We’re With Stupid…

We Can See Right Through You

In social media (and pretty much any other type of business), transparency is pretty important. If you are a business that is trying to increase buzz or awareness of your products or services, being sneaky and shady definitely doesn’t help create a pretty picture. If you are open, it allows your consumers to give real feedback and engage in real conversations.

Take Tiger Woods as a real-life example. Yes, yes, we know that everyone everywhere is talking about him (hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em). When the scandal broke, Tiger remained hidden and unavailable. Had he responded immediately, even with a vague statement, media speculation would have not been as damaging or rampant. We do have to commend him though, because eventually he did release a statement. Most other celebs choose to just stay cooped up, waiting for the storm to blow over. Or they just go on an interview without ever actually talking to their fans. We may not respect Tiger Woods’ decisions, but at least he stepped up to the transparency plate.

On another, more social media oriented note, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s creator and golden boy) also recently practiced transparency. His recent letter, which first appeared on your Facebook home page and now on the Facebook blog, addressed changes that were being made on Facebook that would directly affect the users. He tells you exactly what you need to know: how these changes will be made, when, how, and why. And even though Facebook received some backlash for their changes in privacy settings, we commend Mr. Zuckerberg on his transparent letter in attempt to let everyone know what was up.

That being said, transparency helps. It just does. Having conversations on the web and engaging consumers is about having real, open discussions with people. You can’t have a meaningful conversation if you aren’t acting like a real person. Even more so, timing in your transparency goes a long way. The sooner, the better.

So take the time to make sure that you are being transparent. Reflect on the conversations you are having and make it a priority to be clear and fully open about who you are and what your purpose is.

Public Outbursts Make for An Interesting Week in WOM

I never pay too much attention to tennis, and I knew if anything noteworthy happened at the Video Music Awards, I’d hear about it for weeks following, so I missed both Serena William’s and Kanye West’s outbursts on National television. Thanks to my Twitter-addiction though, I knew about these celeb slip-ups within minutes of them happening.

At the US Open Tennis Semi-Finals, Serena Williams went a little overboard when confronting a line judge. Okay, she went WAY overboard, apparently saying “I swear to God I’m [expletive] going to take this [expletive] ball and shove it down your [expletive] throat, you hear that? I swear to God,” to the line judge.

Slapped with a $10,000 fine and tarnished reputation, the tennis star apologized today on her Web site.  Unfortunately for Serena, an apology  won’t undo the 869,160 views on YouTube and the influx of Twitter conversation about the attack.

Yesterday, one day after Serena’s tantrum, Kanye West made an even bigger scene at MTV’s Video Music Awards Show. Ripping the microphone from the hands of Taylor Swift, who just won an award for Best Female Video, Kanye told the crowd “I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” While there’s speculation that Kanye and MTV did this a publicity stunt, Beyoncé’s shocked reaction and Swift’s hurt face show that maybe, just maybe this is real, unscripted television.

I haven’t counted the publicity-stunt idea out. After all, year-after-year the VMAs have given us something that makes for good conversation and goes viral. Kanye’s outburst got people talking since it happened, and actually generated nearly 300,000 Kanye tweets in the hour following.  If negative attention is what he wanted, Kanye sure is getting it. On Twitter I’ve seen a plethora of tweets having expressing hatred toward Kanye and/or showing support of Taylor Swift.

There must be something in the air this month that makes for some high-profile blow-ups. Or maybe Rep. Joe Wilson payed Kanye and Serena to take the spotlight away from his “You Lie” outburst in the middle of President Obama’s address to Congress last week.

Not ALL of America’s celebrities, politicians and athletes are acting out-of-line this month and generating unpleasant word-of-mouth for themselves. Beyoncé did the right thing and gave Swift the attention she deserved while giving her time on stage to make an acceptance speech.

And after his through-the-legs hit that took him to the US Open finals, Roger Federer doesn’t need to make an outburst to generate some word-of-mouth for himself.

