With more and more people from India jumping the Social Media bandwagon, local brands are not standing on the edges anymore and have slowly started to test the Social Media waters. Reliance Mutual Fund seems to be a new kid on the block. I happened to get the following mail from them yesterday
“Accept Button”?
Curious, I tried to check out what they had to offer and here’s what how things stand. The link takes you to their MF site that has the same icons in the tiniest size possible in the most invisible place possible
And here’s what you get when you click the icons
Facebook:
Twitter:
Orkut:
These screenshots pretty much tell the Social Media story for Reliance MF, which is so typical for most companies that are trying to be there but are no where near the optimum experience. It will take them some time and effort to understand there’s more to Social Media than reposting links and hopefully they’ll get hang of things before they run into a Nestle Like crisis
A couple days back the food giant Nestle(after being targeted by Greenpeace) stepped on the wrong side of Social Media by posting rude and insensitive status updates and comments on their Facebook page. As expected, updates like this 
and comments like this
did not go down well with their existing fans and those who checked the page because of the brouhaha. Therefore, Nestle suddenly found itself in middle of another debacle courtesy inappropriate management of their Facebook page. The person handling their Facebook page obviously had no idea (nor does he/she have any now) of the blunder he/she committed.
Now that the mistakes have been made and realized, what next? I’ve read as much as ten posts by Indian and International bloggers/social media whatevers essentially either link blogging what others are saying or making the most obvious and superficial suggestions how the tone of the messages should not have been rude etc. Interestingly none of them offered a direction if not a solution of what can a brand do if it happens to run into a situation like this.
Possibly, it’s because none of those who wrote about the Nestle Crisis have ever managed a single Fan page by themselves.
Keeping that aside here’s a quick list of things that I would have done had I been in charge of the Fan page
( I have intentionally limited the scope of discussion to Facebook Fan Page and Off course I don’t expect everyone to agree with my method)
1) Admit you have made mistake(s):
One of the best ways to start your firefighting plan is by acknowledging your mistake and maybe promising that it won’t happen in future. A big brand admitting they did something wrong and apologizing gives everyone the signal that the brand is conscious of what it is doing and sets the expectation right. Also, most aggressive critics and fans turned critics an ego boost from this.
2) Remove offensive content:
Yes, remove the content that offended people. Irrespective of what others feel I am a strongly believer that you should remove offensive content to avoid it offending even more people. An offensive status message will keep getting more eyeballs with time and it’s best to take it out of the loop.
3) Change the Landing Tab:
This is what one gets if they go to the Nestle Facebook page
The deal here is that it shows you the same things irrespective of the fact whether you are a fan or not. This landing page could temporarily be changed to some other tab, say info.
Facebook Default Landing Tab settings.
4)Turn of “Auto expand” comments:
Slightly below the default landing tab drop down is another option that let’s you configure if the comments
on a status will be expanded by default(with top few comments listed) or will they just show up as *x comments*, only on clicking which one can see the comments. The idea here is to reduce the visibility of negative content so as to reduce others doing the same thing.
These are just a few things that can possibly be done to control the situation from flaring further and in case things go really out of hand temporarily stop fans from posting comments to your page all-together.
All the points mentioned above are just for firefighting a Nestle like crisis on Facebook and are obviously not the perfect solution. Some people for example might have issues with removing the offensive content or making it less/easily visible but then a temporary fix needs to be done to avoid things from spilling over. Also, once the basic firefighting is taken care of the brand must get back to doing the right things and work its way out of the Crisis.
It’s a great co-incidence that this post comes right after my previous post with a similar title. As I write this post Steve Jobs is presenting Apple’s next innovation ‘iPad’ which represents a new category between the smart phones and netbooks. This launch would easily be one of the biggest Tech events in the History with millions of people glued on to various nooks and corners of the World Wide Web trying to get a glimpse of Apple’s latest offering. Twitter as predicted by some is almost down and so are many other platforms which were experiencing heavy traffic spikes due to the event.
This post is not about Apple’s iPad, it is however about the Irony that I see. In today’s day and age where every Social Media Enthusiast/Evangelist/Consultant/______ in every SEO/SEM/SMM____ company talks about being “Social”, “Listening to conversations and participating in them” and a lot more, here is Apple, a brand that has been in the market for a good amount of time and is conspicuous for not being “Social” as per the standards but it’s still being able to garner ultra hype about a product launch that is capable of bringing many a social networks down and get almost everyone on the ones up talking about it.
All by just making remarkable products that people are passionate about
PS: I can’t think of any Social Brand being a part of any event/campaign of a scale this big, can you?
Amongst all this hype of Twitter and how tons of companies use it for customer service etc it never really occured to me that how Twitter isn’t doing anything noteworthy to interact with its customers and offer them support/help.
Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.
Last saturday saw the 2nd meet of Social Media Club’s Delhi chapter and I along with Dipankar Sarkar spoke about our experiences and learnings from Building a Global Social Product(Kwippy) out of India.
I personally was quite excited about the talk as we generally don’t talk about products much in the regular Twitter, Bloggers and other Social Media related meets and I feel this is something that we should do often to create awareness amongst the attendees and if possible encourage people to build new products.
(Pic courtesy Gaurav Mishra)
Here’s the presentation from the talk
Talking about web products they can be categorized into two categories, “Innovation” (a completely new concept, first of its kind) and “Improvisation” ( a slight modification in an innovative idea and/or a slight modification in its implementation). From what I’ve observed most social web products in India belog to the “Improvisation” category with focus on the Indian market. Be it a social network, a platform to share pictures or microblog.
Though there is nothing wrong in improvising on someone’s concept and building a product for the local market but I guess most of the products in this segment fail to add any substantial value to the concept or it’s localised execution. Also, what makes me wonder is why there aren’t many popular Indian web products in other categories particularly Global products based on an Innovative concept(from India) and Global products based on Improvisation(from India) of some innovative concept.
I feel there’s a lot of scope in both Made in India, for India and Made in India for World categories and I would keep a close watch for products in these two categories and now that I have moved out of Kwippy(will detail out in a seperate post) maybe work on something myself sometime soon 🙂
Ego searches on Google aren’t uncommon and one of the most recent ego searches made me notice something unusual.
Yes, that’s an ad by Facebook for the name “Mayank Dhingra”. Out of curiosity I made a random India name search and
Sure enough Facebook is upto something, A couple more random searches on Indian names confirmed it
Looks like Facebook has taken a lot of Indian names(random?) and bought Google ads for them. A SEM trick to get more traffic and signups?
If you are a blogger from a metro Indian city with decent online presence chances are you might have been contacted for some brand sponsored blogger meet or the other. While I am not sure about how things stand in other parts of the country, Delhi is definitely seeing a lot of activity on this front. The PR firms and Social Media agencies are increasingly going all out to woo the bloggers to help them spread the word about their clients new product, service etc. Given the fact that me and my fellow blogger friends get invited to an event/meetup every ten days you can imagine how things stand today and where they can go from here.
While being a Blogger and Social Media guy I am quite happy to be a part of the new scheme of things but I am not exactly happy with the way ‘Bloggers are being pitched’ by PR, Blogger relation firms and Social Media agencies and I am not alone in feeling this way about the way we are approached and followed up.
While a lot has been said about this already. I’d like to share a quick list of Do’s and Don’t s for approaching us (Bloggers) and hope the local agencies/individuals will learn a thing or two from it and in turn make things better for everyone involved.
The below mentioned list is for people who want to do their jobs better and are willing to make an effort for the same. So if you are one of those lazy guys who don’t want to make an effort, skip the post.
Don’ts:
1) Don’t Send Bulk Emails/SMSes: While it might be the easiest way or the only way you know of to send email to a dozen folks, it is counter effective. Such bulk emails trigger the spam alert which I am sure would be the last thing you want. Also, being personal in your emails shows that you have spent some time on those emails and most bloggers would appreciate that. If you are new to the job or need to further fine tune the sending email bit, you can checkout ‘5 Tips for Writing Better Emails‘. The same applies to SMSes also.
2) Don’t Spam: Contrary to what you might think, sending multiple emails or smses about your client’s product or the agenda/reminder for your meet don’t guarantee any results. If I am interested in learning more about your product I’ll ask for it and the same goes for attending the meet or reviewing the product. If I am keen to attend the meet I’ll attend it, sending me reminders every 2-3 days. Bombarding me with information about your product/meet might make me lose all interest.
3) Don’t Instruct: I am not sure how it works with journalists but telling bloggers what they should and shouldn’t write isn’t the best thing. Giving them pointers or sharing key points is good but telling them you should write ‘this’ or you can write ‘that’ isn’t.
4) Don’t Act Desperate: Yes, it’s plain stupid when PR/Agency folks start acting desperately to ensure a bloggers attendance or getting them to write about something. If a blogger finds your event interesting and they can fit it nicely in their schedule they will attend it, asking them to send a cab or pay for conveyance generally doesn’t help. Similarly asking them to test a product or share it with their friends multiple times ends up doing more bad(though not easily visible) than good.
Do’s:
1) Know the Blogger: It might sound obvious but I am sure most people who approach bloggers have almost no clue about them. You need to spend some time researching about the person behind the blog. The least you can do is to find out some background of the person and what he/she likes to write about.
It helps you to verify if the blogger in question would be interested in learning/reviewing your client’s product.
2) Plan Reasonably: This is another aspect that needs some fine tuning. Bloggers are people too and majority of them(at least the one’s I know) are not full time bloggers and don’t make their living out of just blogging. Some have 9-5 jobs, some have businesses to run and thus a bloggers meet scheduled in the middle of a work week and that too in afternoon is unlikely to find any takers and pestering ’em won’t help much. So it’s a good idea to take these things into consideration before planning a meet.
3) Build Relationships: If you are serious about your job and are thinking of long term associations you should definitely spend some time and effort in building relationships with bloggers that you’d like to involved with. Assigning blogger(s) to an individual is a good way to approach this unlike anyone from the PR firm emailing or calling any blogger at random. My response would definitely be better if I know the person approaching me beforehand and have had interactions with them before.
Here are some of the links you might want to read
1) http://www.globalprblogweek.com/archives/the_pr_lessons_of_a_.php
2) http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008349.html
3) http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/08/how-not-to-pitch-a-blog/
4) http://www.ogilvypr.com/en/expert-view/7-tips-pitching-bloggers
How has been your experience as a blogger or PR/Agency person pitching bloggers like?
Update: The findings of a Global Blogger Survey done by Text 100 a few months back should make things even more clear for PR folks
A really basic/beginners guide(13 slides) to
Email notifications for various actions(like new friend request, new follower) play an important role in getting a user back to the site and making them perform an action (accept/deny or follow back). Also, given the huge size of various social networks and thinking of these emails as a customer touch point it’s helpful to have a nicely designed notification email template. I’ve written a couple of posts on the same earlier too.
In this post I’ll try to compare the notification email by various popular platforms for the basic action of getting a new friend,follower, subscriber etc and see whose doing what and what could they do to make things better.
1) Twitter:
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: Block
This template is mostly good enough to decide if a user wants to follow back another user of not but by having a direct follow button would have helped.
2) Slideshare
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: None
This template is plain and simple but it doesn’t have a display pic for new follower and it doesn’t have a direct button for an action. Also, it has two links which point to the same page, which isn’t the best thing .
3) LinkedIn
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Invitation; Direct Action: Accept Invitation.
While Linkedin has a direct action button they don’t have any detail about the user in question. Here again a picture or some more description will be helpful.
4) FriendFeed:
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: None; Direct Action: Subscribe back
Friendfeed has by far the best designed email notification template in which they have the display pic, last few updates and just one link to get direct action(subscribe back) from the user
5) Facebook:
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit request ; Direct Action: Accept Request.
Facebook has changed it’s notification from the older one (active till 14th september 09). While they have definitely gone the Friendfeed way, the name of direct action button is Login which doesn’t kinda look right.
Format: Text; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Request; Direct Action: None
6) Orkut:
Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile and Visit friends page; Direct Action: None
Orkut too like slideshare has two links to the user’s profile and a third link which reads ‘visit friends page’ but it takes you to a separate ‘add friends’ page ala facebook. Also there is no direct call to action here too.
While there could be reasons for not having a direct action button for Facebook and Orkut(because they need to group friends into categories for example) some sites like Slideshare and Twitter can easily pick this.{Tip 1}
Having two links to the same profile page is definitely not wise and needs to be taken care off {Tip 2}. Other tips like having some profile info and a display picture can help {Tip 3} in a direct call to action(button etc) {Tip 4} if there is.
As you might have noticed eventually every notification email has moved to HTML format as it has more options like better looks and including a direct action call. {Tip 5}
What do you think about these email notifications?
