In social media should you choose personal or corporate branding?
That is not the case for such things as packaged goods and or large service oriented companies. Those that are born brand first as is the case for the vast majority of brands and companies in the social media space must keep the brand first in the minds of it’s customers. As much as a personal touch or the collective voice maybe important elements behind the brand touching the consumer in thoughtful and memorable ways, it is important to place the brand 1st and foremost.
Look at the top brands in social media today. Jet Blue, Dell, Starbucks, Whole Foods and WestJet just to name a few. They are all very personable and have clearly communicated as a group of people behind the brand that actually do care, but they do not place themselves before the brand. When I think of Zappos I have no idea what the names of the great people that helped me with customer care issues, and if I was not an in the advertising industry I would not be able to name Tony Hsieh as the CEO. Most of the Zappos customers only know the brand by name.
So back to @bradinator vs @Blackcloudwine for a few minutes here. What are the risks of abandoning the personal brand? As @paulrickett points out that 60% of those who follow @bradinator do not follow @Blackcloudwine so at first glance one might say that is a bad choice to abandon the personal account considering how often @bradinator tweets about his Blackcloud Wine. But that would be a very simplified view of the situation. @bradinator’s personal account is very irreverent and has collected a huge following for that very reason. What if those 2030 followers could care less about wine and follow him just for his personal commentary? Then even if he could transfer his social capital over to the @Blackcloudwine account then it would be worthless. If 909 followers of @Blackcloudwine have a higher propensity to love wine and buy more wine and were attracted to that account due to the winecentric tweets in the first place then the smaller more qualified numbers are much more valuable. I will admit that I did not take the time to attempt to measure the quality of the @Blackcloudwine wine followers but I will bet that most are more interested in wine that on his other account.
Social media is just like traditional advertising when it comes to influence. It’s not the number of eyeballs that count but rather the quality and relevance of those that follow you and your posts, tweets and feeds. Just because you have a follow count of thousands upon thousands on Twitter, your blog or Facebook page does not mean that you can market just anything to your potentially unqualified followers. Hell if it was a shear numbers game then why not just head over to fiverr.com and pay the five bucks to the literally hundreds of people offering to place your message or ad in their Twitter streams of 10′s of thousands of followers. I’ll tell you why. Proof that the clickthrough rate on those unqualified posts are incredibly low. All you need to do is pay one of the social media influencers a “fiverr” and then hand them over a message with a bit.ly or ow.ly link and watch your clickthrough rate. I will bet you that you will get fewer then 10 clicks on your highly un-targeted campaign. I am not saying that big numbers of followers don’t work but they need to be qualified. Sure we may lead tribes but if I started to push Tampex branded tampons to my Twitter followers I am sure my tribe would not buy what I was selling.
Here is another reason that the personal brand in social media may not be the right way to grow your brand…scaling with grace and authenticity. We have seen what happens when a personal brand does not scale well due to the fact that there is a finite amount of you [personal brand] to go around. Usually when a personal brand takes off there is the need to automate the posts and tweets etc. That is usually done by way of hiring assistants to do the work for the personal brand…that’s not very transparent now is it and can blow up quickly. When you choose to support a branded account the ability to authentically scale the brand is much easier to do. Sure it’s through the same process of distributing the communication through others like assistants or social brand managers. The difference is that each manager can be identified as an individual behind a brand.
On an account that our agency set up for a customer we have three different people that tweet on behalf of the brand and are demarked by the “^” charachter and their initials. This clearly identifies that there is more than one person managing the account and if need be others can be added with out the feeling that there is any misrepresentation of the branded tweets.
So I ask the question again. Is it social capital suicide or just the death of another Twitter ID? Or is it just the birth of another one that may suit the brand better and in the end move more product and connect with it’s customers in a much more authentic way?
Toyota seems to have a sticky Twitter foot too.
Over the last few days I have noticed a sudden and strange behavior on Toyota’s Twitter account. There was a huge influx of uber positive re-tweets from other Toyota fans on Twitter. There is nothing wrong with re-tweets (RT’s) per say but like most tools in your toolbox understanding how and when to use them is key and from what I could see Toyota did not understand the tool at all.
