Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with two-parts of AT&T’s social media equation. Shawn McPike, a social media strategy manager with AT&T’s customer care group and Susan Bean, a strategist behind AT&T’s corporate communications, joined me in far-ranging discussion around AT&T’s social media strategy. For a company the size of AT&T, with a plethora of consumer touch points, social media can be both a blessing and a curse. In fact, AT&T has found the dangers of open discussion in social media from day one. But this isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s really a story about learning through doing. While AT&T has made some missteps along the way, they’ve course corrected and are reaping some of the benefits of having a direct channel to hundreds of thousands of customers and true brand advocates. Here are some highlights from the first part of our conversation.
RaceTalk: Thanks for joining me. Shawn, it sounds like you work within the customer care group and e-commerce, and Susan you’re on the communications side. How do you coordinate between these groups and how did that start? I think this might be a good place to jump-off.
Susan: Sure, well I can kind of give you the background, and the narrative, and then Shawn can jump in. First, it started with Facebook a couple of years ago and we were kind of just getting our feet wet, it was a little tiny page, a couple thousand people, we sort of jumped into it.
We thought Facebook is new and we should be looking at concerts and celebrities and we kind of played around with that and that didn’t really have much resonance for people. It evolved over time and we found what people were interested in talking to us about was our business and our technology. The real affinity at play here is the actual affinity for the technology and device itself, because people are so emotional about their cell phones. So when the iPhone 3Gs came out, that was when the page really started to take off. There was a lot of controversy about the pricing and lack of MMS and people just started looking for AT&T and social media and finding us on Facebook, and that was really festive! Everyone was really mad at us all the time. It was basically non-stop all week:
“We hate you, we hate you, we hate you.”
It was an interesting trial by fire because it was still small enough and it wasn’t happening in front of billions of people. But we sort of found our way with communicating directly with people. We were corporate communications so we knew all of the narratives; this is what we talk to reporters about. So we had this revelation of “oh, okay this is kind of like our dream come true.”
We’re always trying to give our point of view to reporters and now we get to just talk to people directly. So why don’t we get into it and really give them the point of view on why this is important. It was a fascinating process and what happened then is we started reporting back to the business – “You know what, people are really mad about this.”
They’re sounding off all over the place in social media, on Facebook and in the blogs. And the company actually listened and came back and re-did the pricing, which is one of the things that started to help us really turn around the tone on the page. Then it started really growing, and three months later we finally got MMS for the iPhone. We really went out of our way to make Facebook and twitter a resource for people with MMS, and that’s when we started working with Shawn and the care team.
So we were already working with them and on the first day of MMS people were coming and saying okay I’m having a problem setting up MMS, how do I do this. So we started referring them. “Oh we got these great customer care people, they’re over here on twitter.” Which was kind of a clunky way to do it, and we were like oh duh. Why don’t we make the customer care people administrators of the page and then they can deal directly with people on Facebook and everyone can be the beneficiary of the advice they get? And we did just it. It wasn’t a big corporate decision, we just said, we think this is a good idea. We checked with our bosses and off we went with it.
RaceTalk: So that became an extension of customer care and do you still work with them as far as messaging and pushing out content in addition to answering questions?
Susan: Yeah. We’re in more or less of a nonstop all day conversation. We just went through South by Southwest where we really took on a huge effort to make sure everyone on Twitter knew what was going on at the show. So that was a combination of us talking to our colleagues on the network team, finding out what’s going on, letting Shawn’s team know what the status of the network was, what it is we could tell people, and then their out there basically combing the Twittersphere looking for anybody who’s complaining and jumping in and giving them information and helping. So it’s just an all day conversation but Shawn should give you the background on Twitter and customer care and how that works and what the methodology is from his point of view.
Shawn: It really fits along well with the story Susan told. At the same time we and the eCommerce group, which is a part of our marketing, were seeing the tone, tenor, volume and the overall intensity of messages within social media. It was just deafening, and certainly if you go back to that time of MMS and look at the top ten daily, weekly, and monthly trends on twitter, you saw that AT&T and the iPhone was basically at the top or near the top, almost every single day.
