April 21st, 2009 by Arie
Original Article by David Nelles
There it goes; Twitter has become a substantially relevant PR tool. Hence, within only few months a number of brands have experienced, how fast a crisis can spread – thanks to this channel of the 140 characters. The American painkillers Motrin had encountered the anger and resentment of few well networked moms. The E-Commerce Gigant Amazon had to experience a hacker attack over Easter, which erased literature offers regarding gay and lesbian themes. And last but not least, the Domino’s pizza delivery service has its share of experience in regard to the short distasteful video of two employees on YouTube. The three cases show that even in the U.S Twitter has definitely become more and more relevant for company’s communication. Yet, how could these three companies avoid the big disaster to their reputation before it even started? Maybe these three tips below can help a little:
Only listening does not suffice
Important is also knowing, who talks about the brand in Twitter, and how badly he/she speaks about the brand and the corresponding company. Therefore, the following few priorities should stand out in foreground:
Priority No. 1 has to be the people who make up the majority of your brand’s customers. And that will be the question for Domino’s as it plots the best plan of response: The pizza chain needs to know not only how many people saw the video but who those people are and how likely they are to be current customers.
A monitoring is not only a quantitative analysis of the relevant brands mentions, but it’s also about the qualitative analysis like the segmentation and the creation of user’s typologies. Only a qualitative analysis ensures an effective potential crisis analysis. Thereby, it’s not only decisive, how often a tweet or retweet comes out but it’s also important, whether the tweet fits into my target group or not.
Don’t hide uncertainty – Transparency is a must
Companies should engage themselves in the discussions with quick and fast manner towards the emerging crisis in Twitter&Co. even if the companies do not actually know, what is happening, just like in the case with Amazon deleting the whole product groups. A short PR statement would only ignite more fire to the unfavorable situation. A transparent answer in Amazon’s case would be to inform users that the mistakes are not known yet and people in charged are doing everything in their power to resolve the problems. Through this kind of behavior, one shows that critical voices in Twitter are being taken seriously and that one does react to the voiced sentiments. This kind of strategy can smooth the situation and best example for it: the action taken by Scott Monty after a notice of one of the Ford fan’s communities:
Monty logged onto Twitter and asked people to hold off: there was “more to the story.” That slowed down commentary. A little later he added, there was counterfeiting of Ford trademark properties involved. That froze the conversation and bought him some time.
“Some time,” in a PR crisis a few years ago used to translate into about four days. Times change. Monty figured he had bought Ford a few hours.
The above example show that through the announcement of the brand alone of something is being done in respect to the circumstances can definitely slow the spread of crisis significantly down.
Exercise precautions and build your own Twitter community
This basic doesn’t only apply for Twitter but it applies as well for the whole area of social media. In case of a crisis, a strong brand community can be a life insurance for the brand.
Strong, emotional brands that have built up years of consumer goodwill seem to be more insulated from long-term hurt. Few consumers judged much-loved Whole Foods when its CEO was caught posting comments on financial sites under a fake name. Another consumer darling, JetBlue, has recovered valiantly from its Valentine’s Day massacre, which left passengers stranded on board on a runway for eight hours.
It appears quite advantageous for brands alone, out of the perspectives of crisis prevention to build a strong community around its brand. An authentic and long lasting dialog with users, and tying customers emotionally to the brand will make sustainable damage of brand reputation very unlikely. Furthermore, a big brand community i.e. a big Twitter followers guarantees a real sense of hearing in the target group of user generated channels. At least, Domino’s Pizza now understood how essential own Twitter community can be.
March 31st, 2009 by Arie
Original Article by David Nelles
The benefit of social media is undisputable in regard to the dialog between customers and companies. Particularly, the dialog within 140 characters stood out the most in the core of public discussion concerning the usage of collaborative media in business area. Yet, the Customer Relation Management proves to be the perfect environment for Twitter&Co.
…I think that Twitter has a unique opportunity to tap into the lucrative CRM space.
As stated by Jeremiah and he had his point there. More and more companies are using this very direct and authentic way of communications with their customers. U.S provider for web analytics – Omniture uses also Twitter amongst others social media tools, to connect and nourish the relationships with customers.