The subject matter was regarding the quality of Toyota vehicles from point of view of Toyota owners. That in its self is not an issue but the shear volume of RT’s on the subject was quite large and it made more of an impression of a “See we are ok and so and so even says we are…” kind of approach. Tweets like this from @Benne420 “@Toyota as a teen driver, I still get amazing gas mileage out of my 02 Camry LE. I love my car!”, from @OmarHenry “@Toyota is still the best cars around! a guy at my gym still drives a 1980′s toyota with the original engine! dont believe the hype….” and from @FireCat_7“@Toyota my first car is a 1998 Toyota Camry LE. I LOVE IT and I love Toyota. Much love guys. Keep the good work up 
”were the norm in yesterday’s tweets. That is really a very guttural and unsophisticated old fashioned PR approach. Like talking really loud with your hands over your ears “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”.
Anyone that knows me knows that I simply can’t stand over use of passive self flatulence on social media sites and this was clearly one of those instances. The tactic of re-tweeting praise from other users is really no different than making the statement yourself. Who are we trying to kid here? I don’t care what any social media guru tells you or your company. Be careful on that tactic because as the public become acclimatized to the vernacular of social media marketing so will they see through the thin veneer of that type prolific of re-tweeting. It’s lazy social media to flood your stream with.
The tweets felt somewhat desperate and like the usual person responsible for the Twitter account had suddenly been yanked from their duties and a desperate Sr. manager with orders in hand to “DO SOMETHING’ was now at the helm. The strategy veered off coarse and felt like there was a sticky accelerator on the RT button.
What should Toyota be doing? They should stay the course of the original strategy by helping the thousands of Toyota drivers out of this mess, through helpful links on how to get there cars fixed quickly, and demonstrating what the company is doing to rectify the matter and to restore confidence in the brand.
When someone is stuck at the bottom of a well that you pushed them down, get a rope and help them out. Don’t stand there and tell them that everyone else you pushed was able to avoide the well all together. The whole feed in recent days is nothing but bogus PR fluff. Between the massive recalls and the congressional hearings that begin today it would be better use of social media to take this head on as apposed to head in the sand as they are continuing to do today.
Some recent Canadian Facebook statistics
- 54% Female
- 46% Male
- Each has an average of 220 friends
- They make up 12% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 80% of all online 12 – 17 year olds†
- 77% use it more than email
- 44% use it more than cell phones
- 40% use it more than any other communication tool
- 57% add/use an application
- 41% become a fan of a page
- 62% upload/view/share a photo
- 39% RSVP to an event
- 47% share/post/watch a video
- 58% read their news feed
- 13% send a gift [that surprised me!]
- 48% Female
- 52% Male
- Each has an average of 247 friends
- They make up 29% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 93.8% of all online 18 – 24 year olds†
- 82% use it more than email
- 43% use it more than cell phones
- 45% use it more than any other communication tool
- 52% add/use an application
- 33% become a fan of a page
- 63% upload/view/share a photo
- 56% RSVP to an event
- 47%share/post/watch a video
- 67% read their news feed
- 20% send a gift
- 53% Female
- 47% Male
- Each has an average of 153 friends
- They make up 32% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 27% of all online 25 – 34 year olds†
- 79% use it more than email
- 49% use it more than cell phones
- 44% use it more than any other communication tool
- 50% add/use an application
- 31% become a fan of a page
- 59% upload/view/share a photo
- 34% RSVP to an event
- 44% share/post/watch a video
- 63% read their news feed
- 19% send a gift
- 56% Female
- 44% Male
- Each has an average of 85 friends
- 67% are parents
- They make up 16% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 78.2% of all online 35-44 year olds†
- 58% use it more than email
- 56% use it more than cell phones
- 47% use it more than any other communication tool
- 62% add/use an application
- 30% become a fan of a page
- 60% upload/view/share a photo
- 37% RSVP to an event
- 43% share/post/watch a video
- 62% read their news feed
- 26% send a gift
- 62% Female
- 38% Male
- Each has an average of 49 friends
- 75% are parents
- They make up 9% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 74.8% of all online 45-54 year olds†
- 65% use it more than email
- 60% use it more than cell phones
- 49% use it more than any other communication tool
- 55% add/use an application
- 28% become a fan of a page
- 64% upload/view/share a photo
- 29% RSVP to an event
- 50% share/post/watch a video
- 58% read their news feed
- 31% send a gift
- 59% Female
- 41% Male
- Each has an average of 51 friends
- 81% are parents
- They make up 6% of the Facebook population.