Susan: And not in a good way.
Shawn: Not in the way we wanted. So my team was brought in to start building that strategy for how we could change those numbers and how we can affect those customers, help them out and find out what their actual issues were.
But at the same time, we didn’t want to just jump in and our mantra at that point was basically the only thing worse than not being somewhere was being there and doing it badly. So we wanted to make sure we did it right before we jumped in full-force and if we could handle the volume. It was crucial, especially with the volume that we saw with social media messages. So at that point were engaged with corporate communications/PR and basically started putting together the strategy for how we were going to do that.
Certainly there were issues from a branding perspective, that fit more with communications area, and other issues that were strictly care and there were some issues that would definitely go down both paths. So rather than try and deal with all those on the fly, we decided to take a measured approach and plan for that ahead of time. We met for quite awhile, put that strategy together, got signed off on all levels across both organizations and then we put our presence out there. We started small at first, taking the viral, let’s not overextend ourselves approach. We wanted five care and four managers in August of last year on Twitter. Totally viral. Through the end of the year we hadn’t really put any publicity, promotions or advertising towards it. We still haven’t really for the most part. I was looking today and I think our Twitter followers (right now we have 14 care managers total) have almost 7,000 followers between the different accounts.
RaceTalk: So you have 14 for Twitter alone?
Shawn: There are 14 total people and they staff across, work on both Twitter and among other sites that we monitor as well. They don’t always do it at the same time. They kind of rotate, keeping a presence in all areas. But they are real people. This is actually their real names and real photos. That was the big step we wanted to take on the care side. Provide, not a corporation speaking at people, but really the care folks, and care managers speaking with people and try to help them. We definitely wanted to create that as a conversation, an engagement with them, instead of just the flat message.
We’ve taken a pretty strong approach with that and we’ve had great results. I think right now the team averages almost 1,800 reach outs per day to customers. In December we actually launched our first Facebook page versus the main AT&T page along with Susan and the other teams on the PR side. The approach is basically the same there.
Certainly the channel is a bit different. The medium is a bit different and the requirements of Facebook around engagement, private messages or not private messages, etc are different. We definitely had to tailor our approach a bit, but for the most part we kept a personal approach: private mailbox addresses for everyone, same personal personas, etc. Kept the same approach, monitored the wall. We’re on Facebook and on Twitter live between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 – 4 on Saturday.
RaceTalk: How do you assign stuff? If there is a post on Facebook or a tweet at you? Are you using CoTweet or other platforms to assign follow-up, or is it more just talking about whose best among your group to follow-up?
Shawn: We do have a tool now for the initial outreach. Our agents use the exact same process that our care managers would use in any other scenario: email centers, call centers, etc.
So when they contact a customer, when a customer calls or we get them on the actual phone with us, it’s the exact same interaction and documentation as any other channel. So basically we do have it set up where we ticket, open a ticket, an internal ticket for a customer region. Susan for example – would reach out to a customer, ask them for their contact information. Again, in most places we try to reach out to the customer to give out their contact information and then call the on the phone one on one. We try to do most interactions with the customer, especially with anything that’s obviously customer-specific information, one-on-one. And we try to keep it that person who initiates the response and interaction with the customer. We keep that same person no matter how many different instances. So it’s always, whoever opens it, has to close it out with the customer and make sure they’re satisfied. And then in many cases we get positive tweets on twitter for that person/AT&T. I think several hundred so far that are positive.
Susan: And we see the same thing on Facebook. It’s funny, before we really went down this road there was a lot of discussion around if you should try to do customer care on social media and there was a lot of “oh my god, that will be like having all these negative things in our social media properties.” “What if its just people complaining and everyone will see?”
And the effect of it has been really stunning. Shawn was talking about how we use to always be a trending topic on twitter. That is virtually never the case now. I mean this is a really rare instance of a company having a really big problem that was essentially solved. Sort of doing the simplest thing you could possibly do, which is talk to people.