The lesson we can learn from Serena, Kanye, Rep. Wilson, Beyoncé and Federer is: Whether you’re doing something good or doing something bad, social media doesn’t leave much room for hiding. The same goes for business, whether it’s a good deed, great tennis move or drunken outburst,  it only takes one move to make you the next trending topic.

United Airlines- Too Little, Too Late

Social media empowers companies to connect with customers. It enables companies to listen, respond and promote itself, among a plethora of other things. Social media, however, also empowers customers to get back at brands, as we’ve seen this summer in the United Airline’s “United Breaks Guitars,” debacle.

Last year, when United Airlines’ workers broke musician Dave Carroll’s $3,500 Taylor Guitar, the airline refused to compensate him for the damage. The repairs cost $1,200. In a final offer, Carroll even said he’d accept $1,200 worth of flight vouchers, in compensation for repairs. United Airlines still rejected the offer.

Fed up with nine months of battling with airline representatives, Carroll realized he was not going to win the battle. During his last call to United Airlines, he made a promise to do something that would cost more than the guitar’s worth to company’s reputation.  In fact, some claim that what he did could have cost United Airlines $180 million. His weapon for bringing down United? YouTube.

Not only did the musician use YouTube to trash United’s reputation once, he did it twice. And he plans to do it a third time. His first video now has more than five million views, and the second, released two days ago, has surpassed the 100,o00 mark.

Of course, United contacted him immediately after the first video, offering compensation for the broken guitar. But it was just too late.

There are two important lessons to learn from this.

First, web-savvy customers have the power to use social media just as effectively as big brands do. Two videos can be detrimental to your online reputation. And if the customer causes a big enough stir, the story will get some play time outside of the social media realm.  When Google-searching “United Airlines,” on the first page you’ll see Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” videos. On the first page of the “Southwest Airlines” Google search, you’ll find Southwest’s blog “Nuts About Southwest,” which is  highly interactive and an example of outstanding social media execution. Lesson learned? A customer who knows a thing or two about social media can trump your company’s social media efforts.

Second, customer service is still king. With a pretty impressive following of 31,000 on Twitter, and a meager Facebook presence, United Airlines is doing OK on social media. Social media provides a platform for a brand to listen to and interact with customers online. Listening online, though, is not enough. Social media isn’t the end-all be-all. Brands  need to focus on a comprehensive strategy. One that includes social media AND outstanding face-to-face customer service. United Airlines didn’t do that, and now it is the one paying the price.

There’s No Hiding in Social Media

Whether it’s an embarrassing video of one of the NBA’s leading players getting dunked on, or the trailer for a highly anticipated movie, some leaked videos should remain…leaked.

When brands try and control social media (which goes against the whole idea), they can end up hurting their brand image, and the two most recent social media blunders were no exception. For the record, this does not mean companies should let libel/slander/copyright issues abound on the web.  But recently, there were two instances where videos surfaced that Nike and Disney didn’t want anyone to see, and their curmudgeon-like responses sparked some intense brand dissonance (we’re writing an entire blog entry on it, for goodness sakes!).

When cameras caught  Xavier’s Jordan Crawford dunk on LeBron James a few weeks ago, Nike made sure to confiscate the footage (as rumored, per request of LeBron). As LeBron is a huge endorser for Nike, obviously they didn’t want the Nike image to be damaged by the superstar’s slip-up.  Of course, two phones with the capability to take video caught the dunk, and the video got out anyway.

Sweeping an error under the rug does more harm than good in the age of social media. Instead of a quick laugh about how the LeBron got dunked on by a college player, the talk was all about how Nike (or LeBron) tried to hide the video. Now both reputations are tarnished. Honestly, most people (myself included) don’t even think the dunk is that big of a deal. I only saw the video because of Nike’s response; I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Nike wasn’t the only one to generate negative buzz by trying to hide video content. When video leaked from Alice in Wonderland, Disney forced YouTube to take the videos down. The videos were already creating an immense amount of viral buzz, and could have really pumped up promotions for the movie. As the end-user, I wouldn’t have heard of this debacle if Disney hadn’t chosen to play big brother. It just made it harder for me to find the trailer online (booooo).

