This article is based on a study by Nora Ganim Barnes entitled “Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media” from the Society for New Communications Research. http://www.newcommreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/customer-care.pdf

Interested in getting a job with a retailer? Signing up with a new internet service provider – or perhaps you’re looking for an avenue to slam an existing one?

Consumers now know where to aim

Consumers now know where to aim

Whatever your pursuit is, it’s unlikely that you’ll be doing your research from a corporate brochure, or shouting down the telephone to a computerised operator when Google and Facebook are at your virtual doorstep. Despite a large sum of free positive publicity that is derived from blogging, it is estimated that 59.1% (Barnes) of social media users use these channels as avenues to ‘vent’ their frustrations with companies. That being said, companies facing this negative publicity must make an important decision: run for the hills or confront and reconcile?

Unless you are a household brand that a perspective partner or customer should know everything about, the chances are they will throw your name into a search engine. As the study above reveals: 72% of people surveyed choose to opt for this course of action. If you think this is predominantly teenagers with too much time on their hands, think again, as a large proportion are in the desirable 25-55 year old age bracket, university educated, and earning over 100K each year. In some cases the larger the company the easier target they are, with a Google search under “WalMart” revealing an employee being trampled to death by eager shoppers, a unethical decision to boost Wii sales, and impending labour lawsuits that could total up to $640 Million – all under the first page of search results. Mark my words, no one is safe.

A brand’s resistance to jumping on the social media bandwagon is understandable. To a large extent launching a branded application on Facebook or even a company profile page holds the company at ransom to less than positive comments. With groups calling themselves highly imaginative names such as I hate Optus, this can be daunting. However, these comments are going to be made with or without your consent, so you may as well jump on board and utilise this as free market research, or in a truly optimistic fashion, try to resolve issues with disgruntled customers. If the statistic of ‘95%’ rings true (i.e that this percentage of complaining customers will do business with you again if the matter is dealt with swiftly) (TrainingZone) it can be a great avenue to recapture lost customers. At the very least you can promote your brand as being ‘in the know’ with where your customers are by being there too.

Truth be told, most interest groups on Facebook are overwhelmingly positive and comments posted can provide a number of benefits to companies. From “Where can I buy this product?” to “Are more flavours being released?” – it generates conversation and a buzz about existing brands and products. Given the astonishing number of users attached to some of these groups (Pepsi – 151,000 fans, Nike 831,000 fans, or, closer to home, Vegemite – 85,000 fans and Toobs – 21,000 fans) useful qualitative information can, and should be collected on the brand’s image or product lines and used wisely.

When it comes to getting criticism through social media channels, not all companies are on a level playing field – with a disproportionate number of service provider companies getting hit the hardest. These companies need to be the most strategic with the channels they use. If the major complaint is slow response rates, engage them immediately with a customer support alternative on Twitter. If you’re being labeled a ‘money grubbing prostitute’, give your customers a free branded application on Facebook or iPhone with discrete brand placement and high utility value. If you’re being attacked on a recent TVC that has failed to cut the mustard with your target audience, come clean and run a promotional competition seeking personal TVC entries via MySpace.



The floodgates that once protected companies from public criticism have now well and truly been activated across the social media space. The only question now is: how will you react to it?

You’re almost there. Just a few clicks away. As your clock ticks over to 12:04 you realise your computer is taking an increasingly long time to load. Following much distress, it finally completes its loading with a dreaded HTML error alert. As you then frantically go back to reconfirm, a heart wrenching message reading, ‘Sorry, this concert is now sold out’ appears just as your clock ticks over to 12:05….

This all too common scenario has partly encouraged bands to now create live streaming of concerts. Of course, the profitability of live streaming has been demonstrated nicely by companies such as Ustream and Livestream, but with Facebook starting to get involved in the space and YouTube recently engaging in their own streaming of live concerts, things could be about to get much more interesting.

As far as online concerts go, a lot has happened in the last month. One of the more memorable events was the Foo Fighters concert: live from studio 606, which was powered by Livestream and accessible through Facebook. Not only did this create a greater level of engagement among fans (as they could contribute to conversations between other fans and friends during the live performance) the concert was able to efficiency target the enthusiasts in the first place by tapping into the various fan pages of the band to generate guest invites. Unsurprisingly, the concert also had huge potential to expand, with each invitee of the 30,000 strong crowd, given the ability to invite their own friends.

Accompanying imageAkin to this, YouTube has also been active, streaming their second major concert (U2 live from Rose Bowl) and combining it with Twitter feeds to generate more traffic into their site. Although the combination of Twitter with live broadcasting means that the content can now be accessible to users, there may be nothing more irritating to the hard core fans than having to divert part of their attention from the concert towards fanatics posting incessant variations of ‘I luv this track’ throughout the duration. As painful as that might sound, it probably paled to the number of users twittering during YouTube’s feature length screening of the classic: Taxi Driver last month (‘Are you talking to me?’ anyone…). Still, you rarely get something for nothing.

