@RBJacobs showing understanding of ORM
I happen to think that FNB do a pretty good marketing job, I have been a fan of the manner in which the @RBJacobs twitter persona handles queries. But its interesting the way people think about brands – this morning @PerrynMeyer commented on FNB as below.
I retweeted but copied @RBJacobs into the tweet saying it was over to him to sort out – sure enough he responded and invited @PerrynMeyer to to contact him. Out of left field another fellow @Nicholas_Duncan appears and expresses his opinion that @PerrynMeyer should not have commented in public as she has tarnished the brand and then criticised me for having retweeted it as I did.
I am sorry @Nicholas_Duncan but brands are not tarnished by what people say about them, brands are tarnished by what brands do. People saying what they feel and expressing their opinions is what enlightened brands would hope for, they understand that they don’t control brand that belongs to the customer/consumer.
You see you can’t control the conversation – nor would you want to. What you want is to be part of it and to be seen to care because your brand is not what you say it is – its how your customers experience it and what they tell their friends
What @PerrynMeyer and I did was not tarnish the brand, on the contrary we gave @RBJacobs the opportunity to burnish it.
What better outcome for FNB than this (their response retweeted) – unless its a thank you from @PerrynMeyer as well.
Digital Promotions are not the same as Social Media marketing.
The Nando’s Dictators campaign see TV ad here and its accompanying promotion using digital channels (although I don’t know how the customer gets from the TV ad to the digital promo) is very different to social marketing.
Sarah Britten in her article Is Nando’s ‘Last Dictator Standing’ the new ‘Old Spice Guy’? probably inadvertently, draws the correct comparison because in spite of the hoopla the jury is still out on the Old Spice Man’s effectiveness. Both are old style push campaigns and at best interactive.
I find it frustrating when I hear the discussions online and elsewhere referring to this campaign as a social media campaign, its an oxymoron – when you start understanding social media you realise that social media is not about campaigns – it’s not about push – it’s about facilitating communities it’s about ideas spreading.
I wonder when the power of social marketing of tapping into the value of communities, conversations and memes will dawn on brands?
A #hashtag does not a social strategy make.
Takumi Sushi – I am sorry but you lose.
People do such ridiculous things when they find their brand under attack and here is a good example.
This is what happened;
A twitter user buys R399 take away sushi from a place called Takumi Sushi, When she opens up the container she finds a dead bug, she thinks it’s a cockroach – so she does like every normal twitter person would – she posts a tweet with a pic referring to how she had found something extra in her starter.
When she goes back she shows the management and apparently the chef responds in anger by throwing the container at her general direction.
Only after this started spreading through twitter did the establishment respond followed up by a threat of legal action obviously intended to intimidate the customer. Read the whole story here
Eventually a voucher was offered to the young ladies, which they turned down (kind of obviously) and now Takumi Sushi has offered to give the R1000 voucher to the person who makes the best response on the story.
The fact that the bug wasn’t a cockroach at all but a beetle is not the issue, its not even an issue that the clumsy bug could have flown into the sauce at the customer’s dining room. Nobody will really know.
The issue is that this business instead of apologising and fixing the problem acted with violence and then decided to intimidate its dissatisfied customers in the public domain and then to make the folly worse is now using the R1000 of vouchers to induce people to say nice things about them.
In this new world customer service is the new marketing – you have to give people a great experience – and if you do they will tell their friends. You behave badly they will do so as well.
If the management at Takumi Sushi had accepted responsibility the incident would have died away in seconds – instead its been floating through the interwebs and here I am sitting a good 12 hour drive from wherever in Cape Town this place is and writing about it, and some people will even read this – maybe even a lot.
I can’t possibly judge what is the the real truth but like any normal person I did a few searches on twitter and using Google and on the whole the Desmarais sisters come across a reasonable – Takumi on the other hand come across as defensive and their behaviour as aggressive and completely unacceptable.
Sorry Takumi that not the way to do it. You lose.
Posted on November 16, 2011 at 5:10 pm by Walter Pike · Permalink
· One Comment
In: Advertising, Customer Service, internet, Marketing, social media, Uncategorized
In: Advertising, Customer Service, internet, Marketing, social media, Uncategorized
What’s the point. Bid or Buy?
So if bid or buy or anyone else wins the prize for the best ecommence site – who are they fooling, what did they prove, that's not all if you click the link you will get an improved chance to win an iPad by liking the Facebook page.
So their Facebook page will have hundreds of iPad fans.
Pointless – wouldn't they rather have bid or buy fans. What's so hard to understand?
Dear Walter Home Cars Property Hot New Login Vote for bidorbuy as the best ecommerce site. You could win an iPad.
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CellC will miss Lars Reichelt … and so will we.
I am very disappointed to hear that Lars Reichelt the real CEO of Cell C has resigned My personal experience of the man was very positive. I met him after I had roundly slammed the CellC Trevor Noah campaign in blogs and on the radio. He invited me for a cup of coffee to discuss my views a discussion scheduled for half and hour that went on for hours. I still hate the campaign but think the strategy that it was communicating was brave and spot on.
I think that he is one of the very few CEO’s around whom I believe have the both the vision and the drive the change that the industry needs.
