So you hear the good news that your boss/client wants to get started with a social media strategy. Before you start jumping for joy, does the conversation sound anything like this?
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: We’ll think about that later, just do it
If that’s what it sounds like, I can almost guarantee in 6 to 12 months that very person is going to be asking you “so how have we done on Twitter?” and you’re going to say “err but we didn’t specify any goals” and it’s going to bea one way ticket to hell. And you know what? In all likelihood if you’re doing it for the sake of “just doing it”, it’s probably not going to be work you’re going to be proud of anyway.
Instead, the conversation should go something like this:
Boss: Let’s get on social media – let’s start with Twitter
You: Why? What’s the objective?
Boss: I want to use it to improve customer service
You: So we’re going to monitor all mentions of our brand and respond to complaints and rectify them?
Boss: Yes
Replace “Twitter” with “Facebook” or “blog”, replace “improve customer service” with “increase lead generation” or “decrease costs’ and you get the gist.
Ideally it should go even further than this to identify whose time will be allocated to this, how much time and how the initiative will be measured.
You need to do this from the get go. Set the expectation early that social media efforts – while free/cheap – take time. Don’t let your desire to do some social media work/please your boss/please your client get in the way of this. It’ll save you a world of hurt later.
How do you deal with “just do it” requests? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
I’m not a usability person by training, but I am a consumer and bad user experiences frustrate me.
I love trying new things out. I download apps and signup for online accounts frequently, but very few manage to hold my attention for an extended period of time. Why? It almost always comes down to usability.
Last night I was telling my sister about two “to-do” apps on the iPhone: 2Do and Awesome Note. 2Do is intuitive, easily navigable and understood. Awesome Note was cluttered and a little difficult to understand (though it gets great reviews) – and was deleted in three minutes.
Her experience mirrored mine almost exactly and it really struck home the point that the average person doesn’t have more than a few minutes to figure out how to use your product. If you don’t make it worthwhile in those first five minutes, forget it.
Earlier today I was reading a blog that had a “31 day social media” plan. I entered the landing page for day 21 and spent a few minutes searching for day 1. The embedded search box didn’t work, there was no internal linking back to the beginning and the archive section didn’t seem to exist.
The instant before I was going to forego the whole 31 day plan, I saw a link to “older posts”, and after clicking through about a month of content, I landed back on day 1. But the point is I was this close to giving up on the content not because the content was bad, but because the usability was just so frustrating.
So think about this the next time you send out an email, choose a blog theme or design a website, and try not to frustrate your end users.
The Singapore Writers Festival is back and the big news was that they were bringing in Neil Gaiman. After continually hearing about it and repeatedly checking their website, there was no mention of Neil until one day it was all over the social media channels that tickets had run out and were only announced on Twitter (to an audience of 170+) as opposed to their Facebook group (700+) or even their mailing list.
Understandably, this led to confusion, disappointment and outrage all over the Facebook group, Facebook event page and Twitter:
I believe the organisers made one of the biggest mistakes there is to be made in social media: focusing on the tools, platforms and technology. They probably were aware that “Facebook” and “Twitter” were the latest buzzwords in town and decided to use them exclusively instead of their website or even email communications.
And even then, I’d be hard pressed to say they used them well. There’s little to no response to the upset people above on the channels and to put it plainly, it seems like the organisers intend to ignore them.
At the end of the day, we have to realise social channels is to be used in conjunction with existing channels, not instead of. If and when they are brought into the marketing or communications plan, there should be a solid strategy or goal behind it, not just using the tools for the sake of it.
Perhaps the Singapore Writers Festival organisers should have taken a page out of the British Council’s book since they organised it brilliantly when Neil was last down a few years ago.
For a completely different case study, check out Jonathan Wong’s post on Anime Festival Asia
My blog has been quiet for the last week or so thanks to a trip to Hong Kong (which I enjoyed immensely), and imagine my reaction when I got home and found mutiple emails that just offended my senses. The gist usually is something like this:
Hello,
Our awesome event [insert name of event] has secured awesome speaker [insert name of speaker] to be at said event on this awesome date [insert date] together with other awesome speaker such as [name drop #1], [name drop #2] and [name drop #3]
Attached is the press release and a photograph of the awesome speaker. Please tell the world about it on your blog
Really? Dear PR person on the other end of the email, if you had such a request, would you do anything to act on it?
1) The pitch had better be relevant to me, my blog, and my readers. I’ll leave you to decipher what that means.
2) The pitch should not include a press release. A social media release or a link to graphs/videos is fine.
3) Provide a beneficial call to action. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not your news channel. If you think said awesome person is so interesting, offer me a chance to meet him or her over lunch or an invitation to the event so I can blog about how awesome I thought the person was after that.
I’m going to put it as plainly as I can: such emails are spam. And following this blog post, I will mark all emails as such and forward the email to whoever the contact person is on the company webpage (hopefully the CEO) and explain why it offends me. I’m also giving serious thought to starting a PR blacklist wiki. Sure I might miss out on some really relevant piece of news months down the line, but that is a price I’m gladly willing to pay.
Both are free services, both are online services with competitors (I could use Google Maps for gothere.sg), which do you think will get me going back for a second use?
Which would you go back for a second use?
More importantly, because yesterday’s post was about reputation, if both these people came to you and said “I was the guy behind tweet.sg” and the other said “I was the guy behind gothere.sg”, which would you feel more comfortable in hiring? Would you be more inclined to believe that the attitude when money is part of the equation would be the same as if the service is free? Or would you be more inclined to believe that said behavior would be drastically different based on whether money changes hands?
