Category Archives: Technology

One of the best examples of how social media can turn a small incident into a monstrous thing is United Breaks Guitars by Dave Carroll. Just to set the premise, Dave Carroll, a musician, was flying from Halifax, Canada to Omaha, Nebraska via Chicago on United Airlines flights. He checked in his guitar and when he got down at Omaha he found his guitar was broken. He approached United Airlines to pay for fixing the guitar. United was pretty indifferent to his requests with many excuses to not fix it. Being a musician he did what he does best, i.e. wrote a song titled United Breaks Guitars and posted it on YouTube. Within first 4 days, the video got 1.5 million views on YouTube. On Day 5 it was covered by every major news channel  causing a long lasting damage to United’s brand image. It is also worthy to note that United stock plunged 10% during this week (I am not claiming the reason for stock value plunge being this, but many analysts have drawn relationship between the PR disaster and stock price).

What was United Breaks Guitars? It was basically a creative person lodging a complaint about a bad experience with the service. But what areas has it affected? Everything ranging from public relations and corporate communications to branding and customer service. This is all courtesy of social media.

The amplification of the impact of United Breaks Guitars was instantaneous and widespread because of the creative and talented complainer Dave Carroll. But social media has the power to take any normal complaint or customer outburst and turn it into wildfire, sometimes slowly and other times rapidly. The reason being the complaint here is not lodged privately to the company. It is public, where a customer’s network of friends and family, other customers who have had similar experiences and general people can join in the conversation, add their own 2 cents as well as keep the incident in mind while making their next buying decision.

What is important for companies is to prioritize the complaints and  make sure every customer complaint on social media is addressed proactively. The volume on social media is immense. With intelligent data mining techniques, companies can learn about the priority of customer conversation and make sure that the most pressing issues are addressed immediately and eventually they reach to every issue before it becomes another case study like United Breaks Guitars.

Watercooler shows are the shows people talk about in a social situation. The emergence of social media has taken the phenomenon of watercooler shows to a whole new level. Social media provides people a platform to talk about the shows. Every day millions of viewers are joining the conversation on social networks and they are using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other platforms to share opinions and convert a normal show into a watercooler show.

What is essential for a show to become a watercooler show on social media? Apart from great show creating a captive audience, it needs a few key influencers to stir the pot on social media, to talk about the show, love it when something great happens, hate it when the things are not as they would like it to be, but irrespective of anything happening just keep participating in conversations about it.

Millions of people spending hours online on social networks and talking about these shows also leads to an interesting side effect. It creates a rich source of data to find insights about these shows. By intelligent mining and analysis of these conversations, marketers can find what key themes and characters are sticking with the audience to develop promos and advertisements for the shows, advertisers can find what demographic and psychographic segments are associating themselves with the shows to better target their products, and producers can get a sense of what is working and what is not working in their shows. Social media sets new standards for audience analysis and measurement for the shows which are much more realistic and practical as compared to traditional methods of measurement.

The evolution of social media has impacted a lot of industries. In-home entertainment industry is one of them. Every television channel wants its show to be the watercooler show with captive customers and eager advertisers. In today’s connected world, that “watercooler” is replaced by something that is much bigger, scalable and measurable.  Social media is the new watercooler!

Like, follow and subscribe: three words that have redefined the permission marketing in the recent times. Permission marketing is where people give explicit permission to marketers to contact them. There’s a big shift in how people perceive marketers courtesy of the social world. A few years back getting yourself on the do not call list was a cool thing to do, today liking a page on Facebook and following a brand on Twitter is so neat.

Sounds great. Now you got permission to communicate with your customers. That’s amazing! But something is missing. What’s the problem? The biggest problem in social media is overcrowding. Stats suggest that an average active Facebook user likes two new pages every month.

So how can a marketer best leverage the permission provided by consumers in social media? The first thing marketers need to accept is that just having a large number of followers and friends on social network is not the real definition of success in this space. In fact this is just a small part of your social media campaign. That’s because of a couple of reasons. First, the probability of your consumers staying in regular touch with you is slim. The reason being out of hundreds of friends and dozens of brand that compete for attention every minute, the probability that your brand will get the attention is as close to zero as it can be. Second, 8 out of 10 conversations about your brand are happening outside of your turf. If a consumer had a good experience with your product, they write it on their wall. If they liked a movie, they tweet it normally without linking it to the movie’s Twitter account.

It is awesome that you got permission to talk to your consumers. The important thing is to make full use of it. There are a couple of ways you can do this. One is by focusing on an issue that the consumers want to learn more about. The probability that the consumer will pay attention to the issue you, the experts and others talk about is much more likely than anything else. Second, learn about your consumers. Gain insights around who they are. What they want. What’s missing. Why they are forming a certain perception. Why they like you and why they dislike you. Then use these insights to take actions that will make you reach closer to the consumers and gain the real permission to stay on top of their mind in the social world.

In order to understand how to incentivize mavens, it is very important to understand how they are different from your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person. A spokesperson, brand ambassador or sales person is someone who works for a company. It’s their job. They say awesome things about a brand or they recommend people to use a company’s product primarily because they are paid to do that. Mavens on the other hand are the trusted experts in a field who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. These are the people who are contacted by others to find information in a field they command expertise. They do it just because they want to do this and are passionate about this.

The best incentives for mavens anywhere is recognition. One of the pioneers in this field is Microsoft. A big reason behind Microsoft’s success as a platform is the big array of applications on it. The applications are developed by a community of developers. Microsoft incentivize developers using the Microsoft MVP program. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program gives special recognition to the developers who are active in the Microsoft developers communities and forums answering questions, making suggestions and contributing to the product. Microsoft invites them special developers conferences, gives them gift coupons to buy Microsoft software and a special tag next to their name on Microsoft communities.

Another good example is Coca-Cola. As Facebook became a big deal and companies started to look at it as a marketing platform, Coca-Cola discovered that their fan page was already there. A couple of Coca-Cola fans created the Facebook fan page and actively managed it. These individuals were real soft drink mavens who vouched for Coca-cola and took the initiative to help Coca-Cola fans engage with each other. Cola-Cola recognized that and instead of taking over the fan page encouraged these people to maintain it and provided them resources to do so. Over the years, unlike many Facebook fan pages, majority of content on Coca-Cola fan page is still generated by fans.

The most important thing to recognize while dealing with mavens is that you cannot manage them. What you can do is listen to them, engage with them and appreciate them so that they have the incentive to be part of your community and be the volunteers who act as your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person.

I wrote this post for Management Innovation Exchange. It is posted at MIX.