Social media integration aside, it’s no surprise that YouTube has been slow to monetise their content. Although getting better at it now – with sponsored videos and related Adwords – the company’s loses are projected to be $470 million this year alone. Even though it’s unlikely that they will move towards charging viewers for their service, all this trialing just might be in anticipation of a change to their classic model of ‘free content on demand for all,’ – but fingers crossed that it’s not.

Despite these recent events, concerts can never be replaced, but it’s inevitable that they will continue to develop a life of their own online. Once this transition moves beyond the experimental stage that it’s in now, and assuming that it avoids charging users per view, the live streams in the future will likely become hugely populated by sponsors. Although the commercial nature might detract from the experience, it will at least hide the costs from the viewers and, in a few years time, may well become an accepted way to ‘attend’ concerts.

Until it reaches this point, I for one am excited about the shift. After all, there’s nothing worse than forking out $120 to see a band play live, only to discover the majority of their songs are from their recent album that you know nothing about. By just linking your computer to a projector with a VGA cable you can essentially create your own concert, in real time, for free, and restrict the screening to your own network of friends.

Of course, with all the moshing going on, you’ll still probably encounter a few sweaty bodies along the way. With this being the case, at least you’ll now know who they all are.

Womens groups and general consumers alike are outraged at AMP’s latest social media move, releasing an iPhone application that assists males to pick up women. Named, ‘Amp up before you score’, the application classifies women into one of 24 categories and then based on this classification provides one-liners for men to seduce their targets. For PepsiCo, the parent company of AMP energy drinks, this move continues a long running association with male targeted advertising, encompassing extreme sport, mate ship and womanising. This short sighted move however, could be a key turning point for PepsiCo leadership position, with blogging sites rife with previously satisfied customers vowing to now boycott the brand indefinitely. Of course PepsiCo is not the only company to push the gender boundaries, with many brands using the boys club as a way to reach a specific audience. So, were they wrong? Like most, I believe so.

Sex sells - most of the time.

Looking at other iconic brands that have walked this fine line, Lynx have an established position of offering products that make men ‘irresistible’ to women. In promoting the Temptation deodorant several months ago, a branded video game called the chocolate man was created allowing users to run away from stampeding women. This game is supported with a Lynx effect page showcasing women who look as though they have come straight from a photo shoot for Ralph magazine. Accordingly, this could be seen as sexist but, if the facebook fan page is anything to go by, women fans almost outnumber the men. Obviously the big difference between these campaigns and PepsiCo’s is the portrayal of women. By Lynx they are a group of people attracted to their product; by PepsiCo they are a stereotype that should be manipulated.

A number of other brands have pulled off risqué campaigns as bad, if not worse than AMP’s latest concoction. Jim Beam and Bundaberg rum instantly spring to mind here and the jury is still out on Jamieson’s raspberry ale (is anyone seeing a pattern here?), with their indiscrete web campaign of ‘Ho White’. The difference in Pepsi’s case comes down to the nature of the product and its audience. Do they honestly think that energy drink is dominated by males? Or that their customers are regularly out on the prowl? Even if AMP thought that their customers were all charged up, testosterone fueled males instead of the more mainstream Pepsi consumers, it was shortsighted to assume that any backlash would not be traced to its parent company. Then again, this is the same company that released Samba flavor in Australia back in 2006. Taste test anyone?

Was this application another attempt to benefit from the public backlash and the associated free publicity from the media? This is a strategy that’s becoming all too common. Although showing the signs of this, it probably was not PepsiCo’s intention. The application, although offensive to some, seems faintly restrained and indicates that they believed they were onto a good thing. With an ongoing push for gender equality, AMP probably would have been OK if they had released a version of the app (in conjunction to the existing one) that focused on scoring men. By doing this, the focus could have moved away from denigration and towards light hearted entertainment.

In receiving the criticism, PepsiCo has admitted fault via their Twitter page, although they are yet to feel bad enough to remove the application from the iStore. With this in mind, it might come as no surprise to the public when they see PepsiCo sleeping permanently on the couch in the future.

Watching a surprisingly good Adam Sandler film last week (I can’t believe it either) I saw a very astute and funny scene about YouTube. The film is centered around a group of young stand up comedians trying to make it big. As such, all of them see YouTube as a channel to help showcase their abilities to the masses. One comic cunningly disguises his stand up material under a more popular search title of ‘Kittens’ so that, to the detriment of the viewer, they will be shown random, interjecting clips of his material while the kitten footage is being streamed.

YouTube as Social Media

Although sounding half baked, the comic maintains that it had received ‘700,000 hits within 3 days’ and that the link provided in his stand up footage was migrating scores of people to his website. This is then promptly followed by a response from his friend that is fairly unprintable in the context of this site…

While obviously the scene is made to be a satirical take on YouTube, examples of high video views have reaffirmed my belief that outside mainstream video content (highlights of produced movie, music and TV clips) often the most abysmal or mundane content is getting the lion’s share of views. Having said this there’s also lots to be envious of too.

