Yesterday, internet browsing was a first time experience for the vast majority of ourselves. We all woke up to see entire sites to headlines blacked out and black badges on sites in protest of SOPA. I will talk about SOPA in a little bit. First, I want to talk about my experience.
As a relatively new developer, I use the internet a lot for research, reading and checking out coding tips, current affairs as well as other random things - to the point when I get home I really do want to switch off my internet - but there’s always something that bugs me at the back of my mind thinking, how do we do this? is there a better way of doing that? So surely yesterday, cracking on with a project - I found my research extremely limited, thank god for google caching. However, it struck me, that not only how much a lot of my viewing is of american origin but also the solidarity of people uniting to fight a common cause, a cause, that even the most ignorant people shouldn’t ignore. I found Wikipedia first but other sites such as wordpress have followed suit. Google blacked out their logo for viewers in America, and Wired blacked out their headlines across their sites. Michela updated her status to say “Ops! Wikipedia is like air... you don't realize about it... till is gone...”, which I think is the best statement to describe with not just wikipedia, but what SOPA will do if it goes ahead.
So what is SOPA? SOPA , means Stop Online Piracy Act. It’s a bill that is going before the american congress pushed forward by mainly the Hollywood industry and has been voiced loudly by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. It is an act to give powers to the the attorney general to block sites and their payments if they are even remotely suspected of showing anything pirate or conterfeit goods (such a torrent links to movies, selling fake louis vittons etc). If passed, SOPA will also allow the forced removal of listings that show any reference to them. You may think that this is good, as it will reduce the millions lost to piracy. However, little notice will be given to the accused sites, who will then be blacklisted and I can only imagine how easy it would be to appeal not to mention the costs involved. So let’s think about it, if you write a blog talking about a pirate link or anything that falls into the remit of SOPA - you will be contravening that act. The terminology used, is so loose that even if you posted a picture of something fake, it could be deemed as contravening the act. There is another bill called PIPA , and I quote, it is “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”, which is also being put forward to the congress. PIPA works on a similar way as SOPA, and I shan’t go into too much detail about it, but you can read about it here.
The thing I want go into detail about it is, these Bills represent giving power to corporate people and government entities to control what we view, what we don’t view, what we can post and write about. It effectively means, what everything the west world criticises countries like China and Iran for controlling the internet viewing in their respective countries, would happen to us. I say this very callously, but basically the freedom of speech would be abused by the likes of someone who has the money and doesn’t agree what you say and decides to shut down your content. I am not saying we need to encourage or not restrict pirate content, because at the end of day if it’s your property you’re entitled to protection and yes the industry should have this right to protect their property. What can’t I understand is why can’t they innovate to protect their content. Companies like Spotify and Grooveshark, have dramatically reduced music piracy in the uk. So why can’t we do something for the movie industry or other intellectual property? Why have they settled to just block sites? In my opinion, the two bills are a lazy option and could potentially lead to abuse of this power, and should be stopped.
You've probably come across the six degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, that all actors are connected to Kevin Bacon through a maximum of six films or six degrees of separation. You might also have seen the recent study that shows people on Facebook have an average separation of 4.74 degrees. These are called small world networks, the kind that us humans live in. The kind of network that means that you and your friend in Australia might have a mutual friend in Thailand. The kind of network that makes you say, "Cor, it's a small world isn't it?".
Imagine you know 100 people and the world is like this:
Everyone lives in caves, 100 people per cave. No one ever leaves their cave. Everyone is friends with people in their cave and only in their cave. You have no chance of ever meeting someone in another cave, let alone a cave on the other side of the planet.
This network is highly clustered. The average separation here, or Bacon number is very very high. You have no chance of meeting Kevin Bacon unless you live in the same cave. You can only trace a path to very few people.
Now imagine the opposite world where you are connected to a 100 people at random, anywhere on the planet, and all of those 100 people are connected to another 100 people at random and so on. As this is the opposite end of the scale you might also expect it to give people the opposite Bacon number, but it doesn't. Interestingly, the average Bacon number is again very high. Again you can only trace a path to a very few people. This is because out of 6 billion people, the chances of 2 people's random 100 overlapping are pretty small. So you end up with dead end networks again.
Not until the nineties was it discovered that in reality there is a magic number somewhere in the middle, there is a very small range of randomness, somewhere between cave-world and random-world where pretty much everyone on the planet can connect to everyone else in a very few steps, any higher or lower and we'd hardly be connected to anyone. It's weird and counter intuitive, but is highly pronounced. It crops up all over, biology, economics, physics, and luckily human society, which is why we all know each other and the average separation on Facebook is 4.74 degrees.
A bloody health and safety award. Ok I exaggerate, we also got a few bronzes, but who cares right?
When the banks go tits up nobody puts their money into bronze. The only people happy about getting their hands on some bronze are those fuckers that steal memorial plaques from cemeteries.
Maybe that sounds ungrateful or unrealistic, but I think as a creative you have to believe only gold is good enough. Or you’ll never get one.
Sometimes this pursuit of perfection spills over, we can occasionally lose our cool, call someone a Mindless Email Drone or a Gaping Goatse of a Man. If this happens do take it with a pinch of salt. Unless of course it’s true, then take it like the Gaping Goatse you are.
Digital does seem to be a tough category now days though. A viral video that you made for 8 grand could easily find itself up against an amazing technical innovation or a primetime telly backed campaign.
We also have to accept that the internet is a very fast moving landscape. Quite often we reward the first person to exploit a new technology rather than wait for the best use of it.
Also things can seem incredible one minute and passé the very next. I, for example, don’t find videos of people having sex on bear corpses nearly as arousing as I did last week.
