A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation?  Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona.  Is this ethical? No it’s not.  Yet people do it.  On the internet you don’t have to be who you are in real life.  You don’t have to be a spotty 16 year old with a weight issue, you can be an unquestioned expert on lepidoptery.

But what about companies?  Is it fine for them to have employees not identify themselves as employees, or take it even further and pretend to be a member of a different demographic to subtly push the agenda of the company?  Again, no it’s not.  There’s even a term for it – “Sock Puppets”.  What tends to happen is that Brad in marketing slips up when posting as “Brenda, a 58 year old grandmother from Arkansas”, and the community gets suspicious and outs ‘Brenda’.

It’s true that Brad could keep up his persona, indefinitely, and be a ‘secret agent’ for the company.  Yet he could still be found out, especially if he’s posting from work (most forums log the IP address of posters, and it’s a simple process to do a reverse lookup to see who owns that IP).

[View Entire Article]

Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.

 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ‘shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others.   Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:

Boring Boring Facebook

How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:

• “I hate my job”
• “My job’s boring”
• “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”

Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring.  She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem.  However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal.  So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic -  bored.

Ryanair hates bloggers

A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0.  It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error.  His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying

jason!  you’re an idiot and a liar!!

erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with

Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.

Wonderful customer service.  But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar?  Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.

Twittering Skittles

Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form).  Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”.  Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product.  Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.

Is this innovative, risky or both?  More importantly is it working for them?  If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to.  Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…

As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet.  That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else.  However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them.  Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin.  All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.

Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site.  I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.

For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles?  All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow.  This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.

They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site).  Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.

ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.

So, who’s Stuart Slann, why does he need advice, and why from us?

Stuart is an Englishman who decided to cheat on his wife with a Scottish woman he met on Facebook.  Affairs of the heart are things that happen all of the time, the world over, so what’s special about this one?  Well, the ‘woman’ turned out to be 2 men that had met Stuart on holiday in Mexico several months earlier.

Back then, they’d got into an argument over their soccer teams, which ended with the 2 Liverpool-supporters throwing Manchester-United-supporting Stuart (sporting a broken ankle and rib from an earlier para- sailing incident) into the hotel pool.

Rather than letting this be the end of it, these 2 then decided upon a new way to get at Stuart, and ‘Emma’ was born.  Over the next few months, Stuart and Emma had several, increasingly intimate discussions.  This culminated in Stuart agreeing to drive 9 hours from his home in Sheffield to a remote location in Scotland outside of Aberdeen to consummate their relationship.

Upon arriving, they communicated by text, with Emma asking Stuart to take a video off himself performing a NSFW (not safe for work) act with a sex toy.  He complied and sent it to her, then waited for 3 hours for her to ‘get off work.’

At the appointed time, he received a phone call from ‘Emma’, which was where the ‘joke’ was revealed to him.   Surprisingly, he seemed to take it quite well…maybe because he realized that ultimately, he’d put himself in this position.  Sure, the 2 ‘gentlemen’ had played him, but he’d made the decision to cheat and drive 9 hours to meet someone he’d never met.

What’s happened to Stuart in the month since this happened?  Well, the 2 Liverpool fans released the tape of the phone call as a video, with the video of Stuart and the sex toy as the background.

As you may imagine, this has been picked up by quite a few news sources – from international newspapers, to blogs, to soccer sites.  Many talk about the cruelty of the prank, but all of them giving the facts, talk about what happened to Stuart, and link to the video.  A Google search for “Stuart Slann” returns 702,000 results.  I went through the first 100 to see what was out there… and not 1 was unrelated.  Everything was about tale of deceit and treachery (that applies to both parties).

Reputation management wise, Stuart has one heck of a job on his hands.  With hundreds / thousands of pages that talk about him, some on very respected news sites, and the video having over 500k views…what should he do?  Can he do anything that will get rid of all of this?

Well, honestly, not really.  He has 2 options at this point.  The first of those is to lie low, and just wait until the story dies down.  Some of those articles will fade from the search results; as some sites expire their stories, with some fading due as their postings become stale over time.  However, in all likelihood, there are probably still going to be quite a few that stick around for his name – for the next time a new employer wants to find out about him or a potential girlfriend wants to check him out (his wife left him after the story broke).  Sure, he can build up sites and profiles for his name to push them off the front page, or even further down.  But, it’s going to take time and effort.

Stuart’s second option is to embrace it, sell his story to the press, and make some short-term cash off his experience.  Everyone knows about it, his marriage is over, so why not get his side of the story out…(not that it would particularly alter the search results given that the story that’s out now is apparently fairly accurate)?

Personal reputation management is a concern that everyone should have. Anything that you do can and may be used against you by anyone.  It’s all well and good believing nothing can happen to you in a protected community, where only your approved friends can see what you’ve said or posted.  But, all it takes is one upset friend or a fake friend to take what you’ve done and put it elsewhere.  Suddenly, you’re ruined.  Your boss finds out what you said about him.  Your spouse finds out about the pictures of you and your co-worker at the company party, etc.

Everyone has done and said things that they don’t want others to know about.  But, in this instant, connected world; there’s more of a danger than ever before that the lid of your personal Pandora’s box will open up and everything gets out…never to be placed back in the box.

So, think before you share.  Think before you put it on the Web.  Think before you post that photo.

…and most definitely, think before you video yourself with a sex toy to send to a person you’ve never met…

So, you stopped getting the newspapers delivered to your house because it was so much easier getting your news online.  But, now you wonder if there’s an even easier way of finding out about news events without having to type in all those troublesome URLs.

Well, have no fear….Twitter’s here!

All you need to do is sign into your Twitter account and follow the Twitter accounts of the organizations listed below.  Before you know it,  you’ll have access to news from around the world.  When you see something posted that sounds interesting to you, simply click on the link in the tweet, and away you go.

TV News Twitter Feeds
CNN	NBC News
CBS News	ABC News OK, it’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
FOX News	MSNBC News
SKY News	BBC News
Newspaper Twitter Feeds
New York Times	USA Today
USA Today On Politics	Washington Post
Wall Street Journal	Chicago Tribune
LATimes	International Herald Tribune
Daily Mirror	Financial Times
Radio Twitter Feeds
NPR News
Web Based News Service Twitter Feeds
Google News US	Drudge_Report
Yahoo News (no custom logo)	CNET News

I’m sure there are plenty more news services on Twitter, so feel free to add your favorite in the comments.

Twitter is a 140 character micro-blogging platform that has so far generated over 1.41 billion (that’s billion with a b) messages between users.  Those message run the gammut from insightful to inane, from brand bashing to content sharing, from personal to events of worldwide importance.  Politicians have, and in some cases still do, used twitter to get their message out, to inform followers of rallies, or of important news.  News organizations use twitter to push their stories, and companies use it for branding and customer support.

There have been some celebrities that use twitter to connect with their fans, people such as Monty Python’s  John Cleese, Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Penn Jillette, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray, Kazaam star… ok basketball player Shaquille O’Neal,  Star Trek’s Brent Spiner & Wil Wheaton,  Dave Matthews, and even MC Hammer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed more and more British celebrities signing up and tweeting. People such as the venture capitalists from BBC America’s Dragons Den: Duncan Bannatyne, Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones, and Theo Paphitis, UK television presenters Philip Schofield & Judy Finnigan, and former Youg Ones, Rik Mayall & Adrian Edmondson.

Is this a sign that Twitter is starting to catch on?  Will the celebrities pull their fans onto the service to hear what they have to say?  I‘d have to say…yes.

I’ve noticed that whenever television presenter Jonathan Ross has been talked about in the press or on the radio (Sirius plays BBC radio on a 5 hour delay in the US), his Twitter account has frequently been mentioned as a source for the piece.  In the 54 days that Jonathan Ross has had a Twitter account, he’s accumulated almost 14,000 followers, with quite a few of those being new users (from an unscientific study of the last 60 or so people that followed him).   British actor, comedian, & author Stephen Fry has over 50,000 followers (myself included) and has done interviews evangelizing for Twitter.

Twitter has had some phenomenal growth in users (the last number I saw was 2,000 new users per day), and with these celebrities pushing Twitter out into the limelight, that growth can only continue.  So, the questions are:

• Are you active on Twitter?
• Does your brand have a presence?
• Have you at least reserved your brand name on Twitter?

If not, why not?

Update:

Sadly it looks as though either the celebrities have gone from Twitter, or as some suggest in the comments there were some fake accounts as  1 week after this was published all of the dragons, and both of the Young ones were gone…

Back in the first post of 2008 on this blog, I predicted that 2008 would be the year of Reputation Management.  Given the trends we’d seen in customer referrals, it seemed like a pretty safe bet. 

Over the course of the year, we did indeed gain some buzz monitoring / reputation management contracts, which we successfully completed.  However, reputation management was not an over-riding discussion point throughout the year.  Just as Local Search wasn’t in 2006 or Mobile Search in 2007, it was just a part of the bigger picture of internet marketing.  Although, you could say that each was indeed a larger part of that picture by the end of each of those years.

SEO and potentially, PPC can be large parts of your reputation management solution, social media involvement can help your SEO and reputation management, and so on and so forth.  What you really need to look at for 2009 is that bigger picture.  Where does everything fit together?  Where are the holes in your internet marketing plan?  Where should you focus your budget, and how flexible can you make your spend?

In 2009, what I’d like you to do is not to focus on the shining promise of ‘the next new thing’ at the expense of everything that’s already working for you.  But instead, keep an eye out for the potential of that next new thing, and be prepared to test and see if it can / will work for you, either now or in the future, and how it plugs in with what you’re doing now.

There have been several instances of companies using social media to apologize for their mistakes, whether for a policy, or product, or a situation that they were responsible for, either directly or indirectly.  Whether it’s the CEO of Jet Blue apologizing for leaving their customers stranded on the runway, or Google saying sorry for an email outage, companies recognize that by saying sorry, they can head off a potential reputation management nightmare, and engage their customers at the same time.

Today, I came across an example of a city using social media for the same thing.  Napoli, in Italy, has a soccer team that’s currently enjoying what looks like their best season for ~ 15 years.  One of their star players is a Slovakian gentleman named Marek Hamsik, who has been linked with a big money move to teams across Europe. 

Last Thursday, Mr. Hamsik was out for a stroll when he was robbed at gunpoint of 800 Euros, and his Rolex watch.  Fearful that this would hasten his departure, and perhaps doom their season;  fans of the Napoli team jumped onto Facebook and created a group with the sole purpose of saying “Sorry.”  Four days later, this group has over 4400  members all wanting to apologize, and let him know that the regular people of Napoli don’t condone what happened.

Marek Hamsik has responded by saying that he’s just looking to put the incident behind him.  And, when told of the Facebook groups that have sprung up about this situation he said “Don’t worry, I am not leaving.” 

It’s doubtful that the one incident would have forced him to relocate, after all … there are robbers with guns in most major cities around the world.  But, when one of the major European clubs comes in with an offer for his services, he may now stop and think about the support he received from the Napoli fans as they came together on Social Media sites.  And maybe, just maybe, that’ll be enough to keep him in the blue of Napoli, at least until the end of the season.

Wait, think about it first, don’t just do it.

…but all of the cool companies are doing it… and there isn’t a dedicated social network for our prime audience – steeplejacks. If we act fast enough, and leap in with both feet (not something recommended in the steeplejack world), we can become the go-to destination for steeplejack enthusiasts around the world.

Picture by Sponselli

So, have you checked out the demand for such a site? It could be that the reason there isn’t a steeplejack social network is that steeplejacks are too busy climbing chimneys to go on the Web. It could be that the audience isn’t of sufficient size to make a dedicated social network viable. It could be that they’re all already engaged on a similar social network such as one dedicated to dangerous occupations. If you haven’t done the research, you have no idea whether the potential exists for the site to attract enough active members to be a success.

If the potential for the site exists, your next question should be - What will it offer to attract and retain a user base? If you build it, they most likely won’t just come. You have to ask yourself various questions, with the primary ones being: What will the users get out of it? What resources will you offer them that they can’t get elsewhere? Is it just the opportunity to talk about their job / hobby with others? Will you aggregate data from other sources in one place – maps and images of the tallest chimneys, videos of them being climbed, instructional demonstrations, etc – or will you offer new information not found elsewhere?

Of course, part of the discussion on the actual offering should be what you intend to actually use the site for. Do you intend to make ad revenue off it? Sell your products to members? Offer tours & events? Mine the users for their experience and recommendations on your products? Obviously, whatever you intend to do with the site will give direction to the overall look and feel of the site, as you’ll want to ensure that you’re attracting the right people for your purposes.

