The Social Media Domino’s Effect

By Matt Harty 

Its been a bit of a rough time for a few brands recently. They have among the first brands to have tasted the lash of the mob and seen the power of Social Media to move negative branding rapidly to large audiences. 

I first saw this story “An Unwelcome Deliery” about the problems Domino’s Pizza have been having from UGC in Newsweek at the airport this week. It took Domino’s a few days to see this video turn up on YouTube and by that time over a million views of the video had been recorded. 

Then Apple gets hit. I had been following some threads about the Nine Inch Nails and their fight to get an iPhone app on iTunes because of some curse words. But then the very odd selection criteria applied by Apple OK an app where you shake a baby to death for sale . 

The backlash against Apple happened rapidly. Leading to TV and Newspaper coverage and demonstrations outside Apple stores. 

BusinessWeek have some recommendations on how companies prepare themselves against these types of problems. Number one on their list is Monitoring. 

I could not agree more.

Developing A Social Media Content Strategy

by Matt Harty 

In an earlier post, I talked about the Holy Trinity of Social Media and User Generated Content (UGC). The first step in the responsible handling of UGC is Observation. An observation platform helps you see the UGC surrounding your brand. Without the right optics, you can’t see the threats or the opportunities in time to have a suitable effect on their outcome. 

When we observe UGC, we can see differing reactions to the stories posted. We need to make a decision whether the content is repeatable or not. Clearly some stories regardless of how big the buzz was you have no intention of rekindling. There are also a number of reasons that the content of the posts may not be repeatable, these range from vagueness to spreading the wrong message about the brand. 

If we feel that the content is repeatable then we next look to the reaction type to predict the value of the content to us. There are a number of differing types of social reactions that we can observe. These include blogs & articles linking to a piece of content, “Social Bookmarking” of the content or passing a URL in Twitter. 

The benefit to us varies based on the reaction type and our goals for the brand. This is partially where “Organic Search” (SEO) and UGC can co-exist. Where a link to your website URL has been passed in one of these social media transactions you see an SEO benefit in the form of a “Backlink”. 

Firstly, there are two types of posts we should focus on. One are our posts on your domain (press releases, blogs, etc) the other are stories written by others and not on your domain. The latter is less likely to create a direct backlink for SEO unless they carry a link to your domain. However links not contributing to SEO can still make up positive buzz around the brand. 

Where we have observed past positive social reactions to particular types of content and we feel it is repeatable, the next step is to produce content of our own in the same vein. 

The step after that is to distribute the content. I will cover distribution in a whole post of its own as it deserves to be treated as a topic in it own right. 

The final step is to monitor the reaction and see how your content was received in comparison to the similar content that you emulated. 

With an eye on what the mob will respond to, marketers can look for opportunities in the brand buzz to find areas of content that can be expanded on to further the objectives of their brand. I think this approach is far preferable to the random dissemination of brand information we often see now.

Asymmetrical Warfare!

By Matt Harty

Lets face it, the world is a bit of a mess right now. Social media and User Generated Content (UGC) are growing concerns for those in the marketing world. Those who have been aware of the threats anyway.

In a case of life imitating art, we can see the empowerment of the end-user through giving the common man access to a potent broadcast medium. This has lead to a problem even that brands that are aware of the problem, have not yet worked out how to answer.

The world out there in the realm of UGC is not a bunch of sane, rational and sober people exchanging intelligent witty views on wine and restaurants. It is more like a lynch mob with pitchforks and flaming torches waiting to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon and cut down all the tall poppies.

Within the mob, there can be agitators. As the Internet is available to the general public we can not guarantee the sobriety or mental health of the users who may wish to comment on your brand. The agitators may or may not be completely nuts.

UGC gives these people a super-powered Soap-Box from which they can air their views. To make matters worse,  research is telling us that online comments are taken as truth by the vast majority of web users. So if these comments are close to your online transaction points or if they hit a large enough audience, then the results could be devastating.

When I was at law school we referred to the average man as “the man on the Clapham onmibus” to test for reasonableness. Whether our UGC man is average or not, he can cause so much trouble that a brand may be pushed into crisis mode repairing the damage.

Never before has the lone common man had the ability cause so much trouble.

Online points of transaction (Or even points close to transaction) are particularly vulnerable. These are points at which online business is actually transacted or where key decisions are made on the way to transaction. If we take Travel as an example then points of transaction may be flight or hotel booking sites and comparison shopping sites. Points close to the transaction would be review sites or destination information sites.

Don’t think that if you do not transact online that you get off scott-free. Brands regardless of their transaction points can still be held hostage. Just because your transaction points are offline does not mean that you are not exposed to the mob.

It is important to not take this as all being negative. The medium of UGC offers a great deal of upside but its dangers are not to be ignored and contingency plans for a variety of possible threats should be at least considered. As with earlier movements that took us closer to the customer (Database marketing and email marketing specifically) there are brand related risks and things to learn to avoid.

So I guess we all have to get our thinking caps on and think of how this affects our brand and the exposure our brands actually have. Then make some disaster plans and keep an ear to the ground.