Regarding Twitter and customer relationship management, I know it’s been hugely important for us—ClientCare, and really for Omniture as a whole. I love the idea that we can listen to our customers so easily. When there are support issues, we can deal with them quicker than ever before.
Ben Gaines mentions in his statements two important USPs, which obviously speak for the application of Microblogging in the area of CRM. On one hand, it was never before so easy to listen to customers and on the other hand, it was never before possible to assist customers having problems with products or services in a fast & quick manner: two reasons, which strongly support the use of this relative new communication channel. Meanwhile, these advantages of Microblogging are already being often utilized by many companies for their customers – starting from Airlines and Automobiles, to Online Shoes and Tea. The increasingly rapid conversations via Twitter are challenging companies to actually collect and organize the flowing customers’ conversations.
It’s important to first realize that managing a large brand on Twitter isn’t scalable, with hundreds –maybe thousands of tweets about a marketplace a day, individuals will have a very difficult time managing…determining who these people are, and if they are a potential customer is important, who are these people, are they important, where do they live?
With this insights, there are recently promising technical solutions for the application of Twitter in the area of CRM, which guarantee a professional utilization and implementation of costumers contacts. One of the interesting solutions is CoTweet:
CoTweet, currently in private beta and specifically designed to help businesses maximize their Twitter ROI, tweaks the Twitter experience to match that of a more sophisticated CRM solution allowing companies to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard, support multiple editors for each account, track conversations, assign roles, and create follow-up tasks.
Another promising service for Twitter application in CRM is also being offered by Salesforce. Users of salesforce Saas application can integrate Twitter in their CRM:
The new integration allows businesses to search twitter for mentions about their products/services, find and track conversations, track growth and easily create a database of each in their Service Cloud. Once these conversations are part of the SalesForce Service Cloud, businesses can combine these with other mentions across other networks and communities, establish connections, share knowledge across teams and most importantly, completely integrate customer service departments into the cloud.
Applications like Twitter integration in Salesforce or CoTweet will play pivotal roles in the future for the long lasting use of Twitter in the area of CRM. Especially in Germany, where Twitter starts to gain more public recognition and thus, the relevant amount of data collected via Twitter will rapidly rise quite soon. With this kind of growth, it will be impossible to do the research manually. Hence, those kind of technical solutions are inevitable for companies engaging in social media.
With all the excitement and buzz surrounding Twitter i.e. Microblogging, one should always keep in mind that Twitter is only one part of the CRM strategy in social media. It is very essential for companies to use all the relevant areas of consumer generated channels. Hence, the dialog with customers in forums, weblogs, video platforms and social networks as well as Twitter belongs undeniably to a well polished social media set of companies.
March 4th, 2009 by Arie
Original Article by David Nelles
What makes social media attractive? Evan Williams’s prediction is definitely right. Social media appeal to human’s baser need, which is the desire to socially connect with each other. Social networks as technical solution offer the possibility of globally social interaction. Respectively, the state of interaction between individuals in social media is actually a continuation of the offline social interaction into a digital world. From technical tools, Twitter has somehow fulfilled this baser need of human’s social interaction- shown by its huge number of users. However, I have to disagree with one of William’s comment. Well I think, Twitter won’t need the five extra years to get its tool used by broader public.