- They represent 61% of all online 55+ year olds†
- 60% use it more than email
- 69% use it more than cell phones
- 40% use it more than any other communication tool
- 51% add/use an application
- 25% become a fan of a page
- 51% upload/view/share a photo
- 30% RSVP to an event
- 46% share/post/watch a video
- 51% read their news feed
- 30% send a gift
Control your branded story headlines 140 char at a time
Want to get your story or product description out there in the lifestream of others in more controlled and branded way? I have discussed, in the past, the fact that referral traffic of social networking/media sites is rivaling that of Google and Yahoo search. It’s because of this your headline needs to be able to play nice in these applications if you don’t want the referrer to change your carefully crafted message. Just as you take the time to create key words for maximum search ability so should you take the time to ensure that your headline will fit in these often character limited sources of referral traffic.
More and more people are using javascript “Post this to blank social network ” browser buttons and site side “tweet this” functionality to quickly get the story they are interested in promoting into the user’s preferred social networking news feed or lifestream. The scripts are designed to grab the page or h1 story title automatically and use it as the base of the post or tweet. Many times when I post there is a bunch of unnecessary copy that needs to get weeded out in order to fit the space. I will use my personal blog as an example of what not to do “Jaypiddy’s Blog >> Blog Archive >> Winners for the first annual Canada Day photo contest. http://ow.ly/hN0N” See how the headline now becomes a bread-crumb trail? This is unnecessary because there is a shortened URL that the users will click and it takes up valuable space in the post. This is a built in trait of WordPress and I need to look at how to build a work-a-round. Now the user will be tempted, or forced to, edit the copy in order to make the post fit the stream. This means that there maybe the removal of your brand name, typo or personal spin put in the headlines place. Personal opinion granted can be great if the comment is flattering but if possible why not get the headline into the stream as you planned it. Another thing that looks odd when people post into lifestreams is when the post has capitalization throughout the entire headline. This make the headline feel unnatural or more obviously a branded message and will lose the sense that the headline originated with the original poster. Witting in a natural language with proper capitalization will always work better for posting into someone’s lifestream. A headline should quickly discribe your story, product or severice in less than 125 characters so that it can fit into a Twitter stream or Facebook News Feed. The reason for 125 characters maximum is that in Twitter there needs to be room for the story’s URL without the need for the headline to be truncated. This means the message flows into the stream as you intented it to.
The strategy may seem simple but with the lifestream and newsfeeds of real people being where your brand is being advertised so heavily, every step must be taken to reduce the accidental mucking of your hard earned and consistent brand message.
The Brand Race for Followers: It’s Not Just Numbers.
There is an arms race, of sorts, going on. Yes, another one and it’s really no surprise. The reality is that Twitter has dropped and ad agencies are guiding their clients down the same path as they did with Myspace, Facebook and pretty much any other popular social networking site that has emerged over the last five years.
This is what I am hearing and seeing in agency recommendations. Get as many followers as you can quickly then blather out a bunch crap and useless messaging at your followers! Yes another old school one way communication platform has hijacked Twitter. When will they learn? We are back to the eyeballs measurement again because that seems to be the only measurable metric that makes it into the quarterly campaign review decks. It’s not just traffic and eyeballs anymore. Comscore needs a new set of measurement tools. The measurement is brand interaction in the Twitterspace. The numbers matter if you are interacting well with many, then it counts.
Celebrity has really pushed Twitter to the tipping point in recent weeks and sure some of them are doing it well and others are really doing it bad! Agencies should not build out their Twitter plan and campaigns following the lead of people like P-Diddy and Ellen. Maybe Snoop Dogg because he gets it big time, but for the love of God not P-Diddy. *Disclosure* I am a west coast guy and prefer the LA rap anyway.
Twitter is 140 characters of content. That content has to be engaging, insightful, helpful and maybe even carry a narrative. The problem is that agencies are already having trouble boiling down narrative from a 30 second TV spot to a 9 second web banner. Now they have to get down to 140 characters and it freaks them out further to even contemplate that. Hell it freaks me out but that is the new canvas. Figure it out soon before the next and even more confusing communication channel emerges.
If you gather up a ton of Twitter followers and have nothing relevant to say. Your brand will become dull and tiresome quickly and the giant swath numbers your brand has worked hard to get will have zero value.
#skittles a Not so Colourful Social Media Campaign
I have been waiting to see who would be first to rock the social networking site Twitter, with an interesting and conversation worthy campaign. I can now announce that I am still waiting. This may not be a bad thing either. Skittles [Mars Corporation] have taken the conservative approach to the campaign and in doing so have not offended the throngs of Twitterers that are tweeting about the initiative.
