Betalabs is packing for San Francisco to attend the ad:tech, the largest online marketer conference.

It takes place in April 11 – 13 in the Moscone Center, downtown San Francisco, and nearly 250 companies are exhibiting such Microsoft Advertising, Rapleaf, comScore,  and LinkedIn, just mention a few ones. Among the absolut prominent speakers are directors from Google, PepsiCo, LivingSocial, Yahoo, BBDO, eBay, OgilvyOne and many more.

We are excited to see and hear about the latest and greatest from digital marketing, and especially social media, and we´ll be informing you via tweets @grupobetalabs and @menummila . We are also proud to join the Foursquare folks at the Foursquare HQ SanFran for the global Foursquare day party on April 16th! Follow us and do not hesitate to contact us for a chat. We will be more than happy to help you with social media strategy and analytics.

and the winners are…

Macy’s,

Merry Christmas

and

Santa Claus!

- Happy Holidays!

The social media phenomena 2010 – an overview

With only a few days till Christmas it is time to wrap up the social media year.  The major common denominator is huge growth supported by impressive figures, such as Facebook sales ($2bn up 150% from 2009 and value >$40bn), and users in LinkedIn, Twitter. The mobile location-based solutions such as Foursquare, Facebook places, Gowalla and others, have introduced a whole new social media element and increased the variety of channels thus even lowered the barrier to enter to social media.  Indeed, they managed to construct a bridge between physical and virtual presences by providing versatile user-friendly and game alike applications that take place in real physical environment.

Further big phenomena have been social shopping (group-shopping) like Groupon and the breakthrough of tablets, especially the iPad with a constantly growing number of applications. All these have resulted in a growing amount of companies adopting social media to their digital tools portfolio and a clear boom in social media advertising.

For 2011 we anticipate even stronger role for the content and a more disciplined approach for social media supported by strategy, policies, and advanced analytics. And naturally, there will be news and new applications galore probably addressing various types of crowd-sourcing and shopping, and of course mergers and acquisitions.

Some brands and their social media Christmas presence

For the end of 2010 we took a brief look at some brands’ Christmas campaigns and presence in social media. Amazing but the presence was not very impressive.

K-Mart’s  “Share Your Christmas Story” and Macy’s “Believe” were in our opinion the best ones. K-Mart has created its own Christmas Community with people sharing experiences, traditions, and photos. The participants can win gift cards. There is also a facebook application with the same name but we are not sure if it really is from K-Mart. We think that K-mart has a good tactic to engage but we found it esthetically fairly modest. Also operationally, the image link in one corner of the homepage only might indicate that the company does not yet really trust too much on social media. Otherwise the company page is very Christmas flavored and nice.

Macy’s “Believe” is a charity program with a Christmas wish list application with several social features such as a celebrity wish list.  Macy’s will donate to make-a-wish foundation $1 per each delivered letter up to $1 million. We really like the visual realization of the app as well as the way how it is optimized and linked with www.macys.com.  Total, “Believe” is a great combination of commercial initiative and social media and the best Christmas campaign we could find.

EBay has added a “Holiday” tab to its Facebook site which takes the visitor to a quite nice-looking page that is linked to www.ebay.com. The links to opposite direction are either totally missing or at least not well visible. Dell is one of the most successful brands in social media but it does not show any Holiday theme at all in Facebook which we find odd. Frankly, the large e-commerce retailers do not seem to celebrate Christmas with impressive social media campaigns.

The comparison of large European department stores with the US counterparts demonstrates the market maturity: From the group of eminent players such as Harrods, Galeries Lafayette, Kaufhof, KaDeWe, La Rinascente, and El Corte Ingles virtually none is running any significant Christmas campaigns in social media.

Santa Claus and other Christmas keywords

Last but not least we checked out how Santa Claus is doing in social media. Although there is only one real Santa Claus, there seems to be quite an amount of Santa Claus profiles in Facebook.  Of course there is only one twitter account for @Santaclaus with full 429 followers anda total of 3 tweets… Overall, the Santa is not doing well at all in social. We also found a deeper research on Santa’s social media strategy or rather the lack of it. We kindly recommend Santa to outsource social media for 2011 since that’s where his vast audience is.

