The only thing that spreads faster than good news on the web is bad news – as management at Nivea towers have discovered.

Nivea is just the latest in an increasingly long line of companies that have seen their reputations come under fire from empowered consumers using social media tools to give vent to their feelings.

And no wonder in this case. The company’s “Look like you give a damn” campaign was surely ill-advised to even hint that black people aren’t civilised.

The print ad which kicked off the debacle features a clean-shaven black man grasping the longer hair on a bearded mask of his own face, getting ready to throw it away. The phrase “Re-civilize yourself” is emblazoned over the image.

Unsurprisingly the company has taken a beating, and moved quickly to pull the advert. I can’t believe it made it live in the first place.

Regardless, what’s interesting here is the speed at which the whole thing has unfolded given that this started from something appearing in a monthly magazine.

Facebook user Monna Morton appears to have kicked it off on Wednesday evening at 2221 with a scathing post on Nivea’s Facebook page. See the image below.

And then Septembre Anderson Tweeted to Nivea spokewoman Rihanna about the advert, CNN became aware of the story and it was really on.

Of course, mainstream media still wields enormous power over the C-suite – rightly or wrongly – and it is that crossover from social to traditional media that nearly all companies fear when a reputation issue blows-up.

Nivea has issued an apology on its Facebook page, but it isn’t engaging or entering the fray in anyway at the time of writing. Perhaps they’ve seen the trouble that Nestle got itself into and has decided it’s already done enough damage.

At the time of writing there has been 993 Tweets about the episode, which according to mathematical wizardry courtesy of the good people of Sysomos means it has reached 3.1million Twitter users. The story hasn’t run its course yet, so that number is just going to keep increasingly… of course, that wouldn’t be a problem if it was a good news story.

This case raises questions about how companies can protect their reputations in the social media age? The answer isn’t anything to do with social media – the answer is to run the best business possible with maximum integrity at all times. Take customers seriously, strive to do things better every day and do something of value.

Nivea has suffered a common-sense breakdown, and it makes me wonder if the company is striving to do its best and act with integrity? But what about the agency that produced the ad? Surely someone in there must have had doubts about the direction of the campaign?

If we go back to the question about how can a company protect itself… Let’s assume the basics are covered, which means the firm needs to have a well thought out social media strategy with risk management and escalation procedures in place.

And even more importantly, while companies will spend a fortune on getting their message out very few spend enough on listening to the return message – they should.

Social media monitoring isn’t a nice to have in this day and age, it’s a necessity. It won’t stop a crisis like this, but when you see how quickly these things can unfold getting the heads-up about a problem even just a few minutes earlier is surely worth every penny.

Have a read of the article here http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/business/Michelle-Rodger-Big-Brother-can.6798766.jp

Let me know what you think.

In our last post about common sense customer service we were going to use the expression “not happy, Jan” but decided against it because we weren’t sure how much resonance it would have outside of Australia.

So, seeing as it is a bank holiday weekend here in the UK we thought it would be fun to share with you the source of the expression “not happy, Jan” so that when we use it in future you will know exactly what we are on about!

Enjoy this slice of classic Australian advertising from the early 2000′s.

Hope you enjoy your holiday weekend.

Customer service should be easy, shouldn’t it? It’s just common sense, right?

But there are many different interpretations of what constitutes common sense – my common sense might not be yours and vice versa.

Take an example that we will all have been through or seen at some point of a young child throwing a tantrum in a public. There are lots of books and experts that will tell you what a parent should do if this happens.. but which one do you follow? Walk away? Get down on the floor with them? Pick them up and hold them till they stop? Give in so they stop embarrassing you?

While all of these methods will have a sound rationale behind them the most important thing you need to do is know how this child responds and what will most effectively stop the tantrum while maintaining boundaries.

It’s the same with customer service. Not every customer will react the same way – sometimes you just need to band-aid the situation and sometimes you need to be a little flexible.

With that in mind, help your staff to help your customers and therefore you:Clearly define outputs – what does “finished” look like?

• Usually along the lines of a satisfied customer.
• Clearly define expected behaviours – what you should and shouldn’t say to a customer.
• Allow staff a little discretion – give them a little leeway for the individual touch.

Now, think about in this social media terms… if you phone a call centre, there is every chance that the person you are talking to is being treated like a drone and they’ve been given a script to work from.

The promise of social media is to remain human

If you Tweet and someone replies from the company in question, how many companies have got as far as preparing social media scripts. Not many I would bet and also hope – the promise of social media is to remain human.

So, what companies need to be thinking about for making this stuff work in Twitter or Facebook (yes Nestle, I’m looking at you) is to make sure there are savvy staff in place that have been well trained and briefed.

If you are a company and you want to make this work, stop reducing customer service to the lowest common denominator or treating it as a cost centre.

Tell your staff clearly what finished looks like, what behaviours are expected of them and then let them go. It’s easy, it’s just common sense…

Anyone who has ever hired or managed staff will tell you that common sense is a rare commodity – where do you get your supply?