In social media, the best thing you can do is roll with the punches, take whatever you’ve had thrown at you and work with it. The worst thing you can do is try to eliminate a problem by pretending it didn’t happen. The word will always get out, because it already did!

Because Disney pulled the trailer, it missed out on days of momentum building for its new movie. Basically, Disney sabotaged it’s own WOM campaign. Nike may not have gotten a lot of promotional use out of the LeBron video, but by the time Ben Roethlisberger was making headlines, every one would have forgot about LeBron’s debacle anyway.

Google Trends, or Cop Without a Badge, or Xbox Live

With a title like that, you might wonder what the heck this blog entry is all about. But if you have ever used Google Trends, you know that I’m simply focusing my blog entry on timely topics to increase my search engine optimization.

Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see the current top 100 searches in Google. This is useful for blog writers, news columnists, and sometimes even stock traders, because it is shows what people want to know.

Now there are certain ways to optimize your post without breaking an unspoken code of ethics in the blogosphere. For example, if I were to write a post about our Twitter expertise, it wouldn’t make sense (or help our audience) if I peppered the entry with “danielle staub” or “xbox live” or “cop without a badge.” If I’m writing about Twitter, I should just be writing about Twitter (and maybe including Twitter trending topics like “Sotomayer”). Luckily, since this post is about search engine optimization, tagging this post with the aforementioned phrases is completely ethical

Alternatively, if I were to write a blog post about the Real Housewives of New Jersey and comment on the word-of-mouth that spawns from each episode and probably contributes to the success of the show, well, that’s just good blog writing! The key is to give your audience what they want – information on the topics that they are searching. Usually you can do this easily just by doing some quick research first.

So my tip is this: when applicable, keep your posts in line with what people are searching for. Want some tips? I’m happy to help. If they don’t like it, they can always click the “back” button. But don’t try and artificially optimize your post if it doesn’t have anything to do with the keywords you are using. After all, the worst thing you can do is piss off the people on the internet.

Twitter Gets Spammed

As Twitter rapidly grows, people are making more concentrated efforts to take advantage of its traffic. In some cases, this means spamming it by creating a “trending topic.” According to Mashable, these trending topics are fairly easy to create, and once you start a trend it shows up on every Twitter homepage.

A recent trend today is “#twitterpornnames” or “Twitter Porn Names” which is a silly game where you find out what your porn star name is by combining your mothers maiden name with the street you grew up on. According to PC World, this might actually have been an attempt to gain sensitive information from Twitter users. After all, what are the questions you usually need to answer when you forget your password?

A further problem is that instead of creating some trending topics, spammers can also just include the trending topics in their tweets, and it’s like free advertising. Anybody that clicks the trending topic will see their marketing message.

If Twitter can help filter out the spam, then legitamite topics will more easily rise in popularity, making it a more honest and representative tool. This is our shout out to twitter, hoping that the problem gets fixed. (ps – also a large thanks to Mashable for keeping us posted about these updates)

Transparency is King

Belkin’s recent screw up reminds us that transaprency is king. What separates word of mouth most from advertising and PR is that WOM is natural, organic, unpaid, and comes from the consumer.

Not only does unethical WOM hurt the credibility of the industry, but get ready to be exposed. One of the best things about word of mouth is that anything buzzworthy can spread like wildfire.

Once The Daily Background broke the Belkin story, the post was submitted to Digg, where it eventually made the front page and was read by tens of thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands of users.

Belkin has since issued this statement apologizing for the event, but is it enough? Probably not. Here’s just one more reason to keep things on the up and up. If people like you’re brand they’ll talk about it. Consider giving them the tools to do so, rather than hiring people to fake it.