I don’t know what went on behind the scenes but to quote Bill Bernbach “Now as always, the future belongs to the brave” and Lars Reichelt was brave.
Congratulations Lars – you made a difference.
Social Media is a very African concept.
A striking tall black lady stopped me in the corridor at the #imcc conference today.
She observed “Social media is a very African concept isn’t it?”
Think about it – the whole concept of Ubuntu (Ubuntu: “I am what I am because of who we all are.” ) sharing, community and the tradition of story telling.
That kind of sums it up.
Why you don’t get marketing in the social world.
Marketing in the new world is very different to marketing in the world we think we are in.
The Internet changed the game when for the first time it created a communications medium that allowed the one to one conversation (like the telephone) and the one to many conversation (like TV) and a many to many conversation to take place all at the same time and when for the first time the source of information also became the site of coordination. When it connected people in a different way than was ever possible before.
It changed the game completely, and it changed it perfectly.
When you are traveling down a straight line and perfect change occurs it gets you traveling in exactly the opposite direction. You were traveling west at 120 and suddenly you are traveling east at 120.
It looks like the same road, its exactly like the same road and every time you look at the road you can’t figure it out because it’s exactly the same. However instead of driving into the setting sun it’s in your rear view mirror. You are going someplace else.
It’s as fundamental as that.
Completely, perfectly different.
Kulula how hard can it be?
I am 6ft2in tall. If I sit with my back to the seat back and my knees slightly apart I can just fit into the kulula seat. So every time I fly I get to the airport early and check in asking for the emergency aisle and it’s extra legroom. You can’t check into those seats online. Today I was more than 2 hours early and when the smiling ground staff checked me in and assured me I was in the seat I wanted. I walked through the security check smiling. Phew its really worth the effort to get there early.
I am sitting in Seat 15C It is the row immediately ahead of the emergency aisle, it is the only row on the plane in which the seats cannot recline.
In fact if you had to chose the worse seats on this flight – they are in this row.
In the seat next to me the lady has a headache she wanted some space to rest. I am grumpy and very irritated. I am also a Kulula jetsetter (their frequent flyer program).
Really HOW HARD CAN IT BE? Just put me into the seat I asked for.
Kulula has a strong presence on social media, the person behind their twitter profile is great, she is caring and engaged. It just doesn’t matter though because although she can try to fix problems it’s just band aid she can just try to repair the damage. There is an operations problem and it’s not fixed and unless Kulula fix it they may as well close their social media presence. I had a conversation on twitter today talking about measuring social media. I will enlighten you in a different post. But you can measure Facebook friends, engagement all you want but this is where it happens the conversation between those seat 15C and 15B. What was that conversation?
It went like this. “Do you know that Mango now fly from Lanseria?
The killer conversation in marketing.
Broadcast media gives you the one to many, one way method of spreading ideas. The telephone gives you the one to one two way or interactive model. The person with whom you are talking can talk back. The Internet gives you the many to many and interactive model.
The most important conversation for your brand and your business is the conversation between your current customer and your potential customer. It’s important because it’s authentic and so it’s trusted. It’s also scary because you aren’t involved.
Marketing including digital and social media is still obsessed with producing communications to tell it’s story in whatever medium it uses one to many or interactive that they lose sight of this vital conversation. Purchasing remember is not a percentages thing, you can’t buy 67.2% of a car. It’s binary, on or off 100% or zero.
What would happen if instead of trying to tell the brand’s story you focussed on helping those willing to tell their own story about your stuff so that in telling that story they can do it more convincingly?
If they are telling their friends about your stuff – maybe that friend’s decision will change to on instead of off.
A rant about conference organisers
I was invited to chair day 2 of the Social Media World Forum in Cape Town on June 2. I agreed even though there had been no talk of a fee. Keep in mind that I am a professional speaker, so its like expecting your lawyer to work for free. I did so because there are a couple of people on the programme I wanted to catch up with and didn’t mind donating my a day to be in Cape Town to do so.
Now this is a conference for which delegates need to pay around R5000 to attend – a profit making concern.
When I sent a mail to confirm travel arrangements I got a reply telling me that there is no budget for travel and accommodation, sorry for you.
Why do we let conference organisers get away with this? They make money by packaging content provided to them by the personalities on the stage, they market it by selling the people on the stage and now in this case they are actually asking me to not only to forego income that could have been earned on that day in my consulting practice, forego the fee, but even to subsidise their costs on top of it. The least they could have done is fly me down on low cost airline Kulula and offered me some sort of accommodation.
This comes hot on the heels of the Thinking Mobile conference in which the organiser, delivered close to no audience to my talk, charged delegates a fortune, messed up my logo on the website and when I pointed this out showed zero concern. His rating system gave me a high response for my contribution, I would give him zero for his part of the deal.
This is in contrast to the IMC conference and The Advantage stand at Markex both of whom are going out of their way to generate a return commensurate with the speakers input.
The reason is that they take advantage of us because we allow them to.
From now on conference organisers – if you want me to speak you need to guarantee your part of the deal – for example if you say there are going to be 300 people in the room and there are 7 you will get a bill pro rata.
In fact better still please get a sponsor.
I will deliver to my audience – I care about them.
