This is a guest post by Mandy Miller. Follow her on Twitter at @MandyMayM.
Remember the “Live Under a Rock? Geico commercial? Well, in case you do live under a boulder, you may be wondering what this Kony business is about. Naturally, it stirs larger political and foreign relations and policy debates, but you have to give it to Invisible Children, it truly deserves the title of an “EPIC” social media campaign – at least for now. According to GigaOM’s estimates, the seemingly long (by YouTube standards) 30-minute video created by the group and shared widely on Facebook and Twitter was viewed 80 million times in just five days. In case you haven’t seen the video, give it a ‘quick’ view here.
I’ve worked and lived with many friends that have visited and worked specifically within Uganda as well as many other foreign counties within Africa and abroad. The tale and truth here is that these types of atrocities are nothing new. While generic in ‘corporate speak,’ I’ve seen many a social media case that attempts to ‘drive awareness’ to bring attention to them and, of course, bring a call to action. Never have I seen such a viral reception of a campaign of this nature.
The interesting thing about watching the Kony campaign is that it’s REALLY working. I’m not naming any names, but via my social media networks, I’ve been witnessing individuals who have previously voiced no concern or action in foreign policies, affairs, events, etc. now pushing on this content – pushing it hard, at that. The individual that spearheaded this effort, Jason Russell, produced an amazing video. In broadcasting, capturing human interest can be very difficult. Have you ever noticed how long a network news segment is? The average segment is a single minute – some are longer at two minutes. Now, think of the amount of information that goes into that. It takes talent to pull together a video that not only looks good, but ‘touches’ the viewer. I believe Russell has done just that.
While it’s too tough to tell where this campaign will go and how its success will be measured, an interesting point to think about is how this kind of multimedia will begin shifting how we market brands and interact with end-users and the general population. While it’s nothing new, even to people under rocks, the future of media is constantly evolving. With The New York Times recently putting the philanthropy beat on the chopping block, marketing communications professionals, and, more specifically, non-profits, have to be thinking of new and creative ways to cultivate conversation. My guess is that we are going to begin integrating multimedia and social media much more. You can see this in practice with the recent rise in infographics – packing a lot of useful nuggets into an atheistically pleasing package.
What other ways have you seen or think you will see media shift more towards integrating multimedia and social media?
Everyone hates paying extra money to check a bag when flying, but a group of US soldiers returning home from Afghanistan recently were particularly irked.
According to the soldiers, the US Army has an agreement with Delta in place where they can check 4 bags (Delta claims the 4 bag policy was for first class passengers only, but has since changed their policy so any soldiers can check 4 bags). Each soldier was charged $200 to check their 4th bag, which one soldier was carrying the weapon he was issued by the US Army.
While on their flight home, two US soldiers made a video and posted it on YouTube, explaining their frustrations with Delta. While the video doesn’t have a significant number of views yet, it is quickly gaining attention, and Delta decided to put out this fire before they had a United Breaks Guitars situation on their hands. Since the video was published, Delta says they have changed their policy so that any US soldier can have 4 bags on a flight.
The debate about which party misunderstood the policy can be determined by Delta and the US Army. However, Delta deserves kudos for understanding the power that this video could have, and acting swiftly to resolve the issue before it got out of hand.
What better way to begin the celebration of lights then through a great YouTube video that’s on its way to going viral – it has already been watched 226,000+ times in less then 5 days!
Happy Hanukkah, from your RaceTalk bloggers, Ben & Molly!
Early this week Universal Pictures invited RaceTalk to attend a private screening of the documentary “Catfish.” Given our extensive coverage of social media, and particularly Facebook, the studio felt we were the perfect viewers.
The film follows a young, New York City based photographer, Yaniv “Nev” Shulman as he forms relationships with a family in Michigan. After seeing one of Nev’s photographs in the New York Sun, this Michigan family sends him a painting of his photograph, done by their eight year old daughter Abby.
Nev winds up “friending” Abby’s mother, father, sister, brother and more via Facebook and communicates with them regularly. Over the coming months they share countless emails, Facebook messages, phone calls, photos, videos, song recordings, and of course, more paintings. Eventually, Nev begins to form a romantic bond with Abby’s older sister Megan. He talks to her every day on the phone, via text, email and she sends photos and recordings of her singing songs she wrote for him.
One evening Nev discovers via the power of Google and YouTube, that Megan has been sending music recordings that are in fact stolen from an artist named Amy Karney. When he confronts her about it, she becomes frazzled and overly emotional. From this conversation on, things with Megan and the entire family begin to unravel. In an attempt to get some closure on what now feels like a mountain of lies, Nev and the two film makers (his older brother Ariel and their friend Henry) decide to drive to Ipsheming, Michigan to meet the family in person and uncover the truth.
Without spoiling the ending, because if you are an active user of Facebook you must see this movie, I will say that “Catfish” caused me to rethink my personal approach to Facebook. As a PR professional, we counsel our clients on the use of social media and the real-time web, and encourage them to share, share often, and share with complete transparency. We position social media as an easy, low cost way to reach your target audience on the websites and applications they are already using. Personally, we do the same. We use our Facebook profiles to share photos, videos, articles we enjoy, blog posts we write and more. Facebook has become so ubiquitous; we behave this way without question.
In David Kirkpatrick’s book “The Facebook Effect” he chronicles the early days of Facebook when a user was required to have a college, .edu email address to join. Mark Zuckerberg felt the university email address provided a level of authenticity that you are who you say you are. Once Facebook was opened broadly, and that requirement disappeared, you could use any email address to sign up, even a fake one.