On the subject of abysmal, if you’re at all curious as to what the product of incest from within the Manson family would look like, check out TV Shot to Death. The premise is that a redneck American made a bet with his other redneck mates that his NFL team would not lose to the value of his mates being able to blast his large flat screen TV away with guns if it happened. As you can imagine, the guy lost the fight but won the war, attaining over 650,000 views within a week’s time following the footage of the affair going to YouTube. Although there is not much dialogue (apart from just about every Hick in the clip shouting “Who Dat?” repeatedly) it’s such a depressing five minutes of footage that it almost makes it unmissable. Just watch the clip and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, I like kids just as much as the next guy. Nonetheless I can’t understand how another baby biting the finger of another in Charlie Bit My Finger can amass over 146 million views. Many will disagree, and, tastes aside, I take my hat off to the creators, but I can’t extend the same courtesy to the father of David in David After Dentist. This video collected 45 million hits and documented a 7 year old boy confused after the anesthetic takes hold of him following his trip to the dentist. An opportunistic father or a child actor exceeding his years talent? Given that the father has now set up a website and is trying to flog t-shirts to people who now go to watch the footage, I’m pretty certain it’s a case of the former. To me, this is a bit like raunchy dancing with a sibling; it’s not strictly illegal but it probably should be.

Despite YouTube hosting an overwhelming amount of arguable entertainment, one of the highlights of the channel is its ability to pull artists – who undeniably possess talent – from obscurity. For me Brandon Hardesty is one of them. Having an obvious love for movies, he reenacted over thirty scenes from some of the biggest films, while he worked by day as a cashier. Joe Pesci’s producer one day happened to be searching for Goodfellas impersonations and found his uncanny impression sending him a script for the film he now stars alongside with William H Macy. Quite simply, it’s a modern fairytale not dissimilar to Susan Boyle, Cody Simpson, Lauren Luke and, (unfortunately) Natalie Tran.

Ultimately YouTube’s strength is in allowing anyone to provide online videos to anyone else that’s prepared to view them. Like the internet itself, this comes at a cost of being clogged up with garbage (incidentally YouTubing ‘shooting a TV’ will bring up more than twenty results).

But as they say: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. So who am I to determine just what the garbage is?

Call me crazy, but I have never been a fan of meaningless and unoriginal selling. Needless to say it was not a great thrill receiving an SMS from a major Car manufacturer telling me I had “a few more days left to save thousands off a new model XR105.9_shoot me now”.

Although the above SMS was unexpected, it was the next line reading “to opt out of future specials SMS back STOP” that really ticked me off. The car industry in general is probably the biggest loser from the pending recession, but to approach someone with no prior engagement with your brand and make them pay money for not wanting to receive your arbitrary material seems backward. In stark contrast to this blatant attempt of selling vehicles, the last few weeks have proved that we are rapidly shifting into a new age of advertising; disguised, controversial and, in many ways, about time.

Whopper sacrifice: bending the rules is the new favourite

‘Return on Investment’. This term gets thrown around a lot but the reality is that the recession has made brands focus on each advertising dollar multiplying itself. Across digital channels the lesson within recent months seems to be: ‘try the latest channel, and if everyone else has already been there – do it differently’. There are definitely channels that are commonly identified by brands that have previously led the way. Think Blendtec or Carlton Draught with Viral marketing, Dell with Facebook, or Audi with iPhone and you’ll see what I mean. The challenge now is to bring more creativity to these campaigns. Recently Burger King in the US released a promotional campaign on Facebook whereby users could obtain a free Whopper by removing ten of their friends from their Facebook account. Aptly named the ‘Whopper sacrifice’, users put their friendships (or acquaintances) to the test by trading them in for one tenth of a burger and then sending a notification to this effect. Watching a friends profile picture spontaneously combust upon sacrificing them may have been the tipping point for Facebook – withdrawing the campaign after less than two weeks on the grounds of ‘philosophical differences’ (news.com.au). Despite its short lifespan, this campaign attracted over 230,000 users, an enormous amount of publicity and provided yet another opportunity to maintain their edgy and unique promotional strategy. (See also Burger King’s Whopper Virgin and Subservient Chicken campaigns). Sometimes you don’t need the precise dollar figures to know your getting more bang for your buck.

Recently, the most attention within Australia has gone to two ‘fake’ PR campaigns running on YouTube. (See ‘Man in the Jacket’ and ‘Best job in the world’). Employing actors and ad agency staff, Witchery and Tourism Queensland (respectively) have defended their tactics saying they were victimless and innovative. I think I agree. However, my uncertainty comes down to how much intelligence I recognise in their viewership. A woman tattooing her arm for the benefit of winning her dream job is victimless until someone decides to emulate this, or worse – up the stakes with an amputation. No doubt these PR stunts have got hundreds of creative people from major brands and agencies racking their brains as to how they can best mislead an audience whist pushing their name out into the public. To these people I say go for it. The element of surprise is one of the most compelling tactics to improve brand recall and push through campaigns. The difficulty is examining all angles to ensure campaigns remain victimless, and that the focus is on creativity as opposed to exploiting the public outcry that will follow.

Where this general campaign trajectory takes us in the future will be interesting. All personalised and unique YouTube videos that provoke any call to action are almost certain to be treated with an air of skepticism. This will make it harder for brands to get the same kind of public reaction – and even harder to pick up strangers you briefly met in a café.