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:

• Follow this blog  - bookmark and visit regularly or use the RSS feed in the bottom right of this page.
• Sign up for our free email newsletter (use the form at top right of this page).
• Drop us an email at kevin.holdridge@kenthouse.com or yvonne.conway@kenthouse.com.
• 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!

Online PR campaigns – the good the bad and the ugly

An interesting story today regarding the unpleasantly narcissistic dating site BeautifulPeople.com which bills itself as “exclusively for beautiful people”.  Loathsome as this outfit is, their latest stunt appears to demonstrate the power of online PR campaigns nowadays in generating web traffic and leads, something that is important to many of our clients.

The website owners (or, more likely, their PR agency) have issued a press release claiming that they were affected by the “Shrek virus” causing thousands of unattractive people to be allowed membership wrongly. They claim to have removed the unattractive members with a refund of membership fees for their trouble.  I’m sure this outfit has legions of expensive lawyers on standby, so it would be dangerous of us to accuse them of  having made up the whole thing.  But, we find it hard to give any credence to the claims whatsoever. There is no record elsewhere of any “Shrek virus”. The name of this alleged virus is something of a clue. It is hard to imagine how this story could possibly be true.

Our friends at nakedsecurity have put the case succintly:

The website explains that it hasn’t needed to inform any computer security firms about the malware as it is being “investigated internally”, and a “former employee.. placed the virus before leaving the team” and “despite wreaking havoc with the application process, member privacy and security was never breached.”

Phew! So, lots of publicity for the website but nothing for current or future members to worry about then. How convenient!

Despite the total lack of credibility to the story, it has been picked up and covered online by serious news agencies such as  The Guardian, The BBC, The Telegraph,  The Daily Mail and many others. A quick Google check shows there are 5.9 million links and references to this ludicrous story on the Web, all achieved in hours by spreading a stupid press release! Not bad at all for a day’s work.

Yes, it’s pretty depressing that so many journalists at so many leading institutions can be so ignorant, gullible, or lazy as to give this implausible and shameless plug the time of day. However, this failing of humanity does show the power of clever PR.

We’re not suggesting that you suppress your gag reflex and descend to the same level as these people. But, with a bit of imagination, many firms will be able to generate interesting (and ideally even true)  press releases  which can be expected to get decent coverage in the local, regional, national, and trade press. The  cost of a press release is hugely lower than advertising, and can be much more effective at generating leads. Nowadays a press release can be submitted easily and cheaply to multiple online channels. Distributing even a fairly uninspiring article containing relevant key words will help a website’s performance in search engines such as Google, thus helping to attract visitors to the website. And if you are lucky or clever enough to hit the sweet spot and go “viral”, you will be inundated with links and visitors.

We always strongly recommend having a press release strategy for our online marketing clients, especially in this age of social networks. If you’d like to discuss how to create business through social and online marketing, give us a call on 0845 638 0700 or email Yvonne Conway or Kevin Holdridge and lets see what would work for your organisation.

Footnote: Don’t you just love karma? It seems that beautifulpeople.com have become the victim of their own “success”. They look to have paid more attention to coming up with their gimmick and distributing their press release than they did to  managing their web hosting infrastructure.  So, today instead of seeing the usual conceited home page, visitors today were presented with this altogether more satisfying error message. Beautiful!

Families in East Anglia and London sought for a Cambridge University Research Project, in collaboration with BT…

Kent House are proud to be working with Cambridge University researchers, in collaboration with BT, in a bid to recruit 15 families in the East Anglia and London areas for an IT based project.

For one week, members of the families will be asked to record daily activities using certain kinds of technology. They will use a diary template to record the different types of digital communications (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, blogs, games, apps, etc.) that they use on daily basis, the purpose of using them, the location in which they use them, the circumstance of use (e.g. whether usage is planned or interrupts another activity), the mood they are in when they use them, if they are interacting with anyone else while they use them, the time they start to use them, and the duration of usage. The objective of the study is to identify ways in which modern information and communication technology impact both individuals and families and not to test ability or intelligence.

Participants are recruited to ensure that a balanced and representative number of people undertake the study. This is to allow for useful comparison between groups of different ages, backgrounds and geographical locations in the study.

If you are a family (or know a family) in the East Anglia or London areas, with at least one child over the age of 10, please share the link below to find out more about the project and to leave details. Selected families will receive £200 shopping vouchers.www.kenthouse.com/cambridge-uni-market-research

Facebook beats Google to top place

According to Hitwise, Facebook has now replaced Google as the top visited website in the United States for the week March 7th – 13th.

If you were unconvinced about the popularity and power of social networking, this one fact alone should convince you otherwise. This amazing trend is set to continue if the numbers are to be believed. Comparing the increase in Facebook visits year on year to those of Google, Facebook comes out on top with a whopping 185% increase in site visits. Google’s year on year increase seems insignificant in comparison at a modest 9%.

This new success for social networking follows on from last year’s triumph over personal email accounts. Social networking sites became the most popular way to send personal email, taking over from the likes of Yahoo! Gmail and Hotmail.

Social networking seminar attracts large audience

Kent House and Keele University Science and Business Park recently organised a joint seminar on social networking. The event, held on 9 September 09 at Keele Hall, was attended by nearly 100 delegates from all sectors of the local community – including small and large businesses, professional bodies, local authority, voluntary sector, and education.

The aims of the event were: to introduce social networking; to explain some of the jargon and issues around social media and social marketing; to suggest some of the opportunities offered by these new online channels for reaching people more effectively than is possible by traditional means; and to offer some examples of how social networking has been implemented locally.

The event was chaired by Rosi Monkman of Keele University Science and Business Park. The presenters were:

Kevin Holdridge, Managing Director, Kent House

A brief on what Social Networking is, how to get it right and avoid common pitfalls

Linda Jones, Managing Director, Passionate Media

An in-depth study on how to boost your business using social networking media

Hannah Hiles, Media and Communications Officer, Keele University

A case study on how social networking sites helped a business to engage with its customers

There is currently a lot of buzz as well as confusion around social networking, and this was reflected in the lively questions-and-answers session at the end of the presentations.

We have made available here the slides and video from the event.

Want to keep up to date with social networking?

We encourage anybody interested in social media and/or in search engine optimisation to sign up for our free monthly email newsletter. This provides news on market developments, lots of hints and tips, and occasional discount offers for our intensive SEO and Internet marketing bootcamp courses. It’s easy to sign up – just enter your email address in the box at the top right of this page. Rest assured, we will never pass on your email address to other parties or send you spam.

Slides – social networking presentations

The slides from the event are stored on Slideshare, and embedded here:

Video – social networking presentations

Click on any of the speakers’ names below to see video of their presentation.

Social networking sites keep ‘deleted’ photos

The security research group from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge have recently announced the results of their latest study on the deletion of personal photos from the social networking sites such as Facebook. Cambridge academics claim that user photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after 30 days or more since people have deleted them.

A Facebook spokesman claims that when a user deletes his or her photos from their profile, all those photos are removed from the company’s servers “immediately”. However, the Cambridge University team found quite the opposite. The research group performed an experiment during which they uploaded photos to a several social networking sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Google’s Picasa and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces. The academics then deleted those pictures from their online profiles, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites’ content delivery networks. When the researchers checked the URLs 30 days later, most of the links to photos continued to work even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed. As BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones puts it: “you may have put your pictures in Facebook’s bin, but you will still have to wait for the content delivery network to delete them”. Furthermore, special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google’s Picasa, did better than Facebook and Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly.

It is not the first time that Facebook has breached user privacy as recently users of Facebook staged a revolt over rules which would have given the site permanent ownership of their data.

Joseph Bonneau, a lead researcher of this project, concludes that “social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what’s simpler rather than what is correct and it’s imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on”.