“Catfish” demonstrates that the internet and in this case Facebook, allows users to not only share content, but to also steal content; to poach photos, videos, music and more and re-purpose it for their own use. The current explosion of content on the internet and social networks provides users with the ability to pluck content off the web and create an entire identity with stolen information.
Nev is still an active user of Facebook. His experiences have not diminished his use of the network. However, “Catfish” will force you to re-think the way you use Facebook and exactly how open you want to be with your personal information and the people you allow into your network. This film is a haunting, brutally real look at the power of social media.
Old Spice has launched a new social media campaign using Old Spice Man, who is actually former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa.
Following a successful television commercial campaign which began during the Super Bowl, Old Spice took Mustafa to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and is now making personalized videos.
Hustafa has already made videos for social media personalities such as Kevin Rose and AdventureGirl, and is also replying to specific tweets from various Twitter users. One person even asked Old Spice Man to propose to his girlfriend.
While this social media campaign has already attracted a lot of buzz, it’s still a very new initiative that is quickly building momentum. There is no doubt that Mustafa will be in high demand for personalized videos going forward, and Mustafa recently told ABC News that he can product 100 videos a day, with help from Old Spice’s advertising agency.
This campaign should be a launching pad for other businesses looking to capitalize on social media, and it would be a surprise to see other companies follow suit (such as the Miller High Life guy).
In a recent blog post, Socialnomics author Erik Qualman shared updated figures on Twitter’s presence in the online search game. Twitter has officially edged out Yahoo! and Bing in number of monthly searches. See graphic below:
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter founder Biz Stone shared that Twitter now has over 800 million search queries per day, which is a 33% increase from the last time he shared search figures in April (2010).
On his blog, Qualman writes, “We have indicated all along that Twitter & Facebook would be bigger search competition for Google than Yahoo and Bing. The fact that this is coming to fruition so soon is astounding. Social search and social commerce are becoming reality and it’s a great thing to see. Keep in mind we haven’t even mention YouTube and its social search activity.”
To the people who say social media is a fad, or that these sites are unimportant for business I say, think again. Consumers are searching for your products and services on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and if you are not there, they will find another provider.
A YouTube video of Israeli soldiers dancing to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” has quickly become widely viewed – but is not without controversy and criticism.
The soldiers appear to be patrolling the streets of Hebron (the largest city in the West Bank) when a song is suddenly blasted over speakers, and the soldiers break out into a choreographed dance. They are fully dressed in their uniforms and carrying weapons during the duration of the video.
While the video is entertaining, the soldiers are currently facing disciplinary charges. Additionally, the chosen location for the video (Hebron) won’t help the soldier’s cause, as the conflicted area is the centerpiece of many ongoing disputes. A location such as Tel Aviv would have been a better location for the video – but any video at all might have still been frowned upon by army officials.
This is not the first time social media has been a problem for the Israeli army. In April 2008 an Israeli soldier was jailed for posting a picture on Facebook that contained sensitive information.
Last night Racepoint Group hosted an event about social media and its return on investment (ROI). As social media continues to become a larger focal point in public relations and marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand how to articulate it’s value to clients.
Last night’s event centered around a panel discussion with three social media experts: Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Group, Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing for HubSpot.
After Larry Weber’s opening remarks, Qualman shared how he first dipped his toe into the digital space by sending a company-wide email instead of the standard hard copy memo. View his story here:
Volpe was up next and shared with the group the origins of his marketing career and the way tracking and reporting on ROI is evolving. Watch him provide tips here:
The evening was full of tremendous ideas and recommendations. The five big takeaways from the panel were:
1) Social media is not about technology. It’s about human interaction. It’s about sharing information and making connections. People who are intimidated by the technology aspect of engaging in social media should not view the applications as a hurdle. It’s simply the current mechanism to maintain relationships and reach out to new people.
2) When it comes to tracking social media, its important to focus not only on the quantitative (number of followers, number of re-postings) but also the qualitative. We need to take into account engagement and tone. Qualman said, “If social media is so trackable, we should just have robots running things. The human element is necessary here.”
3) Everyone and anyone can be a content creator, a publisher, a media property. As we shift away from traditional print and broadcast media, both we and our clients have the opportunity to get innovative and create and distribute our own content. Additionally, content creation should not be isolated to the PR and marketing staff. Volpe shared that, “50% of HubSpot employees have written posts for the HubSpot blog.”
4) Although much of PR and marketing is based in the written word, we need to start thinking more visually. We need to tell stories through pictures and videos. We need to make our content more authentic and dynamic.
5) On a personal level, Volpe stated, “The new resume is what comes up in Google when I type in your name.” As digital and social media continue to play an increasingly vital role in our PR and marketing efforts, we too have a digital and social persona, and that is now what employers are most interested in.
Thank you to Erik Qualman and Mike Volpe for joining us at Racepoint Group last night and providing such pragmatic, realistic, useful and inspiring guidance on the social media ROI frontier. Be sure to follow @equalman and @mvolpe on Twitter for real time updates on their social media adventures. You can also view all the live commentary during the event with the #smroi hashtag here.
At every basketball game the home team’s mascot usually performs a series of dunks. They usually involve a trampoline, large mat and one or two flips. However, this week the mascot for the Milwaukee Bucks performed quite the high-flying dunk, which has quickly become a YouTube favorite (see below).
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.”