Mars Corp. have basically converted skittle.com in to a search aggregate of Twitter that displays the real time conversation of key words on Twitter that relate to the Skittles brand. They then seeded the refresh and are watching what happens. There is a little overlay that links off to other areas of the site for further exploration. It’s a simple concept and in my opinion only relevant because they are first to market. This type of campaign is the ‘little toe in the water’ approach and is more exploratory than anything else. There is very little risk to this campaign and very little cost as well. So was it worth it? Sure if all you are trying to do it get some PR buzz then I can say it worked. There will be a little brand lift for a couple of weeks and maybe it’ll hit the bottom line with a few extra boxes sold in Q2. For companies only planning from quarter to quarter its just fine. It’s also just fine if you are trying to experiment with cost cutting marketing campaigns in this time of global economic bla bla.
Did it rock the social media world? Not from the posts and tweets that I have read. But that’s not a bad thing either. Skittles are now on the radar of the social media elite and I hope that there is a part two to this so that I can stop waiting for that big day.
I guess that it does further push the idea forward that Twitter is very close to reaching critical mass and that there are now marketing efforts a foot by the larger brands to see what the benefits to marketing in Twitter will yield.
Mark this day on your calendar as the day Twitter turned.
Crowdsourced Editorial Staff for Everyone.
Here is a thought. Traditional newspapers are failing, and magazines are having their own “issues” to say the least. Trying to be relevant media in today’s world can be a tough ride. One online blog service called The Printed Blog is even attempting to provide targeted content based on location and user choices, via geo-targeting and content voting on their website. The idea is that the company custom prints papers for up to 100 unique locations throughout the Chicago area. The content published material will feature international, national, and local news, as well as blog content that is voted on by the web user base. The thought is that the content will be extremely relevant to its readers since each edition is uniquely created by users/readers for a specific area of town. I think that this idea is interesting and may extend the life of traditional newsprint. It’s cool, but not game changing.
What if I told you that an even better system for creating custom content already existed and is being used by millions of people already? A system that has several thousand editors dedicated to providing you with a completely a unique reading experience for each and every user. This system provides highly relevant content either on demand or in a steady stream that you just skim through at any time. This system runs 24 hours a day and pays the editors nothing for their hard work.
Well that system is Twitter and it is already replacing traditional newspapers, magazines, tv, radio and web portals like Yahoo and Google IG as the first place to find content.
Let me break it down:
- I create a Twitter account.
- Then I start to search for, and follow people with similar interests either personally or professionally. or if you are like me, both.
- Download an application like TweetDeck that allows you to group the people you are following into categories. Not unlike sections of an newspaper; News, Sports and Entertainment, Technology etc.
- In each of these sections I follow people that are either experts in their field or have a passion for athe topic of interest. Either way the posts will be relevant.
- Now what do all of these people that you are following Twitter do all day? Well they post stuff. They post links to articles in newspapers and blogs, videos, music [http://blip.fm/all] and much, much more.
- Breaking stories are now hitting Twitter first and I no longer have to wait for the old world media publishing systems latency to get the stories quickly.
- The topics that are trending and are important globally can be easily viewed right in the TweetDeck application trending cloud tag.
- Now because I have selected people based on similar interests and passions, the content that is posted is for the most part very relevant pertinent to me. The Twitter base becomes my very own editorial staff picking only the best of the best and then posting it to your Twitterstream.
- Now add the NYTimes, CBC, Fox News, NPR and CNN into your Twittersteam and you have it all the topics and news covered.
It really is that easy and I must confess that Twitter is fast becoming my main source of all things to read, watch and listen to online. The other great thing about personalized content on Twitter is that if you throw out a question at your followers [editors] about a topic, you will always receive links and information that has been qualified by the user posting it. Let’s say I am looking for an article on viral marketing best practices. Twitter works like a personal research assistant and within five minutes, give or take, there will be four or five messages for me with recommended articles to read. Now if I Google it I have to qualify each result myself. In Twitter, the users that post answers to my questions share the same interests and may already have looked for a similar article. There are users (friends) who already know me and what I am all about, and therefore the four posts are usually much more relevant to my query.
Now, I am not claiming that newspapers and magazines will vanish in the next couple of years but rather how you find relevant content that interests you might shift. You will always need to have the source articles for the Twitteratti to refer to in the tweets. In fact upon further review this might also affect how some folks use Google. Some may use Google for broad and generic searches and use Twitter for highly qualified and refined ones. What are your thoughts on the idea?
I will ask that anyone that chooses to say that Twitter does not work like this will need to qualify the comment by proving that they have at least 100 followers and are following the same on Twitter. If you can’t then the comment is purely speculation and not from first hand experience. I ask this because that is the threshold of usage where this phenomenon takes effect.
