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.
Before, we knew YouTube in the following format - press play, sit back and watch a video. That was until a few campaigns have decided to take it one step further and give it that extra dimension. One such example is the Skittle's Campaign:
A very simple but yet humourous way of engaging the end user and in my case it made me want to share it with some friends, a success in my book for the campaign. Granted, this is very basic and doesn't really do much to the video, but it involves you in the story and makes you a part of the product. There are other examples where you can use your number pad to go to certain parts of a video, click on hot spots to control the end result of the video by redirecting you to another video. This is all good and I have seen some very good examples out there.
However, claiming the fame to the world's first interactive YouTube driving video does not make this next example anymore exciting as watching water drip from a tap. In this case, you can you use your number pad (1-9) to control the car in whatever way you want...
Judging by the comments made - I suspect this video will go viral (if it's lucky) for all the wrong reasons. So the moral of story? Make it a bit more interesting than the world's first interactive YouTube driving video or don't do it at all.
Towards the end of last week Facebook held their annual conference. As we have become accustomed to – in the days running up Facebook rolled out a number of updates (you’ll have noticed these on your personal profiles already). Then after a (bum-winkingly cringey cameo from Andy Samberg) Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce some wholesale changes to the platform.
While at this stage we're still trying to get to grips with the detailed impact these changes will have, we've taken a bit of an educated guess as to what we think this will mean for brands on the platform:
THE BIG UPDATES
TIMELINES
This new piece of functionality replaces profiles and acts as a stream of information about you (YAY!). Starting from when you first joined Facebook - the information you're displayed becomes more compressed the further back you go. Facebook are encouraging folks to look on it as a personal scrapbook.
FACEBOOK GESTURES
The LIKE is DEAD, Long live the GESTURE. Facebook have introduced the ability to turn any verb into a button. It’s predicted that the “LIKE” button will be looked on in years to come as a bit of relic. Now we’re moving towards “Watching” “Reading” and “Listening” - opportunities for how brands use this are huge.
APPS
Though not immediately exciting to those who don’t develop on the platform the change that Facebook have made regarding apps is significant. No longer will apps have to repeatedly ask permission. Once is quite enough. Could potentially cause some issues with the casual users of Facebook who haven’t been paying close attention.
This action is a prelude to them introducing something they are calling ‘Lifestyle Apps’ these are apps more integrated into the Facebook eco-system. They allow users to share information about their activities (such as exercising, cooking watching TV etc) and have partnered with several companies for launch such as Nike, Air BnB and Foodspotting. The Guardian have already launched a lifestyle app which allows users to consume Guardian content without leaving Facebook.
TICKER
In order to make the ‘Timeline’ content more interesting and relevant to the user Facebook have moved some of the information and actions that appear in it to the 'Ticker'. The Ticker is now the place where all ‘lightweight’ info will live. So while we’ll no longer be forced to enjoy endless updates from “Mafia Wars’ or ‘Sims Social’ there is now also no place in the timeline for user interactions with brand page content, it’ll all go into the ticker.
MUSIC/TV/NEWS
You can now LISTEN to music, WATCH Television Shows, and READ the News all without leaving the confines of Facebook. What this also means is a higher level of social recommendations from friends and connections that are also consuming media and content within the platform. Facebook has so far announced partnerships with Pandora, Spotify, Yahoo, Hulu and Netflix.
IMMEDIATE IMPACT TO BRANDS
LIKES
Content that people like on our brand pages no longer appears on Newsfeeds – this means less viral growth for our page. Content that people like outside of Facebook will still show up – part of Zuckerberg’s master plan to expand the Open Graph API across the interwebs? Possibly.
NEWSFEED
They’ve also changed the Edgerank algorithm, previously clever community managers had been able to work the system using tricks to ensure their content turned up in more NewsFeeds. However there is now much more priority given to relationships with friends, over relationships with brands. Likely to mean lower impressions for each of our posts.
PHOTOS
The lovely new larger image display has not yet been updated to brand pages. Possible that this will follow though & excited by the creative opportunities this should open for us!
LONG TERM IMPACT FOR BRANDS
The introduction of the ticker means that the Edgerank algorithm (soon to be renamed GraphEdge) is going to behave differently. We know that 27% of engagement with brands happened via newsfeeds, with a further 21% happening through profiles. Expect that figure to drop considerably if your content is not engaging enough
For brands the platform is now less innately viral, meaning two things: 1. To get attention, and attract fans, you’ll likely have to spend more money on Facebook media 2. Once you have those fans you have to work harder to get their attention.
Content will be key in avoiding this drop off. We’ve seen many brands moving more towards the role of publishers. The work Burberry have done being a prime example. Its possible that to get the same interactions brands will need to look to post more engaging content more often.
Good page posting practice will become even more key if we are to break into the ‘top stories’ of our fans. • The introduction of lifestyle apps is likely to see a move towards brands owning actions, rather than trying to collect “Likers”. For example
“Candice is running” with running as an action being powered by Nike
The increase in functionality (and simplification for developers) of Open Graph means that Facebook is moving to own the internet, socialisation and personalisation (the semantic web) will appear everywhere, not just on Facebook pages. Its time to start thinking beyond the brand page....
We’ll be closely monitoring how the changes impact our day to running of the pages we look after and make sure to report these back to you.
I'm back in love with Twitter today (we have a rocky relationship). Overwhelmingly full of positive & anti-riot messages, organising clean ups like this one in Clapham and trying to help the police catch the looters: http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice. Social media to the rescue.
