http://blogs.hbr.org/sviokla/2010/03/realtime_brand_management_less.html

Real-time Brand Management — Lessons from Virgin America’s Hellish Flight

On March 13, a Virgin America flight from Los Angeles to New York was diverted from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Stewart airport in Newburgh, N.Y., due to severe weather, and the passengers and crew waited in the plane on the tarmac for over four hours. The crew was anxious, babies were crying, mothers were anxious, and the passengers were unruly — to the point that one woman was taken off the plane by police. The entire ordeal was documented by David Martin, the CEO of Kontain.com, on his company’s iPhone social-media application.

Martin was called by someone in Virgin America’s marketing department, who offered him a $100 voucher for his troubles. He said the passengers deserved more. He subsequently received a call from Virgin America CEO C. David Cush. During that conversation, according to Martin, he negotiated a full refund and a $100-per-person voucher for all passengers.

If this account is accurate, it is fascinating that a customer, by posting an account of his ordeal as it was happening via his iPhone, became powerful enough to negotiate such a deal. It demonstrates the need for every company to start thinking about real-time brand management.

Firms may “own” their brands, but brands really live in the heads of their consumers. Companies must constantly nurture and actively manage their brands at the speed customers form opinions about them. And today that’s mighty fast. Notifications or conversations about an experience may begin on Twitter, but they can be immediately posted to all social media around the world. (If Facebook were a country, its population would make it the third-largest nation in the world — behind India and ahead of the United States.)

Greg Brandeau, chief technology officer of Walt Disney Studios, recently told me that the window for premiering a new movie used to be the first weekend of its release. It would take two and a half days to figure out if a movie was doing well or poorly. Today, with people Tweeting and posting to Facebook while they are watching the movie, that window has shrunk to hours.

Most firms do not have the marketing reflexes to respond in real time. There are a number of implications for executives:

Every company must have “a brand radar system” to constantly monitor social media. The good news is that if a company commits to this notion of having a brand radar system, there are many tools to help build this surveillance capability.

Firms must get used to being “naked” to the marketplace. There is no question that all the things that happen with your customers and even within your firm may become a matter of global, public record in minutes.

Companies need a “trust bank” with their customers. I believe that Virgin America did not suffer too much from the horrific L.A. to New York flight because its customers deeply trusted it. In contrast, United Airlines suffered terribly when it broke the guitar of a passenger, who then created a YouTube video viewed over 8 million times in which he bashed United’s service and attitude. Unlike Virgin America, United did not have a reservoir of good will to help protect its brand when a problem arose.

See: http://www.connectioneconomy.com/2010/03/17/africa%E2%80%99s-gift-to-silicon-valley-how-to-track-a-crisis/

Your profile picture should not only show who you are, but also give a hint as to your content. I’m currently experimenting with an upward sweeping arrow, with a bold blue background. But the same face pic as before.

Just a thought!

In March 2010, I still stand by my prediction that Kevin Pietersen will not be playing Test cricket by the end of 2011. But, maybe it won’t be because he chooses not to. Maybe he will just show that his talent wasn’t as precocious as originally thought.

Consider this (stats correct BEFORE the recent Bangladesh series):

In his first 18 tests, KP hit 32 sixes. He has hit only 17 maximums in his last 40 tests. In his early career, he scored his test runs at 72 runs per 100 balls. In the last 40 tests, he has scored at a rate of 58 runs per 100 balls (not quite Geffrey Boycott slow, but certainly not worthy of a reputation as a big hitter). His average is unchanged (48) since his early career.

But it isn’t just tests. KP scored 34 sixes in his first 32 ODIs. But he has hit only 24 sixes in his last 64 one day games. His early career strike rate was 98. In his last 64 games, he has a strike rate of 81.

Someone will notice this soon. Maybe the South African selectors were right all along. KP is not someone you want in your cricket team. Strong point, maybe. But he wouldn’t be in mine!

Thanks to Andy Zaltsman’s World Cricket Podcast for these stats. Zaltstats, in fact. Listen to Andy here.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by codrington: RT @tomorrowtodayza: Blog: The future of money http://bit.ly/9G2nV3...

Interesting idea. Think I might apply it into my business. It looks like a model that encourages wealth generation with employess as the CEO aims to earn more.

Thanks for this.

Food Trucks drive around local suburbs, using Twitter to let people know where they are and what food they have available. The idea involves bringing quality food to the kerbside. And it’s working.

The full list of such offers is available at: http://laist.com/2009/06/17/the_list_food_trucks_that_twitter.php

A great topic. And the interest around is growing. I’m going to attempt to put something together this month around this topic. Just gathering the interesting stuff being written around it. Watch this space.

In Kenya this ‘new money revolution’ is at play with a highly successful model that has frozen banks out of a particular part of people’s money. It’s called M-Pesa and you can read the post around it here – http://www.connectioneconomy.com/2009/11/30/m-pesa-vodacom-nedbank-and-rob-shuter/

There is no doubt that things are all about to change, and indeed, are changing as we speak : )

If you’re not familiar with the Trafigura case, then check out the Guardian editor’s summary

Or read it below (just in case they remove it from their website):

One day – if it’s not happening already – they will teach Trafigura in business schools. This will be the scenario for aspiring MBAs. You are in charge of a large but comfortably anonymous trading company based in London and you have a tiresome PR problem. Three thousand miles away there are 30,000 Africans in one of the poorest countries in the world claiming to have been injured by your company dumping toxic sludge. You are being hit by one of the biggest lawsuits in history. Worse, you now have a bunch of journalists on your case.

What to do? The business school textbooks will advocate a mix of carrot and stick. In charge of your carrot you hire Lord (Tim) Bell, who once performed a similar role on behalf of Mrs Thatcher. He will be in charge of attempts to reposition positive public perceptions of the Trafigura brand. He might, for instance, suggest you become an official sponsor of the British Lions tour of South Africa and an arts prize. And in charge of your stick you hire Britain’s most notorious firm of libel lawyers, Messrs Carter-Ruck, who like to boast of their reputation for applying chloroform over the noses of troublesome editors.

For a while all goes well, especially on the stick front. Carter-Ruck spray threatening letters around newsrooms from Oslo to Abidjan. They launch an action against the BBC. And they persuade a judge to suppress a confidential but embarrassing document which has fallen into journalists’ hands. A new term is coined: “super-injunctions”, whereby the existence of court proceedings and court orders are themselves secret.

Nice work, large cheques all round. But the plan began to unravel rather rapidly on Monday when it transpired that an MP, Paul Farrelly, had tabled a question about the injunction and the awkward document in parliament. That was bad enough, what with the nuisance of 300-odd years of precedent affirming the right of the press to report whatever MPs say or do. There was a tiresomely teasing story on the Guardian front page. And then there was Twitter.

It took one tweet on Monday evening as I left the office to light the virtual touchpaper. At five past nine I tapped: “Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?” Twitter’s detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters. My 104 characters did just fine.

By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly’s question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday “Trafigura” was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.

Many tweeters were just registering support or outrage. Others were beavering away to see if they could find suppressed information on the far reaches of the web. One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable.

By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel. The textbook stuff – elaborate carrot, expensive stick – had been blown away by a newspaper together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.

So this week’s Trafigura fiasco ought to be taught to aspiring MBAs and would-be journalists. They might nod in passing to the memory of John Wilkes, the scabrous hack and MP who risked his life to win the right to report parliament. An 18th-century version of crowd-sourcing played its part in that, too.

One way we’ve found of getting around this aversion to closed groups is that we have a networking system on our website built in wordpress that allows delegates of our events to connect with each other in the weeks and months before the event. But it is our system, on our website, with access achieved by paying quite a lot of cash, so nobody questions that it is closed. The system also does not reveal a person’s contact details unless they choose to reply to a message. So harvesting contact details is quite difficult, and impossible to do anonymously. We can also report on interactions between delegates in our system.

The other point is that I suspect it is often drifters or floating voters that will join my social media group rather than loyal clients. I haven’t confirmed that scientifically. But I have spoken to some of our most committed customers, and they regard their relationship with us as one of their competitive advantages. So they would not join our social media group because it would reveal something to their (uninformed) competitors.

@jodimaas

graeme@tomorrowtoday.uk.com

Some nice points to think through.

The first response to your point about showing your competitors who your clients are is that almost all social networks can be made private, and would need approvals to participate. That does lose some of the value, of course, but does deal with the issues you have raised. A balance would be needed. And possibly different social media accounts for different purposes. I suppose one would hope to have at least a few clients who could be raving fans, and do so publicly without fear of being poached.

I agree with you on the gaming issue. In fact, one of my previous business partners left TomorrowToday to set up a consultancy that looks to use games as a means to teach business strategy and certain business skills. Check Raymond’s work out at: http://www.wisdomgames.co.za

OK, I’ll concede the NHS point. It should be “largest employer in Europe”. Well spotted. (It’s now changed in the text of the article – hah!).

A few points.

Your point about creating fans is really interesting. Something we’re discussing internally. One debating point for us is that we get value from being effective at knowing who our communities are through hard work – market research, phone work, travel. By assembling a subset of these people as fans on facebook or members of a group on linkedin we would provide our competitors with easy access to them. And we know our competitors are looking for ways to identigy people in that group – because so are we – and we compete with some giant BSB publishing and events companies that can execute very efficiently once they have a target audience but forunately don’t understand the intimate details of our markets and client base. I can see the logic and benefit of collecting together your fans on facebook or linkedin for a B2C business but it is more difficult in many B2B situations, especially for small niche players. For example, could you see a law firm or accounting practice with a facebook fan page that shows its clients? The nature of my business is that volumes are small and higher of each customer is high – very different to Coke or Apple.

I think another way that social media will change everything is gaming. In fact some analysis is showing that facebook may evolve into the vehicle that carries social gaming. And apparently apple has revised its strategy for games after finding that gaming is one of the most important segments for iphone apps. Apparently the average profile for regular users of facebook games are females between 30 and 50. That’s a long way from typical XBox 360 users. And i imagine that the interactivity and technology of social media gaming is right at the infancy.

Final point – a cheeky one – from many long pub debates I think its true to say that the NHS follows Walmart, the Indian railway, plus the Chinese and US military as the 5th largest employer in the world.

If you need further evidence that social media is here to stay in the corporate world, look no further than Telstra, the Australian telecom giant.

The 40,000+ person company makes social media training mandatory for its employees and formalized a policy of “3Rs” – responsibility, respect and representation. Taking things a step further, today the company is trying something about as transparent as it gets – publishing their entire social media training guide online, so that anyone can check it out, learn and critique.

http://mashable.com/2009/12/16/telstra-social-media/

http://www.exchange.telstra.com.au/training/flip.html

You asked about missions and the role social media could possibly play. Here are a few off the top of my head:

* Missions (and aid and charity) agencies need to spend a significant time raising funds and interacting with donors. In terms of foreign missions (or aid), one of the key ways to engaging with donors is to connect them with the people on the ground doing work in far flung places. This means missionaries (and aid and charity workers) typically write newsletters. The age of email (and PDFs) has helped them a lot. Social media can make this engagement so much more immediate, and therefore more real to the donors. Missionaries should have twitter feeds that are updated regularly, giving insights into their lives and work. For “creative access” missionaries, this could be done via private feeds, or under a pseodonym if needed.

* Missionaries themselves need to communicate and engage. Social media makes that engagement more immediate. They should be using Google Wave or something similar to have cross country discussions.

* Virtual meetings could help far flung teams – and keep a record of discussions.

* The cloudsourcing concept (and use of eLance.com and similar sites) could really help missionaries with admin support and similar support services. OR, spouses of working missionaries can earn additional income by providing services through these websites.

* Having discussions about missions strategy could get the “minds of many” working for you.

Hope that gets you started…

How absolutely brilliant would it be if a local council really took this on board. You could geotag potholes in roads, traffic lights that were not working, and anything else that the Council needed to fix. The Council could easily write software to analyse the requests, create work orders and dispatch teams. They could also do something government often gets wrong – which is to give feedback to the community and update them on what has happened.

I can see such potential for this particular application. My word.

A hugely valuable article – thanks. I agree that it will soon be important to advertise etc and create “fans”. It is a challenge to get people clicking through beyond the impression stage. At least the impression of the product is made which must have an impact on people’s recall. It would be interesting to see research on what people recall simply by having seen an image repeated down the side of their FB page even if they don’t click through.

Meg

Thank you for such an interesting article. I have to admit that I have not seen the potential of social media and your article has certainly inspired me to take action. As a matter of fact, I am currently doing researching for my next article on how management can get buy-in from their workforce to unlock the potential of their Wokplace Wellness Programmes.

Your article has been very informative and with your permission I would like to refer to it in my article as I am now convinced that using social networking can help power employee wellness programmes.

The next step of course is to figure out how…….

All the best Graeme, and thanks once again

Gerrit

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Just a few quick corrections to help you understand my point. I don’t know whether second hand smoke is dangerous or not – it’s certainly disgusting, but it might not be harmful. That, however, was not the issue. The issue through most of the 60s, 70s and 1980s was whether smoking itself was dangerous.

Global warming is an absolute reality. There is no doubt whatsoever that the world is warming up. Nobody with any decent scientific credentials argues with that. It’s a straight fact. The debate is about what is causing the warming. Is it part of a natural warming and cooling cycle (answer is: “yes”)? Is it being made worse by human activity (this is where the debate is)?

So, global warming is no joke. And we need to do something about it.

Did you read any of the articles linked to above? Did you check out the science? What did you think?

I find myself in conflict with my manager set constantly due to the very reasons you have identified. There is a complete lack of openness to challenging the status quo and structure/procedural way of seeing the working world, Likewise a lack of tolerance on my part for their wisdom.

alwyn