Thanks
Tiny URL services are killing your brand in Twitter
I was sent a link today for a product that I thought at first glance was a joke. I was fooled last week by an elaborate hoax site on a fictional smart phone that was actually a tourism ad for Nova Scotia. So forgive me if I was a bit reluctant to bite on this one. The product is called Go-Girl and after careful examination of the site I determined that it was a real product and that I would put it out there in the twittersphere and ask the question: “Ok so I am not sure whr 2 go w/ this so I am just putting it out there. I had no idea there was a demand 4 this? http://www.go-girl.com/“. Now normally I would have either pasted the URL in the TweetDeck URL shortening field or posted the site via The Hootsuite javascript button in my Safari Bar and it would have looked like http://tinyurl.com/btp55y. This is pretty much the norm for a lot of links in tweets so that users can add as much context to the posted link as possible [remember 140 characters maximum]. Now because I did not do that, the URL went into the Twitter stream as is and un-compromised. Sending in the raw URL meant that if the fine marketing folks at Go Girl had a Twitter alert service activated and actively searching for the branded url they would be notified of the comment. They then could asses the comment and take action. Well the do and did just that. Within minutes I received the following: “Go_Girls: @jaypiddy you better believe it! The women have spoken! Over 40,000 visitors to our website yesterday! It almost crashed! xx” So they were able to talk about the brand and maybe change my mind on it.
I call this Twitter Search Engine Optimization and it will become more and more important as the Twitter base grows in the coming years. In fact the real time search functionality twitter is so powerful that I suspect that Google is trying to figure out how much the acquisition is going to cost and whether or not they have more in their war chest of cash to fend off Microsoft in the in the deal. But the Twitter Search Engine Optimization of your branded URL only works if clean un-shortened URL or your brand is mentioned by name in the tweet stream. Quite often tweets only include the URL and not your brand name in order to save the precious characters for the tweet comment.
Now if I had posted this from a tiny URL service like this “Ok so I am not sure whr 2 go w/ this so I am just putting it out there. I had no idea there was a demand 4 this? http://tinyurl.com/btp55y” there would have been no response from the company. My post and the subsequent conversations with others would have gone completely un-noticed by the Go Girl team that was monitoring the conversation on Twitter.
Companies and brands will need to figure out ways that their brands and branded URLs get into the Twitterstream the same way that they are concerned about key words getting picked up by search engine crawlers if they are to take full advantage of Twitters search capabilities.
I have one idea but would like to open the floor on the topic and see how others feel about the situation. The idea that I have for companies is to place their own “Tweet this” buttons in stories and articles, like Digg and Share this etc, that would invoke their own branded tiny URL service so that the Twitterstream would receive a shortened yet TSEO link back to the original content. Sony would have http://sony.com/A34f and I would have http://powershiftermedia.com/34E etc. I am not totally sure how it would work but I know that through javascript and an API key there would be a simple way to create this for your site.
The floor is now open. What are your thoughts on this and who will step up and create this application if it’s needed. If ya make a million or two off of the deal then you can buy me lunch.
Battle of the Brands in the Twittersphere
What happens when someone asks a question about your brand the social media space? Well, that’s a riddle that many brand, marketing and pr folks have been trying to answer for a few years now. If the question raised about your brand is by someone with a substantial amount of online clout, or has a large influence of social media sites like digg and buzzup. The conversation about your brand can lead to bigger things than you probably wouldn’t expect. Measuring the impact of a social networking conversation has on your brand is not easy and there are only a few high powered, and expensive, search tools that can do with any sort of accuracy.
Blog conversations happen over hours and days and spider off via comments and trackbacks etc. You track some them by using Google alerts and then dispatch either legal, PR or the customer service department depending on the level or kind of attention that the situation requires. For the most part brand managers are able to keep a lid on most bad conversations or attempt to leverage the good ones going out there in the socialsphere, but it is a pretty unsophisticated affair.
Now let’s add Twitter to the mix. Twitter takes the conversations that are happening in the social networking world and accelerates them to a breakneck pace. Those very same conversations are now happening at real time by a powerful network of influential bloggers and social media connectors. They can propel the brand conversation into the stratosphere within minutes. I bet this scares the pants off of most traditional brand, marketing and PR folks. In the old days [oh say last year] you could find the social networking conversation that was happening about your brand, set up a meeting with internal and external personnel needed to either quell the negative impact on your brand or fan the flames of the positive ones. Then walk out of the meeting and execute the plan over the period of a week or two.
