Walter Adamson

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A selection of my comments in the social media.
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| 09.12.27 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• This is great 2000s Decade Recap - Business and Technology, from Mojo, and even better if it had a matched music track! The decade in 3 minutes 22 seconds and really worth the time to watch.
• If you are a Linkedin member - key social media trends 2010 - useful comments.
• You've heard of a stream of consciousness, how about a Twitter-style stream of purchases.
• The sad story of the Borders "corporate blog" - PR disaster or a story of staff dedication?
• You no doubt saw this monster news - catch up with the latest - For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not have any ads in the Super Bowl - instead the company will be spending $20m in social media.
• Rohn Jay Miller abandons a top agency job as no future in a "marketing" strategy - good read - I’ve Got a New Job–and So Do You.
• If you are interested in Smartphone penetration and competition this is a good article, even if US-centric - Top 10 Smartphone Advances Of 2009.
• Celebrating 30 Years of Mobile Phones, Thank You NTT of Japan - not Marty Cooper - this is a great post by the inimitable Tomi Ahonen.
• Did you know that Indian Cabinet Ministers, and Bahraini, are Twitterers? That's the magic of the internet.
• A tip from Jasper Martens: At Simply Business the amount of followers for our Twitter account grew fast when we stopped talking about our insurance products and started talking about small business tips to help our customers.

http://xeesm.com/walter

Catalog of 2010 trends in social media

You've no doubt caught up on many posts on trends, including one of the best by my friend Axel Schultze of the Social Media Academy.

Here are a few more, with short annotations:

• From the Social Media Club, on social media education and the option of open coursework;
• Sports and Social Media Predictions in 2010, an eBook, with 16 contributors, on Scribd - "email will decline as a primary means of communicating with fans";
• 25 Reasons Your Social Graph Will Matter [more in 2010], "78% of consumers trust peer recommendations – only 14% trust advertisements";
• 10 Ways Social Media will Change in 2010, via Don Peppers - "women will rule Social Media";
• Five Social Media Predictions for 2010 from Socialized - "Microsoft's Bing was the surprise hit of 2009, and has started to erode Google's share of search. Bing has some social features, but expect some big news in social search in 2010... Search won't be a separate function. Instead of going to a site like google.com or bing.com, users will receive meaningful, personally relevant search results within the context of whatever they are currently doing."
• Social Media Strategy: 6 Areas of Focus for 2010 from Sales Blogcast - this is actually the owner reporting his own plan for social media in 2010 and asking his readers for help - not sure I agree with all of his goals but his method is great!;
• What will Community Managers be doing in 2010: Community Management predictions, from FreshNetworks - "the community management processes will need to involve more people in the company than just the community manager";

and finally - Challenges Coming for Independent Restaurants in 2010, just for change of topic! - You must become mentally in tune with your guests. Who are they? Where are they? What do they want? How have they changed? What drives them to your door or your competitor’s door? Will they increase their restaurant visits if you …..? You finish the line!

http://xeesm.com/walter

The Reverse Elevator Pitch

I liked this from Maria Umbach, VP and Chief Marketing Officer of individual products for Guardian Life Insurance Company of America:

It's not what you say inside the elevator [to somebody about what you do] but it's about what they say about you after you have left the elevator - she calls this the Reverse Elevator Pitch.

I might also call it the "Residual Elevator Pitch" since it is was is left after you leave the conversation - but reverse is simpler. Maria talks about innovating around language as an aspect of engaging customers. An important topic.

Also important to website design and digital engagement, for Software as a Service companies for example. How to use the right language for the right customers at the right time for the right purpose of their engagement.

http://xeesm.com/walter

| 09.12.20 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• What To Watch In 2010: Social TV - TV + Facebook - this will be a big shift.
• Is the iPhone becoming the single biggest influencer in how media will be consumed and generated @johnee99 
• Only 5 of 45 major brands with communities provide a meaningful experience to their members.
• Did you catch up with Google Goggle - search the web by camera - more start-ups hit the dust, in droves over this little Google Labs build-out.
• 10+1 Social Media Trends for 2010 - the definitive list from Axel Schultze - a must read!
• Rohn Jay Miller abandons a top agency job as no future in a "marketing" strategy - good read - I’ve Got a New Job–and So Do You.
• McDonald's puts up their "social media strategy" on Slideshare and then removes it? I had made a comment on Slideshare but comments have also disappeared. Google this.
• Did you know that Google's Feedburner can know Socialize your feeds - Socializing your feed with Twitter.
• Social media disasters - we've had a few - this is a BIG FAIL from Toyota in Australia.
• How a small cafe in Houston, a tea house, successfully entered into the world of social media marketing - "follower count was never the strategy when we entered the Twitter world. I did have a strategy in mind when I first participated, and it was been refined through customer feedback and a few lessons learned. I think our experiences ... can be organized as the 3 Ps of Social Media Marketing: Passion Personality Place."

http://xeesm.com/walter

How Telstra trained 12,000 staff 6-page social media policy

Telstra, Australia's largest telco and the legacy of the old monopoly carrier, has had a few rough patches lately, both in the social media and in the rising level of complaints, which they have acknowledged.

There is kind of a pent-up tide of anger about Telstra's service, which, perhaps counter-intuitively, erupts in a tirade of negative comments and abuse whenever Telstra announces any intentions to improve the service.

See my post "Will customers help Telstra - Australia's most hated company".

The same again, in response to their just-announced public airing of their social media training guide, where a bunch of people have responded by saying "hey get your service right" and then we'll take you seriously.

However, I think that we should view this social media move on it's own merits. (I'm a customer by the way, and not necessarily a willing one.)

After all social media is only part of the brand experience and getting all the parts in unison is not going to happen overnight. 

I think this particular initiative does show considerable, ah initiative, and far-sightedness for such a corporation. After all this is no simple thing to navigate the politics of this in a 40,000+ employee organisation. In the past it would probably have been issued as a 100 page legalistic document.

The fact that (it's reported that) they've trained 12,000 people to these principles is a fabulous example to the corporate world. 

Another great thing about Telstra publishing this guide is that it gives a big kick up the backside to all those consultants writing about how companies should be so careful about letting their employees get into social media and all the hidden dangers. I get tired of reading those hacked out posts which are really just touting for work. I mean get a life.

If Telstra can do it, and sure it did take them a lot of hard thinking, then any company can do it and they can instantly piggy-back on this published training. They don't need a consultant for this bit (hey, I'm a consultant!).

Telstra has helped the whole social media business adoption move along by being as bold as it has in putting this out in the public form.

As for the content, it's good. I think that a revision should include more relevant stats than 2008, and the idea of not using any Telstra trademarks in any postings by employees on their personal sites seems impractical, but overall it's a very fit for purpose training piece.

It gives a big picture view and short helpful guidance about defamation, which in the past would have bored the life out of employees but here it is in perfect context, short and relevant. It's important to know about Facebook slanders.

AND, you get download the whole 6 page Social Media Policy by clicking on the link on page 31 of the training guide.

Click for a copy PDF 60Kb - Download

6 pages? Seems too long?

Well, 2 pages are introduction, 2 pages are for those employees endorsed as people authorised to communicate on Telstra's behalf, and 2 pages are for all other employees. It's actually very practical, pragmatic, and sensible.

Dare I say, well done Telstra!

http://xeesm.com/walter

Only 9% of Inc 500 do not use social media in 2009

Reporting on other surveys of social media trends I said that "The only thing certain about surveys of the business use of social media is that the trend is UP."

This was confirmed again by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth which has followed up on its 2007 and 2008 studies of social media usage by the Inc. 500 with the release of its 2009 survey.

Adoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing themselves as “very familiar” with social networking.

Companies were also monitoring mentions of their brands in the social media space, at 68% this year. That figure was climbing steadily, up from 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007, reports eMarketer.com.

According to the Center the INC 500 are outpacing the Fortune 500 in the use of social media, a trend continuing into 2009.

I wonder if this is really correct in 2009?

According to the Center - in 2007, the Center’s first study of this group and their use of social media was released and revealed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional and larger Fortune 500 companies in their use of social media. For example, at that time, some research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in 2008 with 16% of the Fortune 500 blogging vs. 39% of the Inc. 500. And it appears the Inc. 500’s lead in blogging will continue in 2009 with the Inc. 500 now blogging at a rate of 45%.

For example the Social Media Academy, in a recent survey, found that 70% of the Fortune 500 are engaged in social media. The difference between this 70% and the CMR's 80% may only be statistical or errors from the survey questions. For example in the CMR survey only 148 out of the Inc 500 responded.

Other findings

The CMR study had a few other interesting findings which were not generally reported on or picked up from the press release.

1.  For the first time in this series of studies on the Inc. 500, executives were asked if their company uses social media tools to communicate with other companies like vendors, suppliers or partners. Again, social networking is the most widely used with 34% reporting they employed these tools. Twitter is being used by 26% of the Inc. 500 for this purpose. It is interesting to note that 1 in 4 Inc. 500 companies consider Twitter an appropriate vehicle for B2B communications.

2.  Another question added to the 2009 study focused on the company’s use of search engine and/or social networking tools to recruit and evaluate potential employees. With the ease of access to information on people, it is no surprise that over half of the Inc. 500 are using search engines to assist in the recruitment and evaluation process. Google was the most popular search engine cited by executives. Forty-eight percent indicated using social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

3.  When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It remains virtually the same in 2009. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of their strategic plans.

http://xeesm.com/walter 

| 09.12.13 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• More 2010 social media predictions, but this time from Ron Callari - worth reading.
• Mashing up business and social applications: 2010's New Software Star:"Socialytic" Business Apps - CIO magazine.
• 3 Ways Bing Is Ahead Of Google by Alex Hawkinson.
• Facebook statistics - Farmville has more users than Twitter!.
• See how you can take 50 year old content and refresh and enhance it with new material in a digital package  - 8 Reasons Hitchcock’s North By Northwest Still Rules.
• Did you know Listorious is a Twitter List directory - the "A-List Lists" and a good search function.
• If you are especially interested in social media in the financial industry here is the definitive list, December update 36 Social Media Initiatives Launched by Financial Institutions in December.
• DIGG feed for "social media case study" add to your reader: http://digg.com/rss_search?s=social+media+case+study
• How to search the Internet more efficiently, light but helpful overview from Michal Wurm.
• Social media has influenced 28% of U.S. holiday shoppers in gift-buying decisions this year, ComScore survey.

http://xeesm.com/walter

Update #1 My Telstra Experience FAIL

I'm following Telstra's My Telstra Experience initiative. I didn't plan to update every day, but perhaps I will have to as it has a certain momentum in the social media world even though it is a closed survey panel. 

Unfortunately the first big media exposure was a complete FAIL.

The whole mess is written up here "Hold the phoney: Telstra’s 'customer' unmasked", and you just have to ask what WERE they thinking???

Excuse my disparaging language but how did they think that bringing in a PR hack to a nightly current affairs show posing as a former disgruntled customer was ever going to work in this day and age?

You can see from the comments on the article exposing this that it has really just pulled the rug out of Telstra's efforts to convince people that My Telstra Experience was anything but yet another PR stunt. That bit is not being derogatory that's just stating the facts as revealed in the comments - universally negative.

If we think about some of the tenets of not just social media, but also customer relations, we think of openness, transparency, disclosure, and perhaps even honesty!

In posing their PR hack as a customer Telstra failed transparency, failed openness, failed to be honest, and of course failed in disclosure. I mean this was utter contempt for the public and and a complete and utter FAIL. It's hard to go on because it is just such a complete exposure of the potentially PR-based thinking behind the whole My Telstra Experience.

Time will tell whether this IS a fatal blow, right out of the gate. The campaign was less than one week old!

 As for my own "Telstra Experience", since I am interested and also a mobile phone and a landline customer, I went to sign up. My experience hit a brick wall at the first step as my browser choked on the very first page. I have all the latest Flash etc, just updated them the other day, but it couldn't break the registration system. That's just a small UI hiccup as thousands have registered, but it stopped me.

In related news Perth Now published a "Memo to David Thodey: here's what your Telstra customers want fixed" after asking for comments from its readers.

...since Telstra put out the call yesterday for customers to tell the struggling telco how to fix its woeful customer service, our readers have scrambled to join the queue. Perthnow.com.au readers ripped into Australia's big telco, slamming it for a complete lack of care, having staff who can't speak English, and of being "too far gone to fix". Instead of getting answers, Telstra got brickbats. Only a few readers gave helpful advice. Rex wasn't one of them, emailing us with: "Their prices - even with their new ones - are between 'not competitive' to 'an outright ripoff'," he said. Telstra this week admitted it didn't know how to fix its woeful service standards, so it called on customers to tell it how to do it.

There's no shortage of people with a willingness to comment. The question remains open - how willing Telstra to listen and to act and to be seen to be acting in good faith?

Will customers help Telstra - Australia's most hated company

According to News Telstra is "Australia's most hated company in terms of complaints". The news is that Telstra has decided, shortly after firing its Chief Marketing Officer Holly Kramer, that it would like to hear from customers about how to "combat soaring dissatisfaction levels".

"We know we've disappointed customers," Telstra's executive director for market-based management Gloria Farler said. "It's not entirely altruistic. If we have low customer satisfaction that means low customer loyalty and if your customers are not loyal they are very likely to (leave), which leads to a high cost of marketing and that leads to disappointing profits," she added.

(Aside - it is amazing how huge those profits actually are in any telco's language given the high levels of dissatisfaction - leading to a kind of hostage syndrome among customers.)

So this is an admirable, if not altruistic, initiative.

Will or can it succeed?

On face value it would seem like a great idea, and with a sure chance of success given the pent up rage against Telstra from its customers.

But before proceeding into the unknown let's start with the known and proclaim that this will indeed be a certain success as measured by Telstra.

How do I know this? Because David Thodey, Telstra's CEO, has reportedly "offered $40 million in bonuses to staff if there are even slight improvements in satisfaction levels". Therefore, as in every large business, these numbers will be met and bonuses will be paid - there is zero doubt!!

Now, let's venture into the unknown to ponder will it actually work in reality.

There is no doubt that Telstra's customers want to give their feedback. After all the very News article itself had generated over 421 comments in 12 hours since 6am the day it was published, that's about 35 per hour or more than 1 comment every 2 minutes.

That's a remarkable number in itself, 100X the normal response.

The key to success is in the planning, the essence of having an integrated social media strategy as opposed to a campaign. So let's list some challenges, and then we can track how things progress at Telstra against these challenges:

1. Since they have 104,000 complaints on the table with names addresses and telephone numbers from the last 12 months, and now another 421 comments which are 98% hostile, is Telstra firstly going to track all those down in the real world and the social media world? Or does Telstra just let lie comments such as the following and start a brand new day with the community portal?

• I just had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fools Day. :-);
• Like there's ANY chance whatsoever they will actually listen to complaints and/or suggestions and fix anything. They never have before and there's a less than zero chance they will now. This is just a PR exercise to get some exposure;
• What a joke, you dont know what to do to improve customer service, i thought you had 104,000 customers last year who could give you an idea, just an example of the fact that youre NOT LISTENING so why will you listen to people who complete your on line surveys;
• I just want to speak to a real person that gives a damn.

2. Do they have their heads screwed on, or are they dreaming, about the tsumani of rage and complaints that will flood into "My Telstra Experience" experiment exactly parallel to the comments to the article? Presumably they will have an already detailed and approved strategic and operational plan and resources to handle these and to coordinate responses in a systematic and timely way.

3. What is the plan of the coordination needed, which will be more than once a day to start, to handle the tsumani, and how are all departments keyed into that plan including, for example, the ability of the call centres to answer basic questions about My Telstra Experience?

4. How well thought through is the risk analysis of managing the rage, managing those who complain loudest, working with the social media as people blog Twitter and Facebook their experiences with My Telstra Experience?

5. How well is Telstra prepared as an organisation to respond to the My Telstra Experience inputs given that (a) their own staff already know most of the problems and have made zero progress (according to the doubling of complaints) and (b) the inputs from customers mostly speak to symptoms and not causes. It's about the organisational mindset - the "prepared mind" as Pasteur once said.

OK, where are we?

On face value and given history this initiative has a very poor chance of real success (I don't mean that the Telstra managers will not get their bonuses!). However I'm not a fan of being trapped by history so let's see what might be different this time.

On the issue of "what might be different this time" the BIG difference since the last in a string of similar attempts by Telstra is that we are now in a new era of established social media. This means that no matter how much they try to constrain views within the closed panel it will not work. There is absolutely no doubt that this will be a public exercise.

Now given that social media IS the BIG DIFFERENCE now you would wonder why a firm would be reverting back to the past in conducting closed shop panels as market research? It seems like a backward view to me, but Telstra are obviously being advised by Vision Critical who are experts in this field and have an impressive track record.

You might also ask me how come this has anything to do with social media as it is a closed panel of surveys? Well that's a good question, and one which no doubt Telstra has thought through. My answer - the panel has people, those same people exist in the social media; the panel will no doubt ask some open questions or give people a chance to make open comments - that opens the chance for the pent up rage and the outlets into social media if satisfaction is not forthcoming. There are other reasons as well that this closed panel is no longer a close panel, but that's enough for now.

But back to my headline - will customers help? They will certainly try, whether it lasts is completely up to Telstra's management of the relationship, and once doubt sets in to the customers' minds then it is all over rover.

I'm interested to hear your views or of your experience with My Telstra Experience.

PS - Below are Poll Results from Adelaide Now which ran the poll with the article announcing Telstra's plans to ask customers for help.

How do you rate Telstra's customer service? 

• Excellent, faultless 1% (29 votes)
• Acceptable, if not perfect 5% (112 votes)
• Average, needs work 11% (228 votes)
• Poor, needs urgent fix 41% (836 votes)
• Sorry... you're breaking up 39% (803 votes)

Total of 2008 votes.

| 09.12.06 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• In this post Leyla Arsan describes how elf, a beauty destination site, does not have a traditional marketing budget but uses social media marketing including a "seven day a week blogging rule"!
• See @darmano's 2010 "most important" social media trends, and the comments which all-in-all are not a rave review.
• You can catch up with, and make your mind up about, conflicting reports on social media, and also catch my last post on the same. 
• If you are on Linkedin check the Channels of the Future Group discussion "What brands will disappear in 2010".
• Travel group Nomads is using social media to offer free business advice to other travel groups and businesses.
• If you've time to waste you could join the social media expert A-list at The Brand Builder all tearing their hair out because a group dared to run a business offering a certificate in social media.
• Facebook announces new privacy plans - "to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone".
• Are social networks more likely to make people complain online?
• Using Twitter to predict sales from the buzz - a WSJ report on a case study makes interesting reading.

http://xeesm.com/walter