Finally, we compared the tweets of some frequent Christmas keywords: Merry Christmas and Santa Claus in 3 languages: English, Spanish, and German. The statistics are provided by twitwinner. Please see the results below. Happy Holidays and Felizes Fiestas!

Every organization, regardless of the activity level in social media should establish guidelines for social media use of the employees. This is simply because an increasing amount of people – including the employees – uses social media.

The guidelines should not be a complex set of rules that hardly anyone understands but rather common sense instructions with ethical and legal considerations in order to avoid misunderstandings and critical information leaks, but also to define the type of preferred communication style.  By providing social media policy training to its employees the organization assures the tone and style of the dialogue and mitigates potential and costly risks involved to miscommunication. This means that well prepared guidelines do neither control nor disable your employees but rather empower them by maximizing the “safe areas” of conversation. It is crucial to remember that in social media the organization can never own the conversation neither can it totally control it but it can control the platform where the dialogues take place which makes it responsible.

How to create a social media policy that works?
(by University of San Francisco)

Two major approaches should be considered:

1. Standard approach where only selected employees are permitted to represent the organization, and
2. Enlightened approach where any employee can participate to public conversation.

The major differences are in control, training, content amount and style, motivation and encouragement, and protection. So which approach to select? That depends mainly on the organization size and the industry you are in. Apparently training and control are easier in SMEs than in large, global organizations, and some industries such as the financial and pharmaceutical sectors deal with more critical information that needs to comply with legal and ethical rules. For these reasons especially large corporations such as Intel, IBM and many more have adopted the enlightened approach.
Other key issues that should be taken into account are:

• Application (who does the policy apply to)
• Disclaimers (legal protection to all online presence)
• Transparency and Identification (use real names and mention the company that you work for)
• Perception (how to communicate personal and professional opinions)
• Negative Content (the tone and of voice of criticism)
• Confidentiality Policies (the confidentiality policies are also confidential)
• Disclosure of Financial Information
• Customer or supplier references (do not mention names or disclose any information of new products that
  are not yet launched)
• Use of company logos
• Posing in company uniform
• Copyright laws
• Conversations should add value (e.g. Interesting content, areas of expertise)
• Regulated industries
• Professional advice (act professionally, understand potential risks, protect yourself)
• Consequences (think twice, get informed about possible consequences)

What does a Social Media Policy look like?

The Best Buy CEO Brian J. Dunn tells in Harvard Business Review about their company approach. The company implemented a social media policy in 2009 after some undesired experiences in employee social media practices. Their policy applies to all some 180000 Best Buy employees and it is built on the following cornerstones:
- always disclose that you are a Best Buy employee when you talk about the company (protect the brand, protect yourself)
- keep nonpublic financial or operational data private
- in generally, “if you find yourself wondering if you can talk about something you learned at work – do not.”

Mr. Dunn also brings up some other key points such as the values, ethics, and confidentiality that the employees are expected to obey every day. Perhaps the major takeaway is that employee responsibility does not end when the day is over; it applies to all social communication, even when you are off duty talking with your family, friends or neighbors – both online and offline.   Please read more about Best Buy Social Media in Harvard Business Review December 2010.

Post writing / 12.14.2010

Read also on mashable about Social Media Policies of Best Buy, Adobe, IBM, and Weber Shandwick.

That’s why we want to join the largest gathering of digital marketers, experience the latest and sniff the trends!

Tracy Tuten: Want the truth? “Social media research is a developing field of study focused on using passive data collection of residual elements in social media vehicles to understand consumer behavior. In other words, social media participants leave behind a trail of multi-media data which can then be mined and analyzed to glean insight.”

And last but not least at the ad:tech, brands, agencies, publishers and service providers come together to share, network, learn and do business.
The ad:tech consists of a conference and exhibition and it takes place in Jacobs Javits Center, New York City, Nov 2-4 2010. (Nov. 2nd, the pre-conference)

Maybe we’ll see you there or if not, feel free to contact us later for news.

“Participation in Social Media and Interactive Marketing is no longer revolutionary. It’s crucial.

In 2009, companies with dedicated social media activity boosted sales by over 18%, while those with minimal or no presence saw a 6% decrease. As 2010 marks a shift in consumer mentality from recession to recovery, companies must adjust their strategies according to how customers make purchasing decisions. Brand differentiation will be key, and companies must be at the forefront in areas like social web, mobile apps and SEO in order to create a distinguished customer experience.” - iStrategy

Whether your goals are higher brand awareness, more website traffic, improved customer service, product development, reputation management, SEO improvement, or advanced recruiting, what you need is strategy.

We want to keep up with the best and latest thus will proudly be attending the iStrategy summit in London, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, Oct 5-6^th. Among the attendants will be the most prestigious and famous global brands such as Adidas, Chanel, Coca-Cola, Facebook, HSBC, Kelloggs, LEGO, Microsoft, Nike, Nokia, Pfizer, Puma, Red Bull, Sony, Twitter, and Walt Disney.

We are convinced that the summit will be very productive and exciting and we kindly encourage you to follow the tweets #iStrategy2010 and #grupobetalabs. Do not hesitate to contact us later in October to get assistance for your company’s social media strategy.

Let’s click together!

As the vacations are happily over in northern hemisphere and our previous blog concerned vacation planning and social media we now want to share our experiences of using social media or better said geosocial networking while traveling on vacations.  – What is geosocial networking again? It embodies the major characteristics of mobile, social and location-based applications something like a combination of Twitter, Facebook and a GPS capable smart phone. The users are sharing real-time short messages on the spot and the businesses in turn can deploy an information channel that incorporates applications with reward programs that can be monitored. These services pursue the objective of bringing the web and the physical world together in a funny, entertaining, and commercial way. This results in returning clients and loyal client bases among many other benefits.

There are a few dozens of geosocial applications out there but let’s have a look at some interesting players. No, we are not actively engaged in all these services but we believe they in many cases should form a part of companies’ social media architecture.  The review is based on company websites, our experiences as proud supermayor badgeholders, and some industry reports.

1. Gowalla

“Keep up with your friends, share the places you go, and discover the extraordinary in the world around you”.

Gowalla embodies a city guide, friends locator and a treasure hunt game. The users check in and alert their friends or other people nearby. Users then collect digital pins and stamps as incentives and share photos, experiences and hints with others. Pins will also be awarded for completing routes which means checking in at several interconnected locations. Gowalla works in a high number of locations worldwide and it has millions of users. It is very advanced what it comes to commercial and more sophisticated applications. It recently ran promotions on in Applestores and newly announced a co-operation with Facebook places, Nike+ and EpicMix where users can view the location of friends in Vail Resorts.

2.  foursquare

“We’ll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people”.

foursquare claims to have a 3 Million+ user base and it is meanwhile the best known geosocial application. The users check in at various types of places, unlock cool badges such as gym rat, jetsetter, photogenic and many more and can become mayors of frequent visited venues. Naturally, the users share the location, tips, ideas etc with their foursquare network.
The amount of stores and locations using foursquare is probably the highest of any geosocial apps and the company states that it is growing at 500-1000 new business inquiry pace a day. Foursquare is also the most common in business use and it has campaigns with Starbucks, Whole Foods, GAP, and Sephora among others. It also announced a co-operation with American Express introducing the concept of social currency.

3. Facebook places

“Share where you are and connect with friends nearby”.

Facebook introduced its fanciest app, the Places in August in the US and launched the service the later in September in the UK. Although Facebook is a follower in the rivalry of the location-based applications it can easily challenge the other companies by leveraging its 500m users and engage them with the brands even more accurately. We do not yet have user experiences from Facebook places.

4. Loopt

“Find out what happens around, connect and share”.

Loopt was first developed for Sprint Mobile Customers in 2006 and thus, is probably among the first geotagging services ever. It consists of 4 applications; Loopt star: go places, find friends, get stuff – Loopt: find who is around, what to do, where to go – Loopt pulse for iPad: what is happening around you – Loopt mix: chat with people around you.
Loopt shows real-time locations of friends and events and it also incorporates restaurant recommendations, later thanks to Yelp plus some other applications. It offers advanced privacy controls so that sharing occurs only among selected audience which is an important feature.

5. Booyah MyTown

” Explore your city and discover real-world MyTown deals near you; Unlock real-world discounts and offers at your favorite shops”.

MyTown is Booyah’s mobile game that was first introduced for iPhone only. This one is different from others since it involves purchasing and selling of places with virtual money and then collecting income when other users check in. It tracks users’ locations but displays it all in game format thus is very entertaining.  It has recently been enriched and it now incorporates even a bar-code scanner to support product campaigns for big brands such as H&M and Pantene. It claims to have more than 3 million users

6. Scvngr

”a game all about going places, doing challenges and earning points”.

By doing that it connects virtual and physical worlds as the other applications. They run currently a campaign with AT&T where the players can get $50 off a Samsung cell phone. Scvgr also works via sms but our guess is that it is only half as informative and entertaining that way.

7. Stickybits

“a fun and social way to attach digital content to real world objects”.

This is a very cool new application that allows users scan barcodes that are attached to music, videos, photos, text, products, and many more. We see many useful alternatives to apply the Stickybits capabilities:  for instance a cv or a company brochure can be attached to a business card by adding a bar code on it. The barcode reader application needs to be installed on users’ smartphone but it is easy. Stickybits works with brands such as Pepsi and Campbell.

8. Barcode Hero

“Now it’s fun and easy to compare prices, share recommendations with friends, and discover cool products. Never shop alone again”.

Scan barcodes, compare prices, share recommendations, unlock awards is the success formula of Barcode Hero for social shopping. Become king of shiraz or queen of cameras and tell it to everyone in your network.

9. Shopkick

“Rewards simply for walking into stores”.

This involves easy check-in and product scanning processes to collect kickbucks meaning coupons and discounts which can then be redeemed for various types of rewards. Shopkick has campaigns with Macy’s, BestBuy, American Eagle Outfitters, and Sports Authority among others.

10. Foodspotting

“ lets you find dishes, not just restaurants, thanks to foodspotters who report sightings of foods they love”.

This one differs from the previous ones since it is clearly restaurant targeting displaying delicious meals placed on map bridging physical restaurants all over the world to digital environment. The interface is very well realized, and the application proves how geotagging can increase consumer experience.

How to benefit from geosocial networking?

For users, the geosocial services are helpful since they offer a real-time, on-the-spot –based system to discover new places, give feedback and share it with the network which then knows it comes from reliable sources.  It is the transparency and the opportunity to influence that makes social networks so attractive and addictive that some people make it even to supermayors. Obviously the game format applications emphasize the latter characteristics.

For businesses the services have opened an opportunity to know in real-time who the clients are where they are located, and engage with them when they are in the neighborhood and likely to spend. Some apps enable product level accuracy of customer behavior which we consider unique and very amazing. The benefit of the huge variety of application is that each business can select the apps that are aligned with other objectives. Important to remember is that the apps come with basic statistics that helps the work at the back office. . And yes, the ROI can be calculated; McDonald’s announced recently that its Foursquare campaign which cost them $1000, resulted in 33% increase in store visits.

Geosocial networking: Conclusions

The geosocial applications have made it possible to connect the offline stores with digital world and it seems that only creativity is the limit. They truly enhance the client shopping experience, enrich the promotion tools portfolio, increase the amount of information, and improve the transparency. Although the major campaigns have been for big brands the geosocial apps offer an affordable way for mom-and-pop stores to create a simple CRM system to communicate with loyal clients. Therefore, there is a good reason to say that location based mobile social media should be a component of any social media architecture.

Any problems or concerns? Yes, roaming is expensive for tourists so free wifis should be provided. Some apps seem to require a lot of bandwidth and the systems are down fairly often. Privacy – users should think twice with whom to share information since check-ins mean that they are not at home. Meanwhile the applications offer decent level of privacy control.

Finally, by applying solid consideration and common sense the users can benefit from geosocial apps since they are entertaining, informative and useful and make many even simple daily tasks easier. Just go and select the most appropriate ones. The businesses should  which ones fit the best to their social media strategy.

For companies, the benefits of knowing exactly where their potential customers are located are enormous. While in Twitter’s case, it had to grow organically, it is very likely that in the case of social networks, like Foursquare or Gowalla, companies will help them to out. The advantages they could achieve using location based social networks are far too important to let the opportunity slip away.

Since their appearance, location based social networks have been in the spotlight of all the social media scene and the hopes of the industry have been fed by the incredible growth and adoption rate this networks have accomplished in a short time. Although everyone praised the success of Foursquare or Gowalla, questions were raised about when the giant of social media, Facebook, will step into this  location game?

With the discovery of some code, and the confirmation that came afterwards from Facebook’s representatives, the answer for that question was finally offered to an anxious audience awaiting a move from the biggest social network.

What will happen next?

The Facebook announcement gave space to all kind of speculations regarding the future of location based social networks, and how the other players on the market will react, and even, if they will survive.

It’s far too early to have a clear opinion about what will happen because the Facebook product hasn’t even rolled out yet. However, some scenarios can be discussed, read on below:

Facebook will take over the whole market

Facebook has more than 100 million people using Facebook mobile. This translates into more than 100 million people who will be offered the possibility of using this feature. That is more than 100 times Foursquare’s audience. We can assume that from those 100 million more than 1 million will decide to become core users of the new feature, so this leads towards Facebook becoming the main player in a short time. There are users who might convert to Facebook’s feature just because they could benefit from a social network that allows them to enjoy a rich user experience, rather than login in to two different services. Mobile users of Facebook are focusing a lot on speed and appreciate the benefits of using an all-in-one application. Considering this scenario it is obvious that Foursquare and Gowalla don’t stand much of chance against Facebook.

The new location feature will raise another round of concerns regarding privacy issues

Facebook is already struggling with all the privacy issues raised by the Open Graph and the fact that a wide range of information about Facebook’s users is available to the whole internet by default. Although, Facebook mobile users are usually more aware and conscious of Facebook’s privacy settings, introducing the location feature might just bring another series of complaints from those protecting users’ privacy rights.

When people sign in for Foursquare they are aware of what using the service might mean in terms of privacy, or at least the majority of them. Foursquare is a new social network in which the users that have signed in so far are people actually interested in the service or avid followers of all the trends in social media. Signing in to Foursquare implies an action from the users. So the initial incentive comes from the user. The user decides who his friends are, and the service doesn’t reveal any information about the place a user has checked-in, by default.

Considering Facebook’s previous actions, it could be easily assumed that the users who will decide to use the service offered by Facebook are going to be sharing their location with all their friends on Facebook. In their attempt of funding an open web, the social network has previously shared by default other information about its users, so it would come as no surprise if the feed from those using the places tab would be redirected to Facebook feed and shared with all the users. In this case privacy issues could be raised, because what Facebook would be doing would be the exact opposite of Foursquare’s strategy. Instead of attracting users to sign in by their own will, Facebook will become “a door-to-door” vendor persuading users to use the service and make it popular among other users.

If everyone took into account these considerations we could assume that users might feel reluctant to use the new feature, and this would result in a scenario where smaller players have time to develop, while Facebook will struggle to attract users.

Foursquare and Gowalla will be niche tools, while Facebook will dominate the mass market

Part of the success that Foursquare and Gowalla benefited from was due to their efficient mechanism of determining how users sign in and use the service. Foursquare’s badges and points system gave users an incipient incentive to continue to sign in. With the help of social media marketing these companies popularity grew. What fashion-freak wouldn’t want the Marc Jacobs badge?

What mechanism Facebook will invest to attract users has yet to be seen, but another scenario we could elaborate would be the one where Facebook’s “Places” tab will become the mass market tool, while Foursquare and Gowalla will keep their faithful users that still engage with the mechanism provided by the two.

We are curios to find out how do you see this issue? Will we have one winner or many winners in the location feature battle?

Comcast is not present in the Spanish market, but this company is one of the most relevant examples of how Twitter can be used as a tool to improve customer service. As most of the companies that develop their activity in the same field, Comcast had a big problem in correctly responding to all the complaints and enquiries from their customers. Although they benefit from a powerful call centre, Comcast started to gain the reputation of a company with low customer service and an increasing number of angry and unsatisfied customers.

This situation was bound to have consequences on business activity until one man, Frank Eliason, had the idea of transforming Twitter into a customer support channel. Frank, who is now Senior Director of National Customer Service Operation, thought that it would be a good idea to introduce Twitter as a tool of their customer support service.

With a great attitude and prompt answers, Frank manages to solve problems for customers that were not solved through the call centre. While researching for this article, we found on the web several success stories related to the excellent customer service various people have received from Frank. Some of them can be found here or here.

Why was Twitter good for Comcast?

Twitter was a complementary tool for Comcast in their customer service mix. As Frank Eliason stated in an interview, they were overwhelmed with the amount of enquires their call centre was receiving, so Twitter was instantly a solution they considered.

Twitter has significantly improved the customer service provided by Comcast, and the social network brought them that and much more. Twitter gave Comcast the chance to bond with their customers. Instead of discussing with a machine that simply moves you from one operator to another, Comcast offered their customers the opportunity to speak with a real person that will solve in real time their real problems. Comcast has the the merit of knowing how to use Twitter in order to transform a weakness into strength and reduce the effect of poor client service.

What should companies consider before deciding to use Twitter for customer service?

Although Twitter has a simple functionality, experience has proven that it can be used for various purposes. If a company decides to use Twitter as a customer service tool, there are some things that should be considered before acting.

1. Monitoring tools

Every company that decides they could improve customer experience via Twitter must benefit from a monitoring tool in order to follow the mentions of the brand. The market offers plenty of paid or free options; the most important monitoring feature for a brand is represented by the keywords they consider relevant. The name of the brand is the most relevant one, but sometimes when they complain, people have the tendency of inventing “ihatebrand” hashtags or simply use an alternate version of the name of the brand. These are important considerations a brand should make to monitor efficiently the appearance of the brand on Twitter

2. Specialized personal

Considering and offering customers the possibility of using Twitter as a customer service tool should be considered calmly by the company. Time has shown that companies that rush usually fail because the person in charge of managing the account is not specialized in offering solutions or simply doesn’t know where to find them.

Clients appeal to Twitter for customer service because it’s a real-time conversation tool. They expect to receive answers in real time also. If the team that is in charge of managing the account is not familiar with new technologies, the process of the business or isn’t trained in customer service and clients relations, than the result won’t match expectations.

3. An integration of Twitter in the customer support mix

Depending on the size of a company it is important to realize that Twitter can’t be the only customer support tool. Twitter has proven its efficiency in various cases, but in very few cases Twitter can remain the only customer service channel. Twitter should be used as a supporting tool for an already developed system, and as a way to respond to a segment that is more familiar with social media technologies.  Offering Twitter as a customer support channel will appeal more to core social media users that to non-users (if they still exist!).

4. Capacity of admitting mistakes

Twitter has many benefits, but without offering a full image and access to your company, users might feel betrayed. Companies that decide to use Twitter should be willing to let consumers enter their company, as well as admitting when something was done badly. With the integration of Twitter in the customer service mix, companies should be conscious that all the information will be public, and this feature comes with strings attached. This means that once customers have access to information related to your company, any attempt of trying to hide something badly done will be punished. Twitter has many advantages, but without transparency things could take an ugly turn.

5. Crisis planning

Twitter is usually a friendly network, but sometimes the power of people is greater than imagined, and a crisis might erupt. This is why it’s important for companies to prepare a disaster plan before deciding to include Twitter as a customer support channel. Experience has proved that with planning, the consequences of a bad action on Twitter can harm a brand more than imagined. You can find more on disaster planning on this article written by our CEO, Markku Nummila.

6. Measure tools

As any other activity, Twitter as a customer service tool isn’t going to be efficient without proper measurement tools. Social media doesn’t follow the traditional measurement patterns, but it can be measured by using other indicators. If a company decides to use Twitter as a customer support channel, there are a series of key indicators it should monitor to evaluate the efficiency of using Twitter. Such indicators might be: number of complaints solved, total amount of mentions of the brand, tone of voice of tweets, customer response, percent of reduction of complaints, and other key indicators adjusted to the profile of each company.

Why integrate Twitter in your customer service mix?

Integrating Twitter in the customer service mix can bring great benefits to a business. We’re going to highlight some below:

1. Establishing a personal relation between the brand and customers

Twitter has the advantage that it’s an environment where rules aren’t so strict and boundaries are more permissive. There are some common sense rules that apply when using Twitter, but on this channel companies have the chance to establish a more informal code, and communicate with their customers on a more personal basis. By using Twitter, companies have access to more information about a user/customer. This way the person with whom the company is communicating becomes more than a serial number. Twitter offers companies the possