How to lose friends and alienate people on Twitter

It would be funny if it wasn’t so shameful. Microsoft’s fragrant PR team for XBox360 has provided a classic illustration of the mantra that we always try to emphasise to clients – clumsy and inappropriate use of social media is worse than not using them at all.

In this instance, some clever PR type thought it would be a good idea to capitalise on the untimely death of Amy Winehouse. So they posted a message on Twitter exhorting people to “remember Amy” by buying  her music from Microsoft’s Zune online store. One of the key benefits to businesses in using social media is that you make yourself part of a community and can convey a sense of character. This tweet was a disaster because:

1. It portrayed Microsoft as greedy, opportunistic and insensitive (while that’s possibly no surprise to most people, reminding us of it so effectively is almost certainly not what the PR people are being paid for).
2. It was crass and inappropriate in the context of Twitter. People use Twitter to give and receive news and information and to share comments and observations. Clumsy sales pitches, especially ones based on exploitation of misfortune, are discordant in that environment. The rule of thumb is “don’t sell at the party”, i.e. keep the communication appropriate to the context.
3. When you make this kind of mistake in social media, there is nowhere to hide, and word spreads fast. I did a Google search just now (see  the screenshot). That showed 9.4 million references on the Web (within two days of the incident), most of them mentioning that Microsoft has been forced to apologise. That’s a lot of bad publicity in a very short time, all from a single 140 character message.

This first mistake was bad enough. But then the very bright PR people at Microsoft panicked when they began to get the backlash. Yes, they thought they would make it all better by posting another Tweet conveying their sincerity and human warmth: “Apologies to everyone if our earlier Amy Winehouse ‘download’ tweet seemed purely commercially motivated. Far from the case, we assure you.” Well that’s OK then! The only good thing about that response is that it has given me more classic material for this case study.  The message here is that when you get caught out on social media, you need to be serious about damage limitation and reputation recovery. That half-hearted and unconvincing tweet just reinforced the impression that these people are cynical and untrustworthy.

In this kind of situation, you need either ignore it so that the furore atrophies quickly (a risky strategy) or to tackle it head-on convincingly and effectively. In Microsoft’s position, I would have considered making a proper apology (not the weasel worded thing they issued) acknowledging that a mistake had been made and showing contrition. I’d also think about making some kind of gesture to show that I was serious about making good. That might have meant offering the downloads for free (and refunding those who had already bought),  or making some kind of donation (maybe to a substance misuse charity). Anything that showed I was willing to take some pain rather than hope to get away with it via another 140 character message.

What they actually did – almost unbelievably – was to post a third cynical tweet: “With Amy W’s passing, the world has lost a huge talent. Our thoughts are with Amy’s family and friends at this very sad time“.   Pure genius.  You can see now why they got 9.4 million negative mentions in two days.

It may be that the Microsoft PR people were working on  the principle that all publicity is good publicity. More likely, those responsible are now working through their contacts books to find new jobs.  To be fair, we frequently come across PR agencies struggling to understand how to harness the immense power and potential of social media (even though their own promotional material generally suggests that they are actually brilliant masters of it) and to avoid making the most basic mistakes.

Compare and contrast with the iTunes store.  They saw the commercial opportunity too, of course, and they posted a prominent “Remembering Amy” feature in their store encouraging people to buy the music. And yet, they suffered no opprobrium. The reason for that apparent inconsistency goes back to our theme of the right message in the right place. Visitors at the iTunes store are there to buy and expect the shop to be promoting certain products and to help them find topical material. In this case, you’re in  the shop, not at a party, so the dynamics and expectations are quite different.

If you’d like some no-pressure and competent advice or discussion on using social media effectively to help your business or organisation, here are some options:

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• Give us a call on 0845 638 0700 (ask for Kevin or Yvonne).

There’s a whole world of possibilities out there! It would be a shame to miss out or to mess up!

SEO industry still plagued by dubious practice

Here at Kent House we try to provide a professional and intelligent approach to search engine optimisation (SEO). We aim to establish with prospective clients  what the goals should be, and what will make money for them or otherwise help them achieve objectives.  We review their competitors and the competitiveness of key words to find the most effective and best-value targets and strategies. We work up a plan with them to use the best mix of activity from the ones available: optimisation of your website and its pages; use of social media and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook; online and offline PR; link building; blogging; localisation; mobile; video; etc. Often we find ourselves advising clients that they can get better results for less money and that spending more isn’t going to improve return on investment. And we never work for our clients’ competitors.

Counter-intuitively, that kind of considered and ethical approach can often be a difficult sell. It’s perhaps not surprising given that many organisations are unsure about how SEO really works and what it can deliver, and that the SEO industry is still plagued by dubious outfits making wild promises but delivering little and frequently using dubious techniques. Here are some examples …

The “number one on Google” callers

The classic is the cold call from a salesperson promising you will be “number one on Google, guaranteed” in return for signing up to a direct debit. In the harsh light of day, the “number one” promise is, of course, meaningless.  Even though the search engines are getting ever more sophisticated, any fool can get a website to top position on Google for searches on an obscure phrase. But is there any value to you in being number one for “Blackwoods Widget Manufacturers, Liverpool”? Will that generate any more leads for the company in question? Obviously not. It takes much more effort to work out what search terms your prospective customers are using and how to make sure you appear in the results for those terms above your competitors. The cold-calling salesperson won’t understand that or even care – they just need to get their quota of sign-ups.  And yet, thousands of companies fall for this approach. Maybe they feel that they are at least doing something (however pointless), or maybe they are bullied by the sales pitch and then find it hard to get out of the long term contract.

Spammers

Many firms employ agencies or casual staff to post hundreds of spam comments on popular blogs. The comment includes a link to the site they are trying to promote (their own or a client’s site).  They hope to improve the ranking of their site in search engines  by creating lots of links. Whilst the strategy really can improve your ranking (especially if you post on blogs covering relevant subjects),  it comes at a price. The spam messages add nothing to the blog articles and discussions off which they leech, clog up the discussion with noise, and they risk annoying visitors and damaging the reputation of the site employing the tactic.  It is very rare for an SEO firm to advise their client so they can make an informed choice about whether to use such tactics. Instead, they usually charge the client for skilled SEO input and then pay a cut-price agency to deploy this cheap spam approach without the client ever realising.

There’s an example of this in action here on our own blog. We normally delete such rubbish, but have left his one as an example.  The offender in this case is a firm calling itself “InnnovativeSEO”.  They’re at www.innovativeseo.co.uk. They describe themselves as “… committed to reaching new heights in marketing performance by providing creative and innovative solutions”.  Really? How exactly is it creative and innovative to post a dumb, irrelevant spam comment on a competitor’s blog in the vain hope of improving SEO performance?   Perhaps “plumbing new depths” would be a more appropriate slogan for this outfit. Feel free to visit their website for an example of SEO cowboys in action.

It is so much better to post useful comments onto relevant blog articles, making a contribution to knowledge sharing  and to the quality of debate. Doing that still allows for the inclusion of a promotional link back to your site but also enhances your reputation and doesn’t make you look shabby. Doing that needs a more intelligent approach and is more time consuming than paying an agency in India to post 1,000 “nice article, thanks” comments on irrelevant blogs.

Submitters

I’m amazed to see this still in operation, but lots of SEO firms still charge their hapless clients for “submitting your site to the search engines every month”. What nonsense. Submitting your site to a search engine is free and simple. And in any case, your site will be picked up automatically and listed much more quickly as the search engines follow links to it from other websites (if your site doesn’t have any links to it from other good quality sites, it is never going to rank well in the search engines anyway). And the idea that you need to resubmit regularly to stop from dropping out of the results is so wrong that it would be funny it it wasn’t being used as a way to trick clients out of their money.  Here’s an example of a site that seems to promote monthly search engine submissions.

This practice is another regrettable example of less reputable SEO firms using low-cost automated and simplistic techniques, regardless of the consequences or effectiveness, whilst presenting themselves as experts and professionals to naive paying clients.

Black hatters

There are many SEO techniques that cross the line from “gaming” the system to cheating it. These are referred to as “black hat” techniques. Whilst they can get very good results, they can carry the risk of reputational damage and/or the client’s site being penalised in (or even dropped from) the search engines.

At Kent House, we pride ourselves on our ethical and professional approach. But, we don’t subscribe to the  sometimes hysterical and self-righteous school that says that using any “black hat” technique must be condemned. Google does not make the law or dictate ethical codes of human conduct (not yet, at least!).  So, although Google’s guidelines say that you shouldn’t do something, that doesn’t make it unlawful or even necessarily unethical to do so. What is unethical is not to have advised the client of the issues and potential consequences of deploying such techniques and to have obtained informed consent. We still see plenty of SEO competitors charge top dollar to get good rankings for the client by using very cheap and easy black hat techniques with the client not realising how it was done and being unaware of the potentially disastrous consequences. Google isn’t yet God, but they are perfectly entitled within their own system to drop or penalise sites that don’t follow their rules. And there have been plenty of examples of that happening, even to powerful corporations such as JC Penney and BMW (see this article for more information).

Bullsh**ters

SEO is a very easy industry to get into. You just need a computer and an internet connection. A search for “seo  company” on Google’s UK site returns 74 million results. Because of the low barriers to entry and because most clients struggle to know how to measure whether they are getting value, the industry is full of cowboys and outfits making questionable promises and delivering dubious services.  In my next article on this subject, I’ll post a checklist that you can use to help judge the quality of SEO firms and to choose the one that’s right for you.