The thrust of the argument is that they should be more socially connected: “What CEOs need to realize is that millions of their customers are communicating this way, and it’s foolish for them to dismiss this”. That is quite a big jump between not being active and dismissing it, but I get their drift!
Blogging v. Twitter
However, a recent blog from tech-supremo Robert Scoble suggests that ignoring Twitter and the like might not be such a bad idea:
“The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.”
It’s an interesting argument. There has been a lot of talk recently about the role of blogs and how they will adapt and mature as ‘microblogging’ continues to grow in popularity.
Scoble’s point is that blogs are great for search engine optimisation (SEO) and so will help drive (if you do it right) relevant traffic to you from search engines.
Twitter obviously doesn’t do the same job as there are too many titbits of information. But, it can still help you drive traffic. Build up a big enough following and you will get click-throughs if you share valuable content. Of course, you need something for your followers to click-through to in the first place and, chances are, this will be a blog post.
A happy medium?
So, I’m not sure the answer is black or white. I think blogs still have an important role to play, especially in setting out your position or argument as a ‘thought-leader’.
But social networks are vital to increasing your sphere of influence; engaging and communicating with new people on a regular basis.
So I guess what I’m saying is that both have their place, but need to be approached in very different ways (even if they are ultimately complementary).
It is sure to go down as one of the social media case studies, taking pride of place alongside Dominos, Motrin and DellHell.
I am, of course, talking about middle-England’s favourite home furnishing company, Habitat, who this week was the centre of a social media scandal of epic proportions.
If you missed it, here is the quick-fire low-down:
Habitat’s marketing or PR department, having picked up some stories in the media about this great, new tool called Twitter, felt it was about time they got in on the action and so duly signed up and started tweeting.
Now, Twitter is esentially a very simple tool to use; you get some followers, start following some other people and begin transmitting a few messages. Habitat though decided to try and run before they could walk and came across hashtags – a way of ‘tagging’ tweets to make it easy to follow particular themes or events.
Unfortunately, Habitat didn’t really understand the last bit and some bright spark, seeing that thousands of tweeters were paying attention to certain hashtags in particular – e.g. #iPhone #Apple #Mousavi – decided to tag their tweets with these in order to get their message out to a wider audience.
Oops.
The long and the short of it is that it didn’t take very long for Habitat to be found out, and once they were, the floodgates opened with angry tweeters, bloggers, social media experts and, eventually, the national media quick to wade in.
And now, Habitat has responded with, quite rightly, its tail between its legs:
I know people have been waiting for a response tweet from us; we are treating this very seriously and wanted to offer a longer message. We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended.
The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that was caused. This is totally against our communications strategy. We never sought to abuse Twitter, have removed the content and will ensure this does not happen again.
It has been really valuable to hear how users would like us to use Twitter and we are determined to do better for the Twitter community.
This is a good response; credit to Habitat for issuing it and holding their hands up. And the Twitter account (@HabitatUK) looks much better, so something to build on for the future.
But I do wonder whether much of the negative publicity this has caused could have been stopped much sooner if the apology had been swift and quick. The digital world moves very fast and, by letting it run for the best part of a week without a response, Habitat merely added fuel to the fire through their silence.
At 10am this morning, freelancer writer Daphna Baram published a shocking real-life account on the Guardian website about a recent heart attack she had.
The focus of the article is that, despite having collapsed right outside a branch of the popular gym Fitness First (where she was a member and had just been running), no one from the gym was willing to help her out or provide assistance.
The official reply from PR Alyson Marlow of the Leepeck Group (owner of Fitness First) was concise and factual but was not really worded in a way that would quickly and easily diffuse the situation.
All-in-all a pretty sad story.
But it is likely to get worse for Fitness First. As of now, four hours after the article was published, there are 182 comments on the article. That’s about one comment every 1.3 minutes! And the Twittersphere is also beginning to wake up to the news as well.
For me there are two major learnings here:
1) Brand reputation issues can stem from anywhere
For all we know, this saga was caused by a few employees in one branch of Fitness First that did or did not offer to help Daphna. But it just goes to show that the actions (or inactions) of anyone in a company can have serious reputation effects for a brand.
2) The social web can very quickly escalate a reputation management issue
It is unfortunate for Fitness First that the individual involved here was a journalist, but even so, this story is made all the more dramatic and poignant because of the instant and vehement reaction of those Guardian readers that were compelled to comment.
As of yet, Fitness First have yet to respond to the article.
For several reasons (mainly to do with lack of time) I’m a bit late to the game with this one. And usually I’d let that go. But the launch of Google Wave is, to my mind, such a hugely important technological development that I just can’t let it rest.
If you’ve missed the coverage (and that’s not difficult as it’s still in private beta) then you wont know that last month, at its I/O developers conference, Google announced a new product – Google Wave – that will be available later this year.
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web. The central component is the ‘wave’ protocol which is best described as a mixture between email, IM and a collaboration suite like Google Docs.
It allows users to message each other in real-time (or not) and collaborate on documents. Google has also constructed a (hosted) application which will act much like Gmail does for email. But the technology itself is open source and Google is therefore actively encouraging anyone and everyone to build their own front end applications to display and use waves (the technology itself, like email, will be vendor or platform neutral however).
Confused?
The video below is the announcement and demo from the conference. It’s over an hour long but highly recommended. However if, like me, your time is precious then this detailed, but concise overview from Techcrunch should do the trick!
Google’s main challenge will be rolling this out. Email is ubiquitous. So is IM. And I don’t see this changing anytime soon. But Google Wave (like so many collaboration and social platforms) demands critical mass. Getting enough people using the technology will be vital to its ultimate success – I don’t necessarily want to be using email for some conversations and wave for others.
So there is lots to work out. And it’s hard to really evaluate the service without being able to try it. But, from what I have seen so far, this has the potential to be a real game-changer. And if anyone can do it, it’s Google!
Last night, Apple released the latest incarnation of its already iconic handset – iPhone 3G S. You can get the full, in-depth run-down of the new device elsewhere but, suffice to say, there is not really that much ‘new’ to write home about.
For me, the interesting part of last night’s eagerly awaited keynote at WWDC was the battering that AT&T (the carrier that has sole distribution of the iPhone in the US) took from the Apple fanboys.
AT&T’s failure to offer MMS immediately and its inability to offer tethering support, was met with jeers from the crowd.
But that’s not all. O2 – the iPhone’s ‘exclusive’ UK carrier – also took a bit of a bashing on Twitter moments after the keynote ended, with the revelation that there would be no special deal for those wanting to upgrade. It is a story that has run and run today and is quickly gathering momentum, including a growing Twitition.
I felt a bit sorry for the poor guy handling the O2 Twitter account last night. He simply had no ammunition that would satisfy the raging hoards. Sometimes, no matter how much outreach you do, you are always stuck with an unpopular decision or a lousy product.
And it makes me wonder exactly why O2 took this stance. Today, they responded:
“We understand that everyone wants to get the new device, but we have to treat iPhone customers the same as anyone else. All our iPhone tariffs are the best value: you’re not going to find a better deal anywhere else.”
This is a stance that is easy to take considering their ‘exclusive position’ and one that the Guardian is quick to dispel.
AT&T and O2 are fighting a losing battle though. Up against the can-do-no-wrong-company that is Apple, they will often come out second best. But it is a dangerous strategy, especially with these exclusive deals likely to end soon.
With Apple’s so-called competitors failing to make much of a splash, I don’t see the iPhone losing support anytime soon. But O2 and AT&T would do well to listen a bit harder and argue their corner against the hardware giant to try and garner at least a little bit of the limelight.