So, now that you believe there’s an audience, and you have a plan for how you’re going to use it, and a user base building and retention strategy; it’s time to think about the cost to your business. What’s it going to take to get this social network off the ground, and what resources are you going to have to dedicate to it on an ongoing basis? Do you need moderators? How many? How often does your company create new content for the users? How much handholding do the users need? Are there superusers that you can trust with certain responsibilities?

Picture by ThomasHawk

Finally, you have to watch the evolution of the social network to see whether it still allows you to achieve your goals. If it begins to deviate from your purpose, you have to make a choice as to whether you’re going to allow it to float off course, and see where it ends up.  Or, whether you’re going to ‘right the ship’ and make minor course corrections along the way. The problem with the former is obvious, while the problem with the latter is that too harsh a correction can potentially alienate some of your user base, so you need to be careful and preemptive where possible.

What if, after all this, you decide that it’s just too much work to start and maintain your own social network? Depending on your goals, you may just want to go ahead and partner with, or sponsor an existing network. In our example, maybe our firm looking to engage Steeplejacks could negotiate to manage the channel on Steeplejacks on the Dangerous Jobs site - or at the very least, become such an expert in the eyes of the users that they come over to your product page to buy your goods…because ‘he knows what he’s talking about, so his stuff must be good’.’

It doesn’t even have to cost much to sponsor a network. One group I belong to is a meetup group for local soccer players. The cost to the organizer of the meetup group is $45 every 3 months. The cost of this group was previously shared out among the members. A couple of weeks ago, we took an offer to have the group sponsored by The Soccer Resort, a soccer tournament organizing company out of Hoboken, NJ. I don’t know the full details of the arrangement, but I’m going to assume that for at a minimum of the $15 per month cost of the group, The Soccer Resort has just placed their name in front of almost 200 avid soccer players in the DC market. Not a bad price at all.

The other day, I received, amongst the usual spam, an email from Fox Broadcasting inviting me to join their brand-new social network for fans of FOX shows. I wasn’t quite sure how I qualified since I don’t recall the last time I actually watched a FOX show.

But still, I’d been specially selected, and they promised me lots of special features once I signed up for their private social network. Heck, maybe I’d find something redeemable on their schedule to watch, or maybe get them to bring back one of their older shows that they canceled ahead of its time…

Project FOX

Excitedly I clicked on the link, I would be a voice of influence on their network. That sounded good. It took me to a page with one question on it. The question regarded my occupation. I know I could have lied.  But, that’s not me…I answered truthfully.  After all, I’d been selected to join this community. They probably just wanted this information for demographic purposes. Then, the next screen came up.

Fox Broadcasting says Thanks but No Thanks

But… but… I was specially selected… I was going to influence your programming… you asked me to join. Now, I’ll go back to not caring about the former home of Firefly and Futurama.

Lessons to be learned from this:

1. If you’re going to have pre-qualification criteria, it’s probably a good idea to mention it somewhere – rather than promise the moon and then snatch it back. I’ve no idea where they got my email address from, but I can say that I had a slightly better opinion of FOX when I was blissfully unaware of this network than now.
2. More and more companies are creating branded private social networks to use as their own internal ‘captive’ focus groups. By rewarding participants with special features for their participation, they’re not only getting the benefit of instant feedback, but they’re also creating and fostering a dedicated group of ambassadors.
3. Companies such as FOX Broadcasting are using tools such as email to seed their social network. They’re not just taking the ‘build it and they will come’ attitude, they’re using the other marketing tools at their disposal.

“Twitter isn’t something that we plan to use right now.”

“We don’t have the resources to invest in a site like Digg or Mixx.”

“Plurk? Never heard of it, not something that we want to bother with until it reaches some kind of critical mass.”

Do any of these sound familiar? These aren’t a problem.  Not every company is ready for each social network, and not every social network is ready for your company. It may be that your company and social networks (some or all) never meet, because they’re just not a real fit.  So, what’s my point with this post?

Even if your company decides not to use a social network, you should make sure to secure your brand on each through user names. Because, if you don’t, the chance is that someone else will.  And, the potential is that that someone may be a detractor, someone who dislikes your brand, and uses that profile to spread messages contrary to your corporate message.

True, when you notice that someone is doing that you can, depending on the strength of our brand and the policies of the social network in question, have them turn that ID over to you  But, damage to your reputation may already be done.

So, you need to go out to social networks and secure your brand name(s). …and you might want to point this post out to a certain former President…