Qantas: chasing the wrong type of engagement

Thanks to Andy Lark for drawing my attention to this.  Another disasterous attempt at a social media campaign that highlights the points I made in my post yesterday.  Qantas is using social media in the wrong way, chasing the wrong type of engagement.  They are simply dragging a traditional marketing approach into social media.  Organisations have to recognise that social media is fundamentally different (see land and sea analogy here) and thus requires a fundamentally different approach (see also post on wasting money here).

Update: And someone has now given it The Hitler Treatment – brilliant.

Bacon and the art of brand engagement (in social media)

Last month a piece of bacon gave me the answer to a question that has been plaguing me.   The bacon in question sat atop a potato salad served up on a Eurostar train from London to Brussels and the question was “how can a mass consumer brand use social media to generate engagement”.

First the bacon.  The issue was, it was poorly cooked.  Call me a food snob, but I believe that if you are to serve cold bacon, especially with cold potatoes, the bacon has to be well cooked, so the fat on it is rendered, crisp and tasty.  In fact, I don’t believe this is a matter of opinion, I suspect there is not a single chef of any repute who would disagree with me on this point.   Which is why I was disappointed to find that Eurostar, in its Business Premier class, was serving poorly cooked bacon.  This wasn’t a culinary disaster, but it was an indicator of poor performance.  It was something that, if I were CEO of Eurostar, I would want to pick up and address.

So – I took a picture of said bacon and put it in a tweet to @Eurostar.  Here it is.  I didn’t receive a reply.  This caused me to think about my relationship with the brand Eurostar – my ‘engagement’ with Eurostar to use a term that the social media revolution has now made a permanent fixture in the lexicon of marketing-speak.  Continue reading →

HSBC: poised on the brink of expensive social media failure

I have just seen a report in PR Week that HSBC is looking for digital agencies to help it build what appears to be a massive community within which its customers are going to manage their lives.  As the brief puts it ‘We will build a distinct digital offering centred on customers’ future needs, financial and non-financial.’

The amount of money that HSBC is going to waste in pursuit of this flawed objective makes me want to weep – not least because I bank with HSBC (or First Direct which is basically the same thing).

Now HSBC is absolutely right to identify the importance of community and communities within social media.  It is absolutely wrong to assume that this means you can build communities within which your customers will then live.  The most important thing to realise about communities in social media is that consumers, customers or citizens will create (and are in fact creating) communities in order to manage their relationships with institutions.  They will not want to be managed within communities created by institutions. Continue reading →

Is Google favouring Google Groups in Discussion search?

I am doing some research for a client identifying conversations and communities, using as just one of the tools, Google’s search by Discussions option.  I was finding that Google Groups seemed to rank very highly here and therefore wondered if this was just a quirk of the (relatively specialist) subject matter I was investigating and therefore an interesting insight to report to the client.  But then, switching topics, I found the same thing – a high prevalence of Google Groups in Google Discussion search.

Is Google therefore artificially boosting the rank of content in Google Groups, over and above other forums or platforms, in order to increase the attractiveness of Google Groups as a platform for group or community formation?  Or is what I have found just a chance effect?  Would be worth taking a closer look at this – hence why I have flagged this for Eli Pariser, author of the excellent The Filter Bubble and expert Google watcher.

I am now a Huffington Post blogger

I was lucky enough to meet Arianna Huffington at the DigitalAge 2011 conference in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago.  We had a very interesting chat at the conference speakers’ dinner – one result of which is that I am now a Huffington Post blogger.  Not quite sure what I am going to post and how, or if, it will be different from what I post here.  Anyway, you can follow me here http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-stacy

It was interesting to see the appetite from people at the conference for The Huffington Post to establish a Turkish edition (and speculation that Arianna’s presence in Istanbul must be linked to this), which really illustrated that the less freedom of expression people enjoy, the greater their appetite to by-pass the official media, which is likely to be allied to political or commercial elites, and establish a people’s media.  And the other interesting thing is the role a hybrid platfrom, like The Huffington Post, could perform.  Being a politcal blogger is quite hard work in Turkey at the moment, but an organisation like The Huffington Post could offer a form of safe house for political opinion on account of the fact that it straddles the worlds of traditional and social media.

 

The power of PR

I am writing this on the way back from Brussels where I was at the Europcom conference, participating in a workshop on social media and also a member of an ‘expert panel’  at the conference’s plenary session.  The keynote speaker at this plenary session was Simon Anholt, who gave an accomplished performance – both provocative and inspiring to the assembled audience of ‘European communicators’.  At the end of his speech, Simon delivered a broadside against public relations, saying that he never understood what it did and why it deserved any attention.

As a self-confessed former PR consultant, I promised a member of the audience that I would take this up with Simon, but he disappeared before I could do so.  So here is my response to Simon on behalf of that member of the audience and the discipline of public relations.

Simon, I would like to tell you a story.  It is a story which is both horrible and compelling, because it shows the incredible power of PR and lead to the death of millions of people.  It is about a man called Edward Bernays.  Edward Bernays is credited with being the father of PR.  Back in the 1930s Edward was approached by the tobacco industry in the USA.  They told him that their problem was that half of the population, i.e. women, did not want to smoke.  Now Edward was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the man largely responsible for introducing Freud to the USA.  He therefore got some psychoanalysts to look at this problem.  Their response, in a typical Freudian way, was to suggest that the real issue was that cigarettes were a penis – a representation of male power – and that they therefore stood for what women wanted, but couldn’t have.   Bernays therefore said that the tobacco industry could use this (what we now call an insight) to suggest to women that the act of smoking represented a way (let’s call it a symbolic gesture) to signify their rejection of male dominance.