On Facebook where there was even more trepidation about oh my god its going to be on the wall and everybody is going to see it. You know what we see everyday is people on the wall saying, “Thank you thank you thank you.” “Thank you customer care Tatiana.” “Thank you Natasha, thank you Jonathan, you guys are great.” What we also see all the time is somebody will come on and complain and another user will come on and say:
“Just wait these guys on Facebook are amazing, they’ll help you.”
Mercedes Bunz of The Guardian had an interesting piece last week on how media companies and newspapers are evolving into technology companies. It opened with a poignant quote from New York Times executive editor Bill Keller (even if you don’t necessarily believe it).
“The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.”
While we might expect this sentiment from other forward-looking media outlets, the idea that the Times values technology as much as quality journalism is telling. Of course they’re hardly alone. Every traditional media company is examining the technology opportunities that lie in front of them. Bunz’s piece also looks at the success that CNN had with driving engagement and crowd-sourcing through its iPhone application and specifically its iReport button. Wired magazine drew praise at SXSW for its technological interpretation of a digital magazine on the forthcoming iPad. Everywhere you look there seems to be another media company testing a new technology.
While the “media meltdown” hasn’t directly affected public relations and communications agencies quite like it has media companies, the same focus on technology is pressing for the industry. After all, communications, and marketing as a whole, are tied at the hip to the future of the media industry. Just as technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good journalism, technology is becoming more and more an integral part of doing good PR. I’m not just talking about run-of-the-mill uses of existing and mainstream social platforms, such as: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. I’m talking about re-envisioning how to reach media and more importantly consumers in the digital age. Much in the way the New York Times has to think about the problem.
These are not only the tools and services that agencies should be looking at from vendors, but the technology that they should be investing in to create on their own.
The agencies and practitioners that will be around for the next technology bubble will be those who can honestly say like Keller (without PR spin), “we’re as much a technology company as we are a communications agency.”
ExactTarget made fairly big news on Tuesday with their acquisition of CoTweet. The email marketing and one-to-one marketing provider acquired the popular Web-based platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. To date, CoTweet has teamed with brands such as Whole Foods, Starbucks, JetBlue, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint and Coca-Cola to effectively manage global Twitter engagement. So what does an email marketer want with a Twitter platform?
What they originally have planned for the service, may shed some light on that. According the their release, CoTweet will operate in San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget and will lead the company’s social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and chief executive Jesse Engle will also lead the San Francisco operation and spearhead the creation and expansion of the company’s social media lab.
“What we’re seeing in the market is organizations are moving quickly to try to capture the potential of social, but are discovering that it’s siloed and not integrated effectively with other forms of digital communications,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer. “By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all forms of interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”
An end-to-end marketing tool, which includes social media functionality could be huge, but initially I would have some fears with an email marketing company (synonymous in some consumers’ eyes with spam), imploring similar tactics with social media. Do they really understand the back and forth engagement between consumers and brands that makes Twitter what it is? It doesn’t sound like Jesse Engle of CoTweet has that fear.
“We see a huge opportunity to build on ExactTarget’s incredible business and customer relationships to help companies drive more measurable value from social media,” said Engle. “As part of ExactTarget, we’ll have the global resources to cement our early lead, rapidly expand our platform and develop the next generation of social media communication tools.”
Perhaps then, they do understand the difference in the social media channel. If it allows for CoTweet to build on their services and offer more real-time measurement and CRM functionality then I’m all for it. If they can apply email measurement and CRM to social, and even mobile, ExactTarget could turn the acquisition into a future leadership position in the holistic Web marketing space.
PitchEngine, the social media release platform, announced on Tuesday that it is partnering with Technorati and MyMediaInfo to develop components for its soon to be released, Pitch™ Platform.
We didn’t have the chance to catch-up with PitchEngine’s CEO Jason Kintzler today, but according to the PitchEngine release, The Pitch Platform (due to be released in beta over the next few weeks) will offer a new kind of “social media relations”. Instead of sending press releases to email addresses, the platform will create a new channel for conversations and sharing content with real people (journalists and consumers).