Your brand is not in your hands anymore – it’s an unpalatable truth for many businesses, but it is the new reality of the information age.

Once businesses get over the shock of the new they will start to see it as an opportunity… but many would probably rather go back to the pre-internet days when you had control of the message you gave to your customers.

Everyone is a critic

If you wanted to find out what your customers thought about your brand you would conduct some market research or tap into the local grape vine. It was all pretty straightforward.

But these days your brand is also in the hands of people who talk about you online, and they might not even be your customers. The democratisation of media with tools like Blogger, WordPress and Twitter has meant anyone can find or create an audience.

What this means is that the clippings agency you are paying to tell you what is being said about your company might be missing damaging material – particularly when you remember people are more likely trust other people like them than they are the newspapers.

Do your media people report back to you on negative reviews posted at ReviewCentre or Qype?

Listen up

In pre-internet days you had the luxury of time to solicit feedback, but now damaging content can trash your reputation in a matter of hours.

Scary, huh? Not necessarily.

There is a burgeoning market for sophisticated software to track your reputation right across the web. Some of the systems are better than others, but what they are all promising is almost real-time tracking of the mentions of your brand. That’s a great start for reputation protection.

Why might it be useful to watch what people are saying? As a company you may not want a Twitter strategy or have time or staff to constantly update your blog, but it is important to look at what is being said in the wild.

Imagine the value of early detection of problems with your customer service or products. Or being able to harness the wisdom in the feedback of hundreds, even thousands, of customers.

Ignorance was bliss…

There is much more to recommend reputation monitoring than a defensive stance against scandal.

Today’s business is very different from 20 years ago when I worked in my parent’s bike shop. We prided ourselves on our customer service, did an occasional advertising campaign and made sure to be present at local bike events.

We were happily ignorant of when people were talking about the shop (either good or bad) and as long as the people came at Christmas time to get their kids a bike or came back to us if they wanted an upgrade or needed a service we were happy.

Customers today have a wider and stronger voice than ever before – think how often you’ve had a 45 minute wait to speak to a call centre and then failed to have your problem fixed. Now imagine you several thousand people following you on Twitter and you decide to start badmouthing company X….

People are going online to complain when they have a bad experience, and it’s not unreasonable when you remember they are helping to pay your wages.

The warm fuzzies

But it’s not just customers you need to worry about. What about the things your staff are saying or doing?

Someone in your own business could play an ill-advised prank that spirals out of control like Domino’s Pizza where the brand suffered serious repercussions within 24 hours from a video posted to YouTube.

By monitoring your brand online you can see what people are saying about you – and believe it or not, the talk is not always negative. It can leave you feeling warm inside to see your business getting a virtual pat on the back.

Have you had any experiences with online reputation management? How did you find out what was being said?

Hello world!

Today we are proud to take the wraps off our baby and ask you to welcome digitalmud into your lives.

Our ambition is bold but simple – to improve the UK’s record on customer service and profitability by offering organisations insight and expanding their capabilities. Easier said than done perhaps, but what fun is life without a big, hairy audacious goal?

We work with companies directly, but also with PR agencies, marketers and government bodies. In other words, because our approach is bespoke we work with anyone who needs social media intelligence.

digitalmud the company might be new, but the services we offer are tried and tested and our expertise has been developed over many years. And the name? Best to ask about that over coffee and cake…

Why not get in touch to see how we can help you?

One of the questions that businesses frequently ask when starting on their social media journey is how to make it a day-to-day part of what they do. The answer is to think strategically.

There is an understandable temptation to say “we need to be on Twitter“, without giving it much more thought than that. Pausing first and asking a few key questions means that you can still jump on the Twitter bandwagon, but you can do it in a way that will be sustainable and deliver real value.

For example:

• Who is going to Tweet on behalf of the company?
• Are the people you want to reach actually on Twitter?
• Will they use their own name, or the company name or a combination?
• What guidelines will they operate within?
• What will they say, and how will the impact of what they say be tracked?

These are simple questions to answer, but answering them first will make your life easier.

When we work with clients we like to borrow the excellent POST methodology from the book Groundswell. The idea is simply to work through a number of steps before launching a social media campaign.

P is for People: Who do you want to reach? What is your target audience? Where do they spend their time when they are online?

O is for Objectives: Decide on your primary objective for reaching out to the target group? What do you want from them? Is raising awareness enough? How will you measure what your impact?

S is Strategy: How are you going to achieve your objective? What are you going to do for your customers/targets? What will be different after you have acted?

T is for Technology: Technology is fun because of what it allows us to do, but we should remember it is a tool and not an end in itself. Starting with the technology kinda puts the horse before the cart… so only after the three points above have good answers should we start looking at what technology we will use to meet our goals.

Hopefully you can see how a little bit of time invested up-front in social media planning can increase your chances of success, as well as making it possible to simply make social media just part of what you do.

Of course, you can make your life easier still and get us to help you!

Well the Wikipedia definition is comprehensive, but perhaps a little dry. And I’m not sure that it truly conveys what is at the heart of social media – people!

These new-fangled technologies are supremely cool in their own right, but they should not be the be all and end all. What they can do for us in terms of bringing people together and giving us all a voice is the be all and end all in my book.

There are two very different presentations below that attempt to answer the question – WTF is social media? – in very different ways.

The first is from Marta Kagan and she answers the question with all-American chutzpah. It’s actually an update on an earlier presentation she gave to reflect the way social media has grown and grown.

And then there’s this from Erik Qualman of Socialnomics. It’s a fast-moving, four-minute summary of all that’s good in social media with the sole intention of convincing you this is more than a passing fad.

Enjoy!

Social media is a relatively new term, but what it applies to isn’t. People have always used technology to connect and communicate, it just happens that now we have very cool and sophisticated technology to help us do that.

Before we had social media we had web2.0 – the title was supposed to indicate that the web had gotten all interactive and that the web is now all about two-way communication, as opposed to broadcast models.

But think about it… the web has always been social and interactive. The web grew out of email technology and networks that existed for scientists to talk to each other. And going back to 1998 when I first started working on the web, there was already a mind-boggling array of chat-rooms, forums and bulletin boards where I could chat to people to my heart’s content.

So why all the excitement about social media? It’s simply the fact that these tools are easier to use then ever, and that because more and more people are using them there is a growing rejection of traditional media. People are showing they want to talk to each other, rather be talked at.

Why not talk with us to see how we can help you on your social media journey?

How good are you at listening? Really listening?

And what if we separate you the person from the company/body/organisation you work for?  Is your company hearing what its customers are saying?

These might seem strange questions, but social media means it is becoming an incredibly important skill for companies and organisations to master. And quickly.

Let’s look at some examples where customers are delivering a very clear, uncomplicated message, and where it seems the companies involved are failing to listen to learn.

It’s probably a cheap shot to single at an easy target to single out the finance sector – but it’s fun and having done some work in the finance sector in recent months I recognise how sensitive these organisations are starting to become in the post bailout world.

So, please step forward Marbles and Thomas Cook.

I remember the Marbles credit card being popular back in the 90s, but when I went to Review Centre it became clear why it might not be as popular as it once was. If you were in charge over there, how happy would you be about this?

Can you feel the love customers have for this brand?

The attentive among you might be wondering why I am classing holiday company Thomas Cook as a finance institution – well, like so many others, they have extended their brand to a credit card for customers. It’s just a shame the customers rather seem to wish they hadn’t bothered!

How does this help the Thomas Cook brand?

Put yourself in the place of the brand managers at either of those institutions – how would you feel if you saw that? What would you do about it?

Well, Marbles and Thomas Cook seem to have chosen to ignore it, which means that awful customer feedback is sitting there unmoderated, radiating nastiness and negativity towards the brands. Not ideal.

Of course, you don’t need to respond to every piece of criticism of the web, but it would certainly be wise to be aware of it.

The reality, of course, is probably that neither company is aware of the ill-will being sent in their direction because they probably aren’t listening. And that’s a shame. Think how many people will see that over time and have their buying decisions swayed. Think how that will negatively affect the money these companies will be spending in other areas such as good search engine optimisation.

While the unvarnished opinion of customers might be unpalatable, surely it is better to know what is being said and to start feeding that information back into the business. And as marketing guru Seth Godin rightly points out, the most effective time to make acustomer service intervention is when that customer is not happy.

In another post we can look at how you can assess the relative authority of any website, how much traffic it might get (in crude terms) and whether you should pay attention or let sleeping dogs lie. Alternatively, give us a call and we can help you now.

Advertising ain’t what it used to be.

Sales people are paying for the sins of estate agents, spivs and double glazing reps.

PR has suffered bad PR at the hands of, ahem, PRs. Spin is a dirty word don’t you know?

And marketing is doing it tough – the boss wants more for less, and you’d better make it all accountable and transparent…

What are you going to do about it?

Happily in digitalmud land it’s not all doom and gloom. We have an answer to the conundrum above. And it’s a simple answer:

Be yourself. In social media that is.

Customers don’t want you to be nameless, faceless organisations that will only talk to them if your people can read from a script. That’s not being authentic, and social media values authenticity above all else.

“93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present, but also interact with its consumers via social media.”

So reported the Boston Globe about a study conducted in the US in 2008, and which showed the appetite of consumers for interaction with companies in online social spaces.

Great, so jump on Twitter and start selling your heart out. NO! Do that and you will be ensuring disaster.

The important statistic from the survey above is that only 25% of consumers want companies to market to them in online social spaces, so leave your best sales patter at home as no-one wants to hear it.

In fact, the Cone survey quoted above suggests 56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

So, what’s a business to do? Listen first – find out where your customers are and what they’re saying. Then get involved, but remember to be authentic to who you and what your brand is. If you are a firm of accountants, you probably shouldn’t trying talk street or slang with your community.

When you are part of the conversation, be helpful, be remarkable, be quick, but above all be human and stop trying to sell.