He organised for a group of debutantes to take part in New York’s Labour Day parade, and to have tucked into their stockings a packet of cigarettes.  At a predetermined place, they were all to remove the packets and light-up a cigarette.  And, of course, at this place, Bernays had arranged to have photographers from all the national newspapers positioned.  And here is the really clever bit.  He briefed the women to declare that cigarettes were “torches of freedom”.

The result: women in their millions took up smoking.  And not only that, it meant that do this day, the smoking of a cigarette is seen as a gesture of defiance and therefore immensely appealing to teenagers.  Bernays not only solved a problem the industry had, he solved the problem it did not yet realise it had.  And he also caused the death of millions of people.

The incredible thing about what Bernays did, is that while this is almost the founding act of PR, it emerged fully formed and has never been improved upon in the 80 years since.  It has everything – the insight (albeit a rather questionable one), the photocall, the soundbite, the story.   It is at the same time horrible and brilliant.  And there is not an ad man, nor ad campaign, that has ever existed that could hold a candle to the awful power of this act.  This, Simon, is the power of PR.

Arianna, Sedat and me

Next week I am in Istanbul talking at the Digital Age conference alongside Arianna Huffington and Turkish digital guru Sedat Kapanoglu.  So no real pressure then.  This post is actually just an excuse to publish the propmotional poster that shows me alongside two such elevated personages.

David Mitchell on Facebook: “Listen guys deal with it. When you are getting something for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”

David Mitchell is not, by his own admission, on the technological cutting edge.  But this gives him the perspective that allows him to really nail Facebook in a way that the Scoble’s of the world might miss.  Read his column published in this Sunday’s The Observer.  It is very funny, as you would expect, but it has some spot on observations.  Thus:

… when Facebook signs a multimillion-dollar advertising deal with drinks manufacturer Diageo, there’s not much parents can do except complain and stock up on Hello Kitty cocktail glasses. Facebook points out that alcohol-related pages are only accessible to users pretending to be over 18 (those pretending the opposite really cheapen the brand) and says: “We care a lot about people, young and old.” We’ll be the judge of that, HAL. It didn’t say: “Listen, guys, deal with it. When you’re getting something free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

And,

Facebook isn’t aspiring to be Cable & Wireless or AT&T, major players within a medium; it wants to be the whole telephone network.

Read it and chuckle.

Facebook f8 changes: making it easier to do the wrong thing

Facebook has recently unveiled a whole host of changes. Essentialy these appear to be about moving beyond the ‘like’ and giving brands more sophisticated ways to integrate themselves into users’ ‘stories’.   At one level these changes may well be successful but at another, they may simply be a means of encourging brands to do the wrong thing more effectively.

I must confess I wrote-off Facebook as a significant tool for marketers a long time ago, largely because I couldn’t see how the obsession with collecting ‘likes’ and recreating your website in Facebook was actually going to create anything of sustainable value.  Instead I have been advising organisations to focus on the discussion capabilities of Facebook – using it as just one community where you can encourage, usually very small numbers of people, to talk in more detail about aspects of your brand if they want to.  I.e. creating a Facebook embassy which is there to service the needs of people who, for whatever reason, want to use Facebook as the environment to ask you questions.

However, I have recently ‘re-engaged’ with Facebook – not professionally, but personally.  I first signed-up to Facebook in the early days, and all the people I was ‘friends’ with were not actually friends, but the social media geek squad.  My real friends were not on it.  Because a blog and Twitter were much better tools for professional use I largely ignored Facebook, simply dropping my WordPress feed into it.  Now however, many of my real friends are on Facebook, so recently I have purged my friends list of all my professional contacts and started to link-up with proper friends again (although for some reason, while I have got Robert Scoble off my friends list, I can’t get his content out of my news feed.  Why is this, is it testament to the awesome invasive power of Scobleness?)

And now I am starting to use Facebook as it is meant to be used, I realise I have absolutely no desire to use it to ‘engage’ in any way whatsoever with anyone, or anything, other than my friends.  I don’t want to have my Facebook space cluttered up or intefered with by brands.  I suspect I am not alone.

Yesterday also received a lengthy update email from Diaspora.  Here is a clip from it.  Diaspora* will never sell your social life to advertisers, and you won’t have to conform to someone’s arbitrary rules or look over your shoulder before you speak.  And because your information is yours, not ours, you’ll have the ultimate power — the ability to move your profile and all your social data from one pod to another, without sacrificing your connection to the social web. Over time, this will bring an end to the indifferent, self-serving behavior that people can’t stand[3] from the walled gardens that dominate social networking today. When you can vote with your feet for the environment where you feel safest, the big guys will have to shape up, or risk losing you.

Now Diaspora is a long way from challenging Facebook – but it is swimming with tide of social media, because it is grounded in achieving the necessary social permission to operate.  As distinct from Facebook, whose need to justify an excessive valuation now means it is chasing the commercial permission to operate.