Technorati will assist in creating the Technorati List (fueled by PitchEngine), which is designed to help organizations and bloggers simplify and expand blogger outreach. MyMediaInfo will assist on the traditional media end with access to 400,000 media members.
With the Pitch Platform, media will be able to follow and filter only the content that matters to them. If they see something they like, they’ll be able to interact privately, one-to-one with the Pitch creator. Media can also pitch story needs to brands and organizations from within the same categories of interest making Pitch a genuine media relations tool.
But do we really need another channel? With more channels than ever before to connect with journalists and brands, will journalists want to open a new channel (even if it is a filter)? We’ve seen the evidence that they’re already using social media for similar purposes. A study released in January found 65 percent of journalists are using social networking sites and 52 percent are using micro-blogging sites like Twitter as part of their news gathering. Add on calls and instant messaging, and that’s a lot of channels to keep track of.
Any new channel will have to offer a lot to get journalists to abandon any of the aforementioned channels. Hopefully we can give you a better idea if this does all that, when we trial the beta offering later this month.
Not only are consumers spending more time than ever before on social networks, they’re also using social networks as a one-stop-shop for news and information. The latest study released by Pew Research Center today found that 75 percent of online news consumers get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites.
However, online news consumption isn’t completely taking over offline (mainly TV and radio) consumption. Instead, consumers are combining both offline and online sources to digest news. In fact, 59 percent of the 2,259 U.S. adults (18+) surveyed, noted they use both sources. Meanwhile, only two percent noted they only use online sources for news and 38 percent of those surveyed still use offline sources as their main news provider each day.
Pew goes onto note that today’s multi-platform news environment is becoming portable, personalized and participatory:
33 percent of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones
28 percent of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them
37 percent of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
Looking closer at Facebook as a news hub, it will become increasingly important for brands to ensure that their messages and announcements penetrate the social network. This could be through their Facebook fan pages, personal posts, aggregation buttons on corporate blogs or even journalist posts. In addition, news stories with brand and message inclusion should also be scored on if they make “most emailed” lists, are posted to an outlet’s Facebook page (i.e. the New York Times posting a story) or if a reporter personally posts a story to their page (example illustrated above).
Personally, Twitter has been a great crowd-sourcing tool for myself each morning that often beats the morning paper in terms of multiple sources, stories and varying points of view. However, I’ve found myself going to Facebook for the same type of crowd-sourcing recently. With the combination of friends’ updates and news posts from both friends, colleagues, news outlets and clients it becomes a more personal experience. I also find that with more information posted (no character limit), I spend less time clicking through to stories (not necessarily a good thing for media companies).
And that personal experience isn’t only key for myself. Despite all of the online activity, Pew notes that the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites. Most likely because the news and information is overwhelming and consumers opt for sites that they are comfortable with and engage within themselves.
Jon Meacham Appearing on Charlie Rose, upon the launch of the “new” Newsweek (Last May)
Newsweek’s “intellectually satisfying” new layout may not be working out as planned. Keith Kelley of the New York Post reports today that the Washington Post Company (owners of Newsweek) somewhat hid within their Q4 earnings that Newsweek lost $28.1 million in 2009. Newsweek CEO Tom Ascheim tells Kelly that they expected losses in 2009 and even in 2010 with their lower circulation, but expect to break even by 2011.
We reported last May on the transformation of Newsweek; from a venerable weekly into an Economist-like read for the intellectual elite. As part of the transformation, Ascheim and Meacham laid the groundwork for trimming down its circulation from 3.1 million to 1.2 million. As of January, Newsweek had cut its circulation down to 1.5 million. The circulation cut, which was done to focus on its “core readership,” also laid groundwork for trimming its staffing costs. Newsweek has offered severance to 44 staffers over the last year.
Despite trimming and cover stories such as “The Case for Killing Granny,” “Is Your Baby Racist?” and “Obama is Wrong,” Newsweek struggled with its transition throughout the media meltdown of 2009 (no different than most magazines). According to information from the Magazine Publishers of America the magazine witnessed a 25.9% drop in 2009 ad pages and a $105 million loss in revenue with its print business. Yes, you can blame the gradual circulation change and redesign, but what business could stay in the green with a 30 percent loss in money coming in – no matter how many people you lay off.