February 24th, 2009 by Arie
Original Article by David Nelles
Well, it’s nothing new about social media engagement in marketing and PR. Even in the area of CRM as well as election campaign, social media appears to be a very efficient medium. Now social media also provides protection against salmonella contamination. Recently, the FDA used Twitter, Youtube, MySpace and Blogs to call back potential contaminated foods products. The center of this particular recall lies entirely on the American’s eating habits: the peanut butter. Thus, the coverage of this recall was extremely immense. To this date, there were more than 2.100 recalled products. Richard Stapleton, the head of U.S Health and Human Services Department justified the use of social media in this case as followed:
When the [peanut product] recall issue broke, it immediately occurred to us to spread the message through social media, which we feel is a much better way than using traditional media…
By acting so, the U.S authorities are certainly going into the right direction. Social media has the coverage and the velocity to spread this kind of themes in a fast and efficient way for the respective target group. Hence, it has been shown quite often, how fast information travels in social media, be it the U.S Airways Crash Rescue or the fire of CCTV building in Beijing. Social media channels, like Twitter, are faster and they certainly do provide wider coverage in spreading the news than the classical media. Though, this doesn’t automatically mean that the classical media should be excluded in this kind of recall action. Most importantly is actually, that all available possibilities and strong coverage media should be thoroughly used. Furthermore, this includes of course the platforms of user generated media. From this point of view, the application of social media for epidemical containment is definitely useful. Rick Turoczy also shares positive view on using social media tools in this area:
Hopefully, this is just the first step – rapidly disseminating information – of many for incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into these agencies. With continued adoption, one can easily imagine the possible advances in protecting the populous from disease before it happens – like employing technology similar to Google’s flu trends combined with social graph information. And that’s only one example.
January 16th, 2009 by Christoph Maeurer
Original article by David Nelles
Earthquake, war and flight disasters: Twitter has become a convenient catastrophe medium.
Caution: Consumers are listening. A Tweet with its unpleasant effects.
Google party plane – Google’s flight personal goes nippy.
Beautifully viral – naughty Durex Bunnies + Outtakes.
Nine Inch Nails – make money by giving.
Journalists should be able to handle these Technologies at the latest in 2009.
The wild 70’s in Apple.
Uschi Blum – Love’s slave.
December 19th, 2008 by Christoph Maeurer
The last Friday Flash before Christmas
Social Media:
The complexity of social media (german)
>> Netzwertig.com
Signs of an unsuccessfully social media campaign (german)
>> Connectedmarketing.de
Xing’s acquires Socialmedian – a social news site
>> Readwriteweb.com
>> Golem.de (german)
Miscellaneous:
new trend: Online-Sleepwalking?
>> Telegraph.co.uk
Mr. Yang on the “heat” spot
>> Valleywag.com
Reviews in Pictures (till now only Part 1 and 2 are available)
>> Boston.com Teil 1
>> Boston.com Teil 2
Still looking for a Christmas present?
>> Well, go get personal with Scarlett Johansson’s tissue waste
Twitter specials:
- who spend, how much time with Twitter? >> Tweetwasters.com
- Twitter and Influence >> Twinfluence.com
- Die “wahren” Twitter-Freunde herausfinden >> Twitter-Friends
Another neat collection of Twitter tools with screenshots
>> Ibrahimevsan.de
Spiegel Online is twittering
>> Prblogger (german)
Happy Holidays and A Merry Christmas!
December 18th, 2008 by Christoph Maeurer
Original article by David Nelles (translated by Nils Maier)
Twitter appears to be the “It” place for the application of company’s communication, both for external and internal purpose. A few weeks back, moms and women twittered avidly their outrage against Motrin campaign and recently there is another case making its appearance on Twitter, which proves once again how truly relevant this channel for company’s communication is. In this recent case, Ford – with the help of Twitter – has succeeded in preventing wide spread damages, which could have cost the company’s reputation. The starting point was a letter of notice sent by Ford’s legal department to a privately owned Ford fansite, demanding for $5000 or the site gets shut down. The copyright violations were the reason behind this demand.
The prominent warned platform was therangerstation.com. This fansite is dedicated to lovers of Ford’s small pick- up trucks. Based in Detroit, this fansite exists for more than 10 years. Well, the reactions regarding Ford’s legal demand were quick to come; the story appeared on the same day in two major car blogs like Jalopnik and Autoblog as well as on Twitter.
It was like a dark cloud of social media brewing over the online reputation of Ford. However, unlike Motrin, Ford has Scott Monty, who is the head of Ford’s social media and he actively reacted in a quick manner over criticisms voiced in Twitter – by continuously tweeting and promising to clear the issue as soon as possible.
Few hours later, Scot tweeted Ford’s official response and provided the link for the official statement of Ford over therangerstation.com controversy. This action was good enough to calm brands evangelists.
