Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

The Revolution will be Twitter-vized

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

It’s been a while, but I remember how revolutionary it felt reading the results of the OJ Simpson trial over an IRC channel in 1995. Now, over a decade later, a similar torrent of massive proportions is happening over a brand new medium, a new subset of the Internet: Twitter. 

In case you’ve been in a media vacuum: In Iran, many claim that the results of the June 12th election are invalid and that the election was rigged. The reaction has been described in the same terms as the 1979 revolution that shaped the current Iranian government.

I’m not here to play pundit on the situation, but rather comment about how Twitter has provided more information than traditional news media.

 According to numerous credentialed and informal sources, foreign media cannot report directly on the ongoing situation in Iran. In the past, combating this media blackout would involve a few select individuals with sneaky access to the outside world. Regardless, it would still be limited and slow to flow.

Today is different. Thanks to Twitter (and to a smaller degree Facebook) the information has been pouring out. Of the trending topics on Twitter, three involve Iran’s situation and the updates are quick to come. Indeed, #iranelection ranks as one of the longest trending topics since they started listing them. Updates from specific people are quickly retweeted and sent along the Twittersphere. Traditional media monitors and at times reports these snippets of information. Indeed, CNN outright states, “CNN is also extensively monitoring social networks as an integral part of its reporting on the situation in Iran.”

 There’s an important point or two to make here.

 Iran is a fairly shuttered nation. Similarly, so is China. Regardless of their powerful ability to stymie using fear and technology, information leaks out. Media outlets now use Twitter-based information. So, if governments like those of China and Iran can’t stop the Twitter revolution, what makes you think that your company can?

There are quite a few businesses out there that think they can or should just ignore Twitter. If these new stories are any indication, you should now realize that you should pay Twitter as much as any other media.  

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Twitter silence in a minor crisis.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Originally, I planned on blogging about Apple’s keynote address and how Twitter probably carried as much, if not more detail along with quicker commentary than any of the larger blog outlets would have managed.

Then something interesting happened this morning. I noticed the top trending topic on Twitter was AT&T. I hadn’t paid it much mind until I saw a friend of mine tweet, “RT @steveagee Dear AT&T, how does it feel to be the number 1 trending topic simply for being a piece of shit?” For the record, I don’t know or follow Steve Agee, but he brings up a good point.

I’d never want to be where AT&T is on twitter, nor would I want one of my clients there. The fact remains though, if you’re doing crisis communication, you damned well better to be prepared for that possibility.

Just for a little background, AT&T doesn’t support two very desired features on the iPhone. One is something called tethering, which basically lets you use your phone as a modem. The second and (apparently) more important one is MMS, which includes picture messages. While the iPhone on AT&T won’t support it, it can be supported on other carriers (in Europe) and other AT&T phones. Add to this the multitude of issues customers have with AT&T’s pricing structure. The latter probably wouldn’t be that bad if not for the other issues. It all adds up. Keep in mind this is a quick summary.

AT&T does have a twitter account, and it does tweet. How useful is it? They have around 5,500 followers but say nothing about the criticisms that iPhone customers have hurled their way. In fact, the twitter feed for AT&T contains a mind-numbing list of promotions. It’s not very useful and definitely not conversational.

AT&T’s situation is precarious. The Cult of Apple seems to be ready to cut the company off at the knees. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is starting to look at new carriers. Right now AT&T is taking the bad road of silence and finger pointing. Officially AT&T has said very little. They could take a lesson from Dominos and at least try and calm people down over twitter, but I don’t see that happening.

I can’t stress it enough – in today’s climate of conversation, you cannot ignore negative talk about your brand. It will not go away. Likely it will only get worse.

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

Live or Die by Social Media.

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

These days, if you haven’t planned for any social media interaction with a large or national campaign, you’ve doomed yourself to failure. Indeed, if you’re a national company and your crisis plan doesn’t have social media embedded into it, you’re in for trouble.

Sure, you might get lucky, but monitoring the social internet is as critical as listening to your customers who walk in and out of your store. More importantly, negative statements won’t just echo for a few minutes, but can sit around for a long time. Anyone with a fancy for Google can see and use these comments – from the media to influential bloggers and your potential customers.

A few good examples: KFC, Dominos Pizza, Swine Flu (sorry, H1N1).

In the most recent case, KFC decided to use Opera to give away free meals. In theory, this was a great plan. Oprah’s draw is extreme. The problem for KFC, however, is that Oprah’s draw is extreme. In short, KFC didn’t plan for this. They thought that they’d double Oprah’s estimated pull for the free meals and that would be enough.

Hindsight being what it is, even Oprah’s organization could have planned a little better and warned KFC that the impact would be huge. Regardless, what I think both organizations didn’t plan for was the power of social media, especially blogging and micro blogging (Twitter). When word got out via social media and the Oprah machine, the demand was too much for the KFCs.

To illuminate what went wrong, it might help to look at a company that did it right, or at least better. When Denny’s decided to promote its Grand Slam breakfast by giving it away, it carefully thought out that there might be more demand for a free breakfast than their kitchens could have expected. Restaurants greeted those who came too late with rain checks. While they took a few shots for it, it helped defray some of the negative sentiment.

According to the Twitter traffic and reports on the situation, KFC simply turned patrons away. Many were rude. They didn’t offer a rain check. If some of the articles are any indication, they didn’t even get buy-in from every franchise. The result should have been expected: people complained. There were complaints on Twitter and over the blogosphere. The primary problem may have been poor planning, but in that poor planning was a forgotten element: social media.

Dying by social media.

KFC didn’t plan for it, and as a result the social internet ate them like a greasy drumstick.

On the other hand, companies like Dominos handled their recent crisis slightly better by essentially fighting fire with fire, posting a video on the same site that hosted the original video. Dominoes also started using twitter to address concerns. Thought I think they acted a little too late – at least they acted. In the future, those companies should continue to foster their social media tribe. When it comes to communicating over social media in a crisis, an established tribe is going to be a lot more useful than a brand new one. If you take a quick look at Starbucks, they have almost 176,000 followers who will hear them if they need to be heard. Dominos has less than a 10th of that. Who do you think is going to weather a social media storm better?

Finally, one group that seems to “get it” would be the CDC. To combat misinformation about the H1N1 virus (so-called swine flu) they quickly utilized Twitter to help correct the misinformation and panic that could have spread virally (sorry, couldn’t help it). Was it a perfect execution? Probably not, but so far there have been very few “perfect executions.”

So what’s the point here? If you’re in PR and/or crisis management, if you’re planning a large-scale promotion that could overload your infrastructure or if you have any connection to the image of a company, you should be scouring the social web to be sure your brand is protected. Anything else would be downright irresponsible.

http://www.twitter.com/starbucks
http://www.twitter.com/dpzinfo
http://adage.com/article?article_id=136551
http://adage.com/article?article_id=136484
http://adweek.blogs.com/tweetfreak/2009/05/brands-on-twitter-kfc-and-oprah.html

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Posted in Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 5 Comments »