In this situation all we can do is keep trying. Try to make stuff we think lots of people will like. Maybe even the judges will like it too. Lest we forget, the internet is a magical place.
You're 14 and getting the bus to school. Its about a half hour drive. You've not graduated to the back seat set, that's two years from now. You're solidly upper middle deck. Occasionally you get three rows from the back on a good day. The appeal of the back of the bus? That's where the older girls are - gossiping, smoking and generally being unobtainable. You sit silently listening in, trying to glean bits from their life and stitch them together. It's a weird sort of escapism. It's destructive too. You should be concentrating on girls your age, but you can't, you want for more.
All of this goes with time. Girls eventually start to talk to you. You get served for cigs. You get let into pubs. Eventually you go to univeristy, you get a job, go to dinner parties... you grow up.
The back seat of the bus feels like a long time ago.
But then you get into Twitter. You feel your way round it for a while, follow footballers until you realise they're generally boring and indulging in "brand building" for when they retire, follow pornstars until you realise there's no porn, follow certain comedians until you realise they're simply emptying all their material that they didn't get through on the last panel show.
Then you find the cliques. The small groups who all talk to each other. The journalists, the writers, the american west-coast comedians. You follow them all and you see all their conversations. You start to learn about them, what they like, who they don't and where they stand on Libya/Amanda Knox/Frankie from X-Factor/Kim Kardashian. Part of you starts to value these opinions. Well if Caitlin Moran, Sali Hughes, India Knight and Hemmo think she was innocent maybe I need to re-evaluatte my position. If Kelly Oxforddoesn't care about the Kardashian divorce then neither do I. But wait Rob Delaneydoes, and Jenny Johnsonalso thinks that's funny - so maybe I should too.
Eventually it becomes all too much. There are too many girls on the back of the bus now. You want to impress them all, but you're reply rate is pitiful. Grace Dent replies once to your tweet. You consider getting all sycophantic about her column and book but think better of it. But maybe doing will get another reply...
I have a new set of girls who sit at the back of the bus, whose conversations I eavesdrop everyday.
Now they're not just gossiping about last Friday in the pub and whose done what to whom. They're plugging columns, books and the films they like. They're forming your opinion on which X-Factorand Apprentice contestants to like. I don't even watch either of these, but feel I could give a run down on who's on them and a list of their character flaws, imagined and real.
I'm sure I'm not alone. Perhaps in how I've made it a bit weird by writing about it.
But between them they've got about 200,000 followers. So I doubt I'm the only one listening in.
If you were one of the lucky ones - you would have read about the problems Qantas were having online or in your weekend papers. The unlucky ones lived through it on airport floors around the world. Friday saw the entire fleet grounded globally due to 'labour disputes' - an action that resulted in 10,000's of travellers being stranded - and thoroughly pissed off with the airline. With wait times on the Qantas customer service telephone lines reportedly running to 4 hours, a large proportion of those affected took to social media to voice their 'displeasure'.
The complaints led to Qantas becoming a worldwide trending topic on Twitter and a flood of complaints to their Facebook page. From a business point of view - this is bad - for community managers it means you're officially into Crisis Management mode.
The Australian media have taken a hardline with the airline regarding their response on social media. Complaining that their customer service through the channels became mechanical and robotic - lacking personalisation. And stating that in the moment of crisis the airline had reverted to using Twitter and Facebook as broadcast channel again. This opinion doesn't really take all factors into consideration but is an understandable reading of the situation. It seems the airline had taken an approach that meant that anyone arriving at their Twitter or Facebook page would easily be able to find the latest information from Qantas, rather than having to search the large number of customer complaints - understandable.
Search Google and you'll find a raft of documents offering tips on how to deal with crises on social media - the truth is that no one crisis looks exactly like another and likewise how you respond will need to change based on a number of factors. However broadly speaking there are some do's and don'ts for managing social accounts during times of 'business strife'
Have a crisis management team in place to deal with emergencies. Usually this will be a mixture of community managers, customer service staff, brand team execs, PR, and a team leader to organise the troops.
Be quick to mobilize them when a problem arises. Don't ignore the problem and hope it goes away - this generally just makes things worse when you do eventually jump in.
Make sure there is an escalation process in place for the team, so they are empowered to fix customers issues as they arise.
Make sure they have a constant flow of up to date information about what you're doing to deal with the problem - they need to be able to pass this onto your customers.
Run a social media monitor for keywords associated with your brand & the issues you're experiencing. The hope is that people will contact you directly on your social accounts, but the likelihood is that there'll be conversations taking place all over the web that you should be joining or at least following.
What you say is important - but how you say it is vital. Don't lose your rag, keep it personalised where possible.
Don't lie! Transparency is so important. If you don't have the answer - find it out before responding - and let the person know thats what you're doing.
Go easy on the delete button. As tempting as it is to delete the worst of the comments that you're getting - don't. Stick to your community guidelines (no swearing, no bullying etc) but deleting negative comments can backfire drastically.
Don't panic and shut down. As in the Qantas example its important to make relevant information easy for customers to find, however this should still function as a two-way dialogue.
What did you learn? After the event look for learnings, these could be related to a product, your community, your customer service, internal processes. Make changes if you need to and communicate these to your customers where appropriate.
These incidences can tend to give brands the chills when taking their first steps into social media- I've heard many people use such examples as a reason not to venture into social media. The important thing to remember is that these conversations, tweets and comments would be happening regardless of whether you have a brand presence in social or not. At least if you're present you are able to join and influence some of the conversations and complaints, and hopefully reach and help more of your customers.
Social media is merely another channel in which to converse with consumers, and while the public nature of it can make this feel intimidating in times of crises and high negative sentiment towards a brand - the opportunities is provides to display solid customer service and help people in real-time make it too valuable to ignore.
