Monthly Archives: November 2012

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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As all the newspapers in the land screamed Leveson from their collective front pages the brilliant Fleet Street Fox notes that “in a 2,000-page report aimed at sorting out how we get our news, there was just one page devoted to the thing which 2.4billion people – that’s 34 per cent of the world’s population – use to make, watch, read, and research things.” Leveson actually refers to the Internet as the “ethical vacuum”. Fox finishes with an excellent and eminently sensible manifesto for independent regulation of the internet. Must read. 

Which leads me on rather nicely to a little talk I attended yesterday by Twitter UK Director @BruceDaisley about how brands are using Twitter to engage with customers and how they’re adapting their tone of voice. He talked about how @O2’s recent success at handling their network outage through some excellent Twitter customer service is down to the CEO actually going on Twitter every day, searching for O2 and ‘walking the floor’ with his customers. This philosophy of treating twitter as an extension of the shop floor and focusing on human & helpful responses is something that we should also be following. Also, as a result of how they handled the outage on social, their customer service satisfaction score went up!

Now, I love Twitter. I think I’ve established that. But naming your child #hashtag? Please someone tell me that this one isn’t true…

On data and tracking interactions – Spinsucks posted a rather useful guide for what metrics PR should track and Forbes posted an article about the best time to share social content (the answer: between 10am and noon and between 8 and 10pm).

Your Facebook “Friends” are stressing you out. What’s worse: the more you have, the more stressed you will be. Why? A study by the University of Edinburgh has found that the wider your Facebook network, the more likely it is that something you post on the site will end up offending one of your network’s members. Unsurprisingly “adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety.” [Personally, I have a yearly Christmas Facebook Friends purge. I ask myself the question: “Would I have coffee with this person, in real life”. If the answer is yes, we remain friends. If it is no, they get befriended. Ruthless.]

Two Charlie Brooker articles in as many editions of this update? This one is just as good as the last one. A marvellous rant about the Christmas ads from John Lewis, Waitrose, Asda and Morrisons.

Videos of the week: a marvellous bit of self-deprecating humour in this clip from Microsoft about their progress with Internet Explorer (IE6 still sucks though) and Darth Vader visits his new overlord The Mouse in Disneyland. 

And finally: you know how the logo of Twitter is a wee bird? Well, a Latvian concept artist has taken that rather literally and has made it possible for birds to tweet!

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Last week I alluded to a re-launch of the Sainsbury’s corporate website to celebrate our 20×20 sustainability plan update. Well, on Tuesday afternoon we went live with the new Responsibility section. Eagle-eyed readers will also notice that the ‘Sainsbury’s views’ has made way for our new Blog – much simpler nomenclature. Do let me know what you think. 

Moving swiftly with the news that Rafa Benitez has taken the reins at Chelsea, Premier Inn Kensington has renamed a top floor suite “The Rafa Benitez Suite’ – perfect for short stays”. Manager Stephen Luck: “We’re perfectly located for a short stay. If he’s nervous of buying a house in the area, Rafa’s welcome to check in anytime and we will give him a great night’s sleep.”

It’s been an interesting week for people and companies messing up on Twitter. British Airways started us off on Saturday when they retweeted a rather horrible, vulgar and racist tweet to their 200,000+ followers. The tweet was up for an hour before it was removed and an apology was posted. Many people were up in arms, ridiculing BA for their incompetence. And sure. The RT was obviously a mistake. And a simple one to make at that: a poor chap in their customer service team will have clicked the wrong button. That said, BA’s response was almost 100% right. It deleted the tweet asap and apologised to its followers and said that it was investigating what may have happened. But they have yet to post a follow up about what actually went wrong.

Another Twitter mistake from the category ‘could have happened to anyone’ came from talk show legend Oprah when she announced gleefully that she loved Microsoft’s new ‘Surface’ tablet device, having already purchased 12 of them. The only problem? She tweeted from her iPad. 

And finally, moving on to actual incompetence… Rule no.1 for a creating a Twitter campaign hashtag – read it out load. Then read it again. Susan Boyle’s PR people obviously didn’t do this and caused great joy on t’interwebs when they used the rather brilliant hashtag #susanalbumparty to promote the singer’s new album event. Even though the hashtag was quickly changed to #SusanBoylesAlbumParty the damage had been done. The Guardian looks at some previous Twitter #PRfails.  

So, quite clearly, the mantra should be: think before you publish anything on social. Which leads us nicely into what is increasingly happening when you get nasty on social. Cases in point: The chap who threatened to blow up Robin Hood Airport landed in court; a teenager who posted a string of tasteless jokes about a recent child murder on Facebook was arrested and jailed; and this week Lord McAlpine kicked off The Biggest Libel Case Ever tracking down the thousands of Twitter users who wrongly named him as a child abuser in the wake of BBC’s disastrous Newsnight film. Charlie Brooker – of all people – has posted three suggestions for an online highway code:

  1. don’t form a mob on the basis of anything you read less than a minute ago
  2. accusations of child abuse don’t go down very well, even if you try to “lighten the mood” midway through them by typing LOL
  3. don’t be a dick

Sound advice if you ask me.