I’m a strong believer of being careful of what you do online because it will come back to haunt you. But what do you think? Love to hear from you.
Tonight I came home to discover that there was a little bit of a rant (to put it mildly) by @TweetSG, the person behind tweet.sg, which allows people in Singapore to update their Twitter statuses via sms. My understanding is there have been lag updates (from the time the sms is sent to the time it appears on the person’s profile) and the developer basically had enough.
Tweet.sg
So I don’t run a business or a service, but announcing to almost 8,000 followers on Twitter that you can just remove any of your service at users at will is a little bit much, as is throwing around the f-word.
So in one night, what has happened is:
Lose many people who have used the service previously
Get bad press out to many others (like me) who have never used it and never will
Given a competitor (Sgbeat.com) a great opportunity to swipe some market share
Granted, service users might have been unreasonable (I don’t know if that is true), but doesn’t everyone face this in every market? Losing our cool is not the way to go.
two days has just under 15,000 views, just over 4,000 ratings (with an average of 5 stars), over 1,000 comments
Today, six days after it was posted on Youtube:
just over 2.3 million views
19,358 ratings (with an average of 5 stars)
12,250 comments
So the initial 15,000 views x 4 minutes of negative engagement is now 2.3million views x 4 minutes of negative engagement.
Since everyone seems to be hung up on using physical world ROI to apply to social media, let’s do this in the reverse situation.
Let’s use the lowest conversion/open rate possible (I’m thinking direct mail with about 1%), I’ll halve that for the internet at 0.5%, which is 115,000 people. If these 115,000 people say “I’m never flying United again”, how much does that translate in negative ROI over each customer’s lifetime at an average of say, one trip a year?
Of course, this isn’t a “scientific” way of calcluating anything. But that’s what we do isn’t it? Buy a million banner ads and hope for a 1% clickthrough rate. This is the same thing, working against you.
It’s all over Twitter but I picked this up via Dan York’s blog: a YouTube video by a band, Sons of Maxwell, singing the song “United Breaks Guitars” which in two days has just under 15,000 views, just over 4,000 ratings (with an average of 5 stars), over 1,000 comments and plenty, plenty, of bad press.
Seriously, wouldn’t it just have been easier (and cheaper) to pay for and replace the guitar? Hell, buy the whole band new guitars and maybe it might have been a positive music video?
Again let’s put that in perspective. 15,000 views at about 4 minutes each (the duration of the music video) = how much time spent on negative brand association? Buying up the equivalent amount of 30 second spots won’t save you. And nothing United Airlines does will prevent this video from being viewed again and again for many years to come either.
I bet many companies fear this happening to them.
Stop.
Mistakes are going to happen. It’s about solving them the first time and solving them right. Not about ignoring them and letting them blow up in your face.
I chanced upon the banner ad rates offered by one Singaporean company awhile back, and saw that a prominently placed banner ad goes for S$4,000 a week, with the promise of “reaching” millions of “eyeballs”.
In Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”, there’s a chapter called “law of large numbers” where he bought 300 million banner ads for US$600. That’s more than one banner impression for one person in the United States. The result? He made a loss. Selling $500 of merchandise in total. He doesn’t specify what merchandise, but does it matter?
To break even on S$4,000 a week, you need to sell:
8 16gig iPhone 3Gs (about one a day)
10 Amazon Kindles (about 1.5 a day)
50 Xbox games (about seven a day)
400 movie tickets (just over 50 a day)
and that’s on revenue, not profit.
The flipside of this is of course, there’s no guarantee that some people of the 300 million saw the ad, and bought the merchandise some time later, thus making it untrackable. But isn’t it the same as any TV, radio or print ad you buy anyway?
Do you think you’re going to do better than Seth Godin’s case study? I’m going to leave the parallel of “reach” and “eyeballs” to traditional media to you.
If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard of the old adage “I know half of my marketing doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”. The good news is if you’re employing banner ads in your marketing “arsenal”, they automatically fall into the half that isn’t working.
But that’s just one case study, if you’re buying banner ads, I’d like to ask you: How have they worked for you?
As everyone knows by now, Singapore has it’s first H1N1 case, a schoolmate of mine from SMU (I don’t know her name or who she is). She came back from a business study mission to New York, and I was on a similar trip two years ago in 2007, and many of my friends were on trips before, during and after that.
So when the media gets hold of information that
a) The H1N1 case is a student from SMU
b) She was on a business study mission to New York
What do they do? Call/email/sms/instant message anyone and everyone they know who has ever gone on the trip, regardless of which year it was. I personally was contacted for information, so too were other friends who were on the previous trips, and not this year’s. They then start asking for the phone number of the professor in charge.
Look. If you want to do responsible reporting, do responsible reporting. Call the hospital, ask the doctor how she is, ask the ministries if we’re prepared for the flu, whatever. Don’t sensationalise reporting by finding out facts that don’t matter, and don’t harass people who have nothing to do with it!
You know the rules. You want a comment, call the school, not the students.
And for goodness sake, leave the poor girl alone to recover in the hospital. It’s bad enough she has to go through the trauma for having the virus, the last thing she needs are vultures circling around her door, phone and anywhere else to get every juicy tidbit of information that matters.
By the way, Channel News Asia, there’s no point being on Twitter which is meant for instantaneous messaging, if you break the news almost five hours after it’s out.
So you hear the good news that your boss/client wants to get started with a social media strategy. Before you start jumping for joy, does the conversation sound anything like this?
