blog in this series, we established that Reddit is significant online social movement, but what exactly can it offer a brand or business?

Monitoring:

Businesses can utilise the platform as a go-to for cutting edge news and content. Monitoring the platform for relevant industry or brand mentions can also yield interesting results. A search for ‘Coca Cola’ on Reddit reveals an interesting and perhaps surprising variety of conversations taking place around the global leader.

Engagement:

Businesses can actively participate in discussions or initiate new conversations. It may be worth considering potential CSR opportunities – is there a particular cause that is important to your business that you would like to talk about with the community?

A word of warning: tread carefully and be transparent about who you are. If you act in an underhand manner, you run the risk of the community turning on you.

The IAmA or “I am a” subreddit is another opportunity for business or brand ambassadors to engage with the Reddit community and answer their questions. Recently the intrepid explorer, Bear Grylls engaged in an IAmA, sponsored by Degree Men, the US version of the Sure antiperspirant brand. He answered redditors’ questions with text and video responses. His presence on the platform resulted in some gentle teasing from the community…

Sponsored links:

Reddit also offers sponsored link opportunities, allowing brands and business to target views according to their interests. As with a typical Reddit post, sponsored links can be commented on and are subject to the Up and Down vote system. They appear at the top of the Reddit feed and are clearly marked as a sponsored link. A savvy brand can get in the eyeline of a very targeted and motivated audience.

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We love purple as much as the next company, but it appears Cadbury have decided to take it to the next level in a recent trademark dispute settled yesterday with Nestlé. Cadbury wanted to trademark the tint and made the case that it has used the colour on its packaging for more than a century.

There were a few concerned looks around the office when we realised the similarity between Cadbury’s Pantone 2865c and our own Pantone 275c. This prompted an official statement.

An unnamed insider from social media consultancy, immediate future (established in 2004)  said: “If they come after our purple they should be prepared for a long, drawn out and debilitating battle. You may have beaten Nestle to Pantone 2865c, but we’ll defend our beloved Pantone 275c to the death. Plus we’re not bloody redecorating, alright!”

The company is awaiting an official response from Cadbury.

p.s. We might consider negotiation if Curly Wurlies are part of the deal

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Gotta catch 'em all

Netflix have learnt the hard way that social media can’t be a last minute consideration when it comes to a rebrand. Marketing has to be fully integrated with social media planning. On demand video service Netflix struck upon the name Qwikster for its DVD side of the business, you can find its official web holding page here. While the company may have managed to secure that prime piece of web real estate, it appears it was a little tardy in bagging relevant branded social media estates. Twitter was where it all came unstuck.

I urge you to visit the Twitter profile of Jason Castillo or @Qwikster as he is better known; Jason has an enviable way with words, a love of weed and an aversion to wasps. And he’s not beyond talking about the offers he has begun receiving from Netflix’s rapidly mobilising marketing dept to try and secure his Twitter handle (however, these references to money have been deleted from his account in the last 24 hours, it appears he doesn’t want to kill the goose that could lay some golden eggs.)

Dayum $1,000!

Jason has seen his follower count increase from the tens to more than 11k in just two days. This is high profile embarrassment for Netflix, more media attention is now on this social media faux pas and the expletives being pumped out from the @Qwikster profile than in the new service. The company’s online reputation had taken a knock on Sunday about the way it communicated its service update to customers, as seen in this apology from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

The reality is that the Jason Castillo incident could have been avoided.

If you’re a brand manager you simply have to remember that old Pokémon adage – ‘Gotta catch ‘em all.’

It’s a fine art, coming up with an original name and idea, but the proliferation of social media and the fact that anyone can own potentially valuable online real estate without out-laying cash means that brands are ever more likely to run into these clashes between the general public and their brand aspirations. Google +’s Huddle feature is another example of a big company (that really should know better) not researching new branding sufficiently.

The key learning?

Bag your brand handle and do your research. You can social media estate sense-check campaign and brand names via sites like Name Chk BEFORE an announcement or making your web site live. Prevention is better than cure, after all your online reputation is at stake.

Finally, you can’t Pikachus your social media estates after the fact, sorry, I had to put that in there.

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What we can learn from the world’s leading social businesses about how things can get out of control.

You can’t stop a crisis once it happens. But you can minimise the chances of getting embroiled in one in the first place.

New research from Altimeter Group backs up this maxim; three quarters of the 50 social media crises they tracked over that last 10 years could have been averted or diminished.  Note that these companies are described as ‘advanced’ in their deployment of social media – they are not novices.

So where exactly did they feel most exposed? We have talked previously about the steps to prevent a crisis but the chart below highlights the feedback from businesses.

Reproduced from Altimeter Group research

There are three here that I want to focus on:

1. The wrong team

The top two relate to education and people. Staff need to understand the difference between a ‘traditional’ and a ‘social’ crisis. The speed and the contagion effect are different and need to be understood. You also need the right skills in the crisis team – a blend of crisis management best practice as well as practical experience of using social media. All the crisis experience in the world isn’t going to save you if no one in the team can actually send a Tweet.

2. What? No plan?

Yes, you need a plan but not a ring-bound bible that sits on the shelf gathering dust. In the midst of a crisis you need a plan that can flex with the unique circumstances of each crisis. At its heart is the decision-making process – how to gather information, assess it, make decisions and then act on it. To some extent the plan needs generic processes – such as how and when to go live with a dark site but it should focus on principles rather than rigid rules.

3. Mediocre moderation

Knowing when to step into a Twitter storm or a frenzy of negativity on your Facebook page is always a difficult call. A workflow provides  a framework to help make that decision – when and where to get involved in the conversation and when to sit tight. Here is an example of one such model.

Social media crisis triage by immediate future

It’s not the sexy end of social media. But it’s the detail; it’s the policy, plans and training that will save you from a crisis.

Let us know your thoughts.

Find out more about our online reputation management and crisis management services.

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