Things may turnaround for Newsweek as we continue to come out of the economic tumult (Ascheim notes Q4 was their best), but does the Washington Post Company have the stomach to wait until 2011 to break even? And perhaps more importantly what is their online strategy to offset these losses? Is there a paywall in the future?
“Fox News, Fair and Balanced.” Some say, it’s the most biased slogan in all of news. Others would argue that Fox News isthe most believable.
No matter what side of the fence you’re on, it’s tough to argue with the fact that there are more sources than ever before in the age of cable news and digital media, with varying shades of slant sprinkled throughout them.
In fact, a study last year by the PEW Research Center found that nearly 74% of Americans believe news organizations tend to favor one side of story and 60% believe news organizations are politically biased.
One new multi-media startup aiming to address these issues, along with the need for cost-effectively produced web and mobile video content, is Missouri-based Newsy.com. Newsy.com is a online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents multi-sourced (or unbiased) news in video form for multiple platforms. The service is positioned as a video analyzer, not a video aggregator (such as VideoSift or Dabble.com), which means it employs an editorial staff to assist with the analyzing, sourcing, producing and repackaging rather than simply aggregating the video content.
“Look at the health care issue right now and there are likely 15,000 pieces of news coverage in all forms,” Newsy.com’s Founder and President Jim Spencer noted to me last week. “We sift through all the pieces of coverage and present one multi-sourced video.”
Missouri would seem like a funny home for a video startup to most, but Spencer, a J-school graduate from the University of Missouri, found just what he was looking for in returning to Columbia. A natural partnership with the J-School lowers staff and production costs, while offering two courses to students: An online audience development class, and a global converged news class taught by Newsy.com Vice President of Editorial Pam Maples, who was previously the managing editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Another cost saver is Newsy.com’s proprietary technology that manually records and captures content. This allows the company’s 22 full and part-time employees, and assisting students, to sift through hours of media in an efficient way. All of this, in addition to the overall production prices being lower in Missouri than San Francisco or New York allows Newsy.com to analyze, produce and distribute news at a discount of as much as 40 percent on the dollar. Or as Spencer notes, “We can now compete with Mumbai.”
The notion of being “smarter and faster” provides several revenue stream options for Spencer, who is a veteran of new media offerings. Formerly the VP of Content and Answers at Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) and the GM of News and Information Programming at AOL, Spencer believes Newsy.com can drive revenue in a variety of ways outside of traditional on-site advertising. Namely, content licensing, branded news casts and revenue shares through syndication.
These revenue streams also apply to mobile video, which Spencer sees as a big opportunity. “There is a demand for short video news analysis on mobile devices,” he noted. The iPhone and its support of high quality video is certainly a driver of that. Last June, YouTube reported a 400% jump in video uploads driven by the release of the iPhone 3G and there’s an equal demand for consuming video on mobile devices. In fact, Newsy.com’s video news app for the iPhone reached number five on the list of free apps in the News category within the iTunes App Store last October (ahead of TIME, Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post apps).
Spencer, who plans to launch a similar video playing app for Android this week sees this growth as validation of Newsy.com’s platform agnostic approach. “It’s an affirmation of our multi-sourced, multi-platform approach. We’re ahead of this trend.”
According to new data released by Nielsen today, global users spent more than five and a half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year.
Facebook continues to show the most global engagement with users spending an average of nearly six hours on the site for December 2009. Twitter on the other hand, wrapped up the calendar year with 579% growth in unique views (UV’s). However, UV’s for the site dropped 5% from November 2009; a possible sign that the company’s hockey stick growth may have peaked.
Looking closer to home, U.S. social media users are also spending more of their free time on social networks with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.
At least it seems to have happened to Rolling Stone. It could be a DNS server issue as Mashable notes, but it does look very similar to the generic hosting service page you get when your site in unpaid.
The site is now updated to an error message, but still no content. Being down for the full day won’t help with Web traffic for the magazine’s Website, which has steadily decreased over the last six months.