Hence, through quick and active reactions from Ford communicator, the virally spread of this issue and online reputation damages for the company were successfully prevented. Certainly, Motrin would have preferred this kind of success. Well, Scott Monty surely took all rules of social media communicator to heart: listen intensively, velocity, deal directly and personally.
In the U.S, Twitter has established itself as a channel for professional communicators. Unfortunately, the case is quite different here in Germany, the discussion revolving around Twitter and its adoption for the company’s communication has just yet to begin. Whether a company should be twittering or not, the examples of past times have definitely shown that Twitter should at least belong to a portfolio of a social media monitoring. However, company’s communicators should not wait too long to get actively engaged in the discussion of microblogging services, where so many multipliers are located like nowhere else.
December 12th, 2008 by Christoph Maeurer
Short and vibrant
Intel published Social Media Guidelines for employees
>> Intel.com
More than 100.000 downloads for Wordpress 2.7 within 20 hrs
>> Boren.nu
Courtesy of Kmart: Bloggers on shopping spree
>> Mediapost.com
Corporate blogs, are they trustworthy?
>> Readwriteweb.com
40 million Americans using Social Networks
>> Readwriteweb.com
Twitter Specials:
Feed your own blog with tweets
>> Twitterfeed.com
List of German Startups Twitterers
>> Deutsche-Startups.de
Have a great weekend!
December 4th, 2008 by Nils Maier
In Germany, it’s common knowledge that many PR agencies, communication companies and organizations as well as the classical media are having such a hard time adopting to social media. Well, it’s kind of giving Neanderthals a moon landing’s instruction and that is how, the brilliant idea of social media from U.S giant industries come across for communications-PR executives in this country. Actually, I might formulate this a bit too harsh and certainly it doesn’t apply to every PR agencies, communication companies and journalists in Germany.
But we can definitely say that a vast majority of communication executives are aware of social media but they just don’t know, how to deal or to connect with it. Although, they only have to follow the four simple fundamentals of communication in social media: transparency, dialogs, authenticity and velocity. The consumer generated communication channels enable journalists, bloggers as well as everyday people to be actively engaged in contributing, discovering and sharing information. Twitter, in particular, offers the optimal vibrant online exchange of information.
The U.S social media relation experts utilize this fact. Hence, the idea of PR and twitter is now continuously being pursued after the 140 character press release coming from Social Media Think Tank. This project is called MicroPR and it aims to provide an exchange information platform on Twitter for companies, agencies and journalists.
As mentioned by Brian Solis and Stowe Boyd, the formula behind this idea is actually quite simple:
PR + Media+Twitter = @ MicroPR
This service should benefit both Media and PR execs. The idea is clear: media professionals are always on the move, looking for answers for their research – company’s figures, business statistics or even expert’s opinions on specific subjects. By using Twitter stream MicroPR, journalists can tweets their questions and hence, build a pool company’s speakers, experts and PR managers.
Brian Solis wrote about the new Twitter service:
Through Twitter, MicroPR connects journalists and bloggers to qualified, targeted PR professionals who can help you with the stories you’re currently writing
And this is how MicroPR actually works in practice:
brian_solis_micropr
In fact, this is not such a bad idea at all, if critical mass of PR specialists and journalists are active on Twitter. Whether this critical mass has yet to unfold in Germany, well I actually doubt it, but who knows, what will be for the coming years? Twitter is for certain, an idea worthy of a follow up consideration, right!?
November 28th, 2008 by Nils Maier
Dell continues to engage in social media. The success story off ‘idea storm‘ motivates to do more. In Jeremiah Owyang’s podacst Vice President Communities & Communications Bob Pearson shares his positive experiance Dell made by engaging in digital customer conversations.
Last week we could read the first rumors about Dells Sales numbers via Twitter. Bob Pearson confirms that they haven’t made 500K$, they even broke the 1 million Dollar via selling used PCs via Twitter.
Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing
Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers.
Executive Video Interview: Why Dell Continues To Use Social Media
Check out the podcast:
