Thursday, February 25, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
PR Nightmares Courtesy of Social Media - Why Monitoring is a Must
By now, you’ve probably heard about several PR nightmares that were made possible by the power of social media. If you haven’t, allow me to recap a few examples for you involving YouTube and Twitter:
1. United Airlines
Dave Carroll’s guitar got smashed. Dave is an up and coming musician and on a United Airlines flight his $3,000 guitar was totally destroyed by the baggage handlers. He arrived in his destination city to play a gig only to find his guitar blown to smithereens. After weeks of trying to get United Airlines to reimburse him for his guitar to no avail, he wrote a little ditty about his horrific experience with United Airlines, shot a video with his band, and posted in on You Tube. For months, if you did a Google search for “United Airlines” you would find his video, “United Breaks Guitars”, on the first page of the SERP. When I last checked, the video had over 7.8 million views.
2. Domino’s Pizza
It took 30 years to build this brand and about 10 seconds to destroy it on You Tube. Some young employees at Domino’s shot a video of what they supposedly do to your pizza before you get it. Let’s just say, you would lose your appetite immediately if I told you what it was they were doing to the pizza. The video was ultimately taken offline but Domino’s was slow to respond because they did not have any social media presence. Although the video was taken down, the story lives on because when you search for Domino’s, news outlets that covered the Domino’s disaster still appear in the search results.
3. Southwest Airlines
In more recent news, Southwest had a large size passenger issue. Kevin Smith, a popular movie director, was removed from a flight for taking up more than one seat. He immediately started to Tweet about it and bash Southwest. It turns out that his negative Tweets about Southwest may have been self-serving to promote one of his upcoming movies but the fact remains that Southwest took a beating from him for several days online.
So, how does a company protect themselves from this kind of negative PR when social media sites provide instant access to a multi-million person audience?
United Airlines and Domino’s struggled with addressing their social media woes. United was very slow to respond and when they ultimately did respond, their response got far less fan fare than Dave’s video did…probably because they didn’t respond in-kind. A smart response would have been to craft their own witty video response and publish it on YouTube as well as on their own site. This likely would have generated millions of views and worked better to spread their response which was to ultimately offer to pay for Dave’s guitar. Dave turned down the payment and instead had them donate the money to charity. United has since incorporated this video into their standard training for all employees which shows me they at least understand how important customer service is to their company and what one unsatisfied customer can do to them in social media.
Domino’s didn’t fare much better. They didn’t have ANY social media presence when their YouTube video broke so they had to quickly establish a Twitter accountant and start responding to the thousands of negative Tweets about them.
Southwest probably handled their situation the best of the three examples listed here. They have a very active social media department and routinely use it to address social media issues. They became aware of Kevin’s issue within an hour and immediately they responded to him publicly, personally and to many of the other Southwest followers who were Tweeting about it.
The questions to ask yourself are:
1. Is my organization monitoring social media chatter about my product or service?
2. Are we ready to respond?
3. Do we know how to respond?
No matter what industry you’re in, the social media gorillas are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Beyond that, there are review sites for just about every industry today.
Here are 2 easy and free ways you can monitor chatter about your company today:
1. Set up free Google Alerts. Simply Google which topics interest you and you’ll get an alert every time these topics are mentioned. For example, Southwest could set up Google Alerts for search queries such as:
a. Southwest sucks
b. Southwest sux
c. Southwest tickets
d. Southwest seats
And so on. You can set the Alerts to come to you 1 time daily or every time a search result is available with your search query in it. Doing the latter will ensure you’re timely in your response to any negative chatter about your company.
2. Check out Twittrratr -
Full disclosure here that the site is not perfect IMO but it can help to give you an overall sense of whether you’re receiving positive, negative or neutral Tweets and you can link directly to the Tweets so you can easily respond.
Check back for more blog posts about social media monitoring in the days/weeks to come.
1. United Airlines
Dave Carroll’s guitar got smashed. Dave is an up and coming musician and on a United Airlines flight his $3,000 guitar was totally destroyed by the baggage handlers. He arrived in his destination city to play a gig only to find his guitar blown to smithereens. After weeks of trying to get United Airlines to reimburse him for his guitar to no avail, he wrote a little ditty about his horrific experience with United Airlines, shot a video with his band, and posted in on You Tube. For months, if you did a Google search for “United Airlines” you would find his video, “United Breaks Guitars”, on the first page of the SERP. When I last checked, the video had over 7.8 million views.
2. Domino’s Pizza
It took 30 years to build this brand and about 10 seconds to destroy it on You Tube. Some young employees at Domino’s shot a video of what they supposedly do to your pizza before you get it. Let’s just say, you would lose your appetite immediately if I told you what it was they were doing to the pizza. The video was ultimately taken offline but Domino’s was slow to respond because they did not have any social media presence. Although the video was taken down, the story lives on because when you search for Domino’s, news outlets that covered the Domino’s disaster still appear in the search results.
3. Southwest Airlines
In more recent news, Southwest had a large size passenger issue. Kevin Smith, a popular movie director, was removed from a flight for taking up more than one seat. He immediately started to Tweet about it and bash Southwest. It turns out that his negative Tweets about Southwest may have been self-serving to promote one of his upcoming movies but the fact remains that Southwest took a beating from him for several days online.
So, how does a company protect themselves from this kind of negative PR when social media sites provide instant access to a multi-million person audience?
United Airlines and Domino’s struggled with addressing their social media woes. United was very slow to respond and when they ultimately did respond, their response got far less fan fare than Dave’s video did…probably because they didn’t respond in-kind. A smart response would have been to craft their own witty video response and publish it on YouTube as well as on their own site. This likely would have generated millions of views and worked better to spread their response which was to ultimately offer to pay for Dave’s guitar. Dave turned down the payment and instead had them donate the money to charity. United has since incorporated this video into their standard training for all employees which shows me they at least understand how important customer service is to their company and what one unsatisfied customer can do to them in social media.
Domino’s didn’t fare much better. They didn’t have ANY social media presence when their YouTube video broke so they had to quickly establish a Twitter accountant and start responding to the thousands of negative Tweets about them.
Southwest probably handled their situation the best of the three examples listed here. They have a very active social media department and routinely use it to address social media issues. They became aware of Kevin’s issue within an hour and immediately they responded to him publicly, personally and to many of the other Southwest followers who were Tweeting about it.
The questions to ask yourself are:
1. Is my organization monitoring social media chatter about my product or service?
2. Are we ready to respond?
3. Do we know how to respond?
No matter what industry you’re in, the social media gorillas are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Beyond that, there are review sites for just about every industry today.
Here are 2 easy and free ways you can monitor chatter about your company today:
1. Set up free Google Alerts. Simply Google which topics interest you and you’ll get an alert every time these topics are mentioned. For example, Southwest could set up Google Alerts for search queries such as:
a. Southwest sucks
b. Southwest sux
c. Southwest tickets
d. Southwest seats
And so on. You can set the Alerts to come to you 1 time daily or every time a search result is available with your search query in it. Doing the latter will ensure you’re timely in your response to any negative chatter about your company.
2. Check out Twittrratr -
Full disclosure here that the site is not perfect IMO but it can help to give you an overall sense of whether you’re receiving positive, negative or neutral Tweets and you can link directly to the Tweets so you can easily respond.
Check back for more blog posts about social media monitoring in the days/weeks to come.
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