Interesting piece in the NYT about how Google’s autocomplete feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive and politically incorrect. Google confirmed: “The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all Web users” and that the search engine tries to accurately reflect the diversity of what is on the Internet, whether good or bad.

And finally: the best underwear ad, ever.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Remember the Tiger/Giraffe Bread incident? A 3½ year old girl writes to us asking why Tiger Bread is called Tiger Bread when it looks much more like a giraffe? Of course you do. It had the entire Internet talking about how brilliant the response from our customer service manager Chris King was. Imagine if Chris had responded the way Hasbro responded to a 6-year-old who wrote to them about how she thought it wasn’t fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. Hasbro’s response is a lesson in how not to communicate with customers. The mum of the six-year-old happens to be a newspaper columnist and she posted the exchange on her blog – which has since received 81 comments, 30,000 hits in 24 hours and trended on Twitter in the UK.

Sainsbury’s corporate site turned 1 in November and right from the get go, we’ve focused on bringing stories to the foreground and thereby showing – rather than telling – our visitors what we’re all about. Good to see then that Coca Cola have revamped their corporate site with much the same idea: http://www.coca-colacompany.com.

This is Minority Report/precog stuff: Researchers at MIT say they’ve found an algorithm that can tell what’s going to be trending on Twitter 90 minutes before it does – with an accuracy rating of 95%. Based on a sample set of 400 topics, they can tell whether or not it will end up trending. Just imagine: a proper early warning system that would alert us to Sainsbury’s or other topics trending. Imagine if they could predict the results of football games a la Back to the Future? Amazing.

An interesting interview with Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer for NBC News who manages the company’s online efforts — including the newly-acquired MSNBC.com, which is now simply NBCnews.com. interestingly, she notes that that “there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You have to tailor the experience for every kind of platform and every kind of audience. So it’s more about being platform orthodox than being platform agnostic.”

Retweeting without reading: Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella analyzed 2.7 million tweets that contained links, and his findings show that 16% percent of the link-containing tweets generated more retweets than clicks. In other words, almost one in every five tweets generates more retweets than clicks. This suggests many people retweet a link without looking at it, and perhaps even worse, vetting it.

While we’re on Twitter, some critical stats for Twitter: 500 million users, but only 140 million are active. A quarter of accounts don’t have any followers and 40% of accounts have never send a tweet…

I cannot believe I’m linking to the Daily Mail, but here goes: they’ve posted a piece about ‘showrooming’ or the moment where you’ve found a pair of sweet new running shoes in the super swish new Asics Running store on Oxford street that fit and you Google them on your phone to see if you can get them cheaper on the web. Apparently, 82% of shoppers use smartphones in-store to find cheaper equivalents online. Make sure you watch the video about e-commerce development (US centric, and very much as Amazon vs. traditional retailers, but a great watch).

And finally, ever wondered why MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore?

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Shameless bit of self-promotion to kick off this week’s edition: say hello to the new Sainsbury’s Food Blogger Network. The Network already contains 80 bloggers from around the UK and we’re looking to get to 100. In a three month trial, we will be providing them access to samples, press events, masterclasses and other money-can’t-buy Sainsbury’s experiences – in return for a blog post on their blog about our products, ranges and recipes. 

This week, Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4bn. While I was unable to get my head around how that is just four Instagrams, the Internets went into overdrive. The best place to follow the news – as so often with news about The Dark Side – was @DeathStarPR who came up with tweet after tweet of sithy goodness. The most retweeted of which was this little gem: Kind of hard to maintain your image as a ruthless, planet-destroying Galactic Empire when your new boss is a mouse. #StarWars #Disney.

Looks like a journo has set up a Tumblr called ‘Love from PR’ collecting all sorts of daft emails and phone calls from PRs to provide an anonymous chronicle of some of the more ‘special moments’ between PRs and journalists. In a similar vein: are 20 things that you should NOT do as a PR.

Fascinating look at how Nestle leverages their social command centre to proactively address negative sentiment. 

As much as I might disagree with Mitt Romney’s politics, his digital team knows how to do Facebook. They’ve developed an app, “Commit to Mitt”, that uses Facebook’s open graph data to unearth which friends live in influential states, or have a public history of interacting with Romney’s Facebook page. As a consequence, they know who to spend time sending personalised direct messages to, while broadcast-style wall posts are reserved for less committed users who might provide a more generalised visibility boost.

The WSJ looks at the pros and cons of the co-branded employee: somebody who use social media to promote themselves using the company they work for and the work they do for that company. Either way, clear expectations and guidelines are essential—both to avoid problems, and to attract and retain employees who fit your corporate culture, and your brand, online and off.

Video of the week: watch this excellent Buzzword BS detector clip from Adobe.

Gangnam style. It’s frickin’ everywhere. 10 Yetis delve into the K-Pop sensation and how it went viral.

Great post about how why visual storytelling is the future of digital.

And finally: turn up your sound, flex your fingers and dance over your keyboard for some Typing Karaoke.

Actually, just one more because it was too good not to include and it just proves that there is an animated GIF out there for any and all human emotion. I DARE you to look at the ‘When one of my colleagues opens a pack of biscuits’ GIF and not burst out laughing.