Tag Archives: twitter

How To Bludgeon Your Brand In 140 Characters

by on June 24, 2009 in Branding

Habitat, a UK-based home furnishings company, received a lesson this week on how NOT to market its brand. Turns out whoever is minding their Twitter account decided to take advantage of all the buzz surrounding Iran and use related hashtags such as #MOUSAVI to peddle their wares.

Shameless? Yep. Brainless? Yep, again. And it’s not just isolated to piggybacking on #Iran – apparently, Habitat has been riding other trending tags such as #apple and #phone. I’m still a bit mystified by who actually thought this was a good idea. The company has deleted the offending tweets and issued an apology, but the damage is done.

A quote from the BBC News article:

“The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat. We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that has been caused.”

The BBC writer is quick to pick up on what is easily inferred from this statement: that a third-party agency is responsible for Habitat’s online marketing strategy and – perhaps more interesting – their Twitter writing. Letting someone outside your organization write your tweets and post to social media shows is a quick way to get into some seriously hot water. If your organization is thinking of using Twitter and other social media tools to engage with customers, for heaven’s sake, don’t let someone else do it for you. This is a DIY initiative.

The Twitter Retention Problem: Oprah, Aloha and Your Community

by on April 29, 2009 in Communities

I tried my hardest to not write a post with the words Oprah and Twitter in it, but I just couldn’t steer away from the soft glowing light of popular discussion (though I guess I am a bit late).

So Oprah and a continuing bevy of celebrities are hitching their brand wagons to Twitter and spurring their faithful followers to give the microblogging service a try. Just one problem: these new members are walking in and just as quickly walking out. From Nielsenwire Blog, Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth:

When Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today. Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.

What does this say about Twitter? I’m not going to cast doom-and-gloom on the service but there are two lessons anyone who is building or managing communities ought to consider:

Welcoming. Twitter’s been overhyped lately and the fact that folks are coming and going really shouldn’t be a shock. All the media-fed mania did was increase the curiosity of folks who wanted to see what the hubbub was about. And when they got there, they were likely disappointed by what they found because there really is no community with Twitter. It’s a social network that inspires community. Because its a social network first, there is no formal welcome, no Twitter 101, no management plan for helping newbies feel comfortable with the lingo. (Come to think of it, maybe Twitter really does need a Chief Community Officer.)

When a newcomer visits your online community for the first time, do they feel welcome and safe to explore the community space? Or do they feel like they’ve just exited the plane into a strange land where their first inclination is to want to get right back on and go home? Think how nice it is to have a friendly gal or guy waiting on you when you deplane, hand you a lei, and say “Aloha.” If that happens, you might want to hang around and explore all your destination offers. Have a welcome strategy and prepare to execute it in a way that will scale just in case Oprah decides to make your community her next cause célèbre.

Integrating. But don’t stop at “Hello!” or “Aloha!” if you’re still dreamily hanging out at the Hawaii example. Most communities that fail do so because they don’t take the next step which is engagement. Why do some people try out Twitter then lose interest after a few weeks? There could be many reasons and would be a good use case for ethnographic work. I’ll propose one possibility: lack of ongoing value. We’re inundated by so many other distractions (like kids, spouse…okay only joking there). But the competition for eyes, minds and hearts is fierce. Is your community maintaining consistent value for your members? Do they feel engaged by their interactions in your community? Whether your community is tied to a cause-based nonprofit or a business, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask.

This topic of engagement is one of my favorites and one that fuels my own anthropological research. It was also a specialty in my association membership work so I can relate to how challenging it is not only attract new members but keeping them. Yet, retention is crucial so think strategically and make a plan. If you’ve found great ideas for keeping engagement levels high among your new members, share them with others in the community here.

The Relationship To Free In Online Communities

by on April 14, 2009 in Communities

We all have expectations of service when we pay for something, right? Go to even a moderately priced restaurant like Outback Steakhouse and you expect to be served well. If you purchase a computer online from Dell, you want to be taken care of if something doesn’t work. And if you pay dues to your professional association, you expect a level of service to match the cost. So, how does free membership in a community alter our expectations? Should we expect the same level of service for something that we pay no money to support?

I offer two cases: Twitter and Facebook. When things blow up on either of these services, do we as users have any right to demand quick, speedy or personal support? We don’t give one dime for the ability to communicate and expand our networks. The cynical among us might even suggest that we users are really just leaching off of both Twitter and Facebook for our own gain. So if we don’t pay anything for these services, what right do we have to express outrage when we’re met with failwhales, questionable changes to terms of service or disabled features?

This is the conundrum facing most online community managers: delivering service in an age where its expected even on free sites. Perhaps the solution here is that we have to change our ideas of what defines a relationship. We can no longer strictly use the financial transaction as a point for determining service level. Since users bring value to the community through their interactions, it seems that we community management professionals need to adjust our own thinking. That failwhale impacts a user’s overall experience which, in turn, impacts the service’s brand. It’s a rippling effect that defines a daily reality for online communities.

Thoughts?

Would You Consider A Customer Care Strategy With Twitter?

by on May 1, 2008 in Business

One of my new Twitter follows Chris Rash posted a tweet this morning as a question: Twitter for customer service? Now if you’re not familiar with Twitter you might have read that as “twits in customer service” and thought that’s nothing new. This pervasive public attitude (which isn’t going away) is precisely why companies need to think differently about how they care for their customers. Want to know how to gain a critical advantage on your competitors? Look no further than your probably beleaguered but infinitely valuable customer service team.

Now, whether you like Twitter and other social media tools or not, you have to acknowledge their massive appeal and increasing usage by folks. It’s time to face the facts that social media is no longer the exclusive tool of the techno-savvy. Along with blogging, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook are now used by a wider audience at all age levels (do a search for grandmothers on Facebook…you might be surprised at what you find). So get off the fence and put on your brainstorming cap – remember to make some for the rest of your team – because it’s time start getting creative in how you maximize these tools to help build stronger business relationships.

If you’re still on the fence and not sure about the value of social media to your services business, here are some thoughts to ponder…

Go where your customers are…don’t expect them to always come to you.
The traditional forms of customer service will never really go away so don’t ditch the phone number and email address. Being accessible and responsive is always going to be the hip and right thing to do. But the rules for gaining and retaining customers are definitely changing. It’s now easier than ever to tell the world about the crappy service you just received or the shoddily-made product that falls apart when you look at it funny. It’s equally easy to tell the world about the wonderful care you just received from a restaurant or how damn reliable and fun to drive your new Honda truck is (yep, that’s my little endorsement for the Ridgeline).

Embrace the personal relationship…just don’t over-construct it.
Too many times, managers like to outwit themselves with all kinds of complicated plans and strategies for how to tap into the next great technology tool. In the process, they tend to focus way more on the tool than the purpose of using that tool…in this case it ought to be to build a better, deeper, more personal relationship with the customer. Going back to the article that Chris tweeted, the decision for Comcast to care and build relationships using Twitter wasn’t a formal decree from the CEO, but an intuitive hunch and nudge from a company executive. (And if there’s a company that needs some positive customer service stories, it’s Comcast.)

And for heaven’s sake…be authentic!
If you decide to use social media, don’t think for a moment you can get away with being phony, disingenuous, or insensitive. The foundation of social media is built on trust and if you betray that trust you might as well hang it up and go back to your old ways of customer service. Remember that you’re doing this as a way to not only build the kind of relationships that retain business, but the kind of relationships that take people from casual customer to raving fans. And it’s raving fans that will hop onto Twitter and tell their networks how fantastic you are.