Well those days are going quickly! Today a conversation about your brand can go from zero to .5 million in less than two minutes and last a total of 6 hours then disappear as quickly as it arrived. That is pretty hard to get a handle on for most.
Here are a couple of examples:
Let’s take the story of Chris Brogan’s question the other week. Chris posed this question: “What’s the difference, to you, between BMW and Audi? Which do you feel more strongly about and why?” For those of you who don’t know who Chris Brogan is let me give you a little background. Chris is one of the top social media experts and has a huge following of loyal readers, fans and clients like Panasonic. His current RSS feed shows 17,315 subscribers, 5000 Facebook fans [5000 is the most tht FB will let you have on any one account] and 39,144 followers on twitter. Now I am sure that there is some overlap in the numbers but you get the idea. Not only is are the number of folowers that Chris great in numbers but they are also powerful in their own connections and followers. The ripple effect is huge here. So back to the case at hand. One question from someone like Chris and you can hear the collective inhale of people that are going to weigh in on the subject.
So for around 4 or five hours on twitter there were no less than 24 thousand conversations in 140 characters or less that where all discussing the pros and cons of BMW and Audi. I am sure that both of the respective car companies are aware that this event happened by now. I have a feeling that stats in this post made it into a few Powerpoint decks. So what does that mean to the brand and what can be done with this kind of data. Well there are a few things that if I was BMW or Audi that I would have looked in the data.
- Problems with your product.
- Problems with your competitors product.
- Likes and dislikes about your the product.
- Likes and dislikes about your competitors product.
- Possible flaws or manufacturing defects that may not be big enough to report but enough to tell someone about.
- Links that people post about your product.
These are just a few of the research strategies that I would have recommended if I had be consulting to either one of these brands during this battle of the brands. Now what to do with this kind of conversational blitzkrieg? If you are ready for such an event then like any attack good or bad you roll out your own pr/marketing plan and take advantage of the situation. The first line of defence would be the corporate website. The conversation is happening online and the Google searches are probably linking to your corporate home page right? Well if the comments are positive and are specific to a curtain make of model of your cars then make sure that the web team has a prominent link or CTA to that make or model that users can easily find. It could mean more sales if you act quickly enough. If there is a negative conversation happening then hold back for a bit and see where it is going. Can your loyalty and retention team “jump” into the conversation to address concerns? The could if they were ready and actively participating on sites like Twitter. There are actually a multitude of other methods that BMW or Audi could have done to take advantage if the situation had they been ready for it. Soon this type of brand blitz will not be a once in a lifetime event. I predict these brand spikes will happen on a weekly basis and that those who learn how to harness them will come out ahead.
Here is another recent example. When Steve Jobs announces the other week that he was stepping down temporarily from Apple due to health issues, the social networks erupted with the news. In fact I had found out about the news many times over on Twitter before I heard about it from traditional news outlets. It was 24 minutes before the NY Times finally broke the story. I know that there needs to be fact checking and such but I am sure that fact could have been checked and pushed live to the NY Times home page sooner than 24 minutes. The news of Steve Jobs went to almost have a million posts in a just a few seconds. Now what if the PR and Corp Com team had not been responsible for the news and it was actually was untrue. Not responding fast enough would mean your stocks are going to take an unnecessary hit.
So the question is are your brands duking it out in the hyper-paced world of microblogging? If so what are you doing about it. From my experience with working with large brands, I suspect not much. There’s probably not enough resources on the marketing team to handle it and the agency with the account is just not equipped the know what to do. This maybe a small concern for a lot of people today today but not for long. It is my strong recommendation that marcom teams around the globe start to focus on issue like this. Companies like JetBlue and Whole Foods understand the importance and have huge beach heads in this space already. What are you doing?
****UPDATE**** Here is an update on the metrics of the converation. Mike Troiano at the Scalable Intimacy blog has further anylized the impact of such conversations with a simple yet clear estimation of the impressions made:
24,000 conversations, folks. If on average the participants in those conversations had 100 followers (Chris alone has 40 thousand followers), that’s 2.4 million impressions. There’s no doubt in my mind these impressions are higher impact than passive, anonymous media equivalents… but you know what? Screw impressions. They’re the artifice of dying media. What’s the impact of a couple million affluent, college-educated, major metro-concentrated thought leaders being exposed to each other’s positive and negative views of a brand in a 24 hour period? I’d say pretty high. Maybe I’m just new fashioned.
As you can see from the above analyisis and comments below there are more than a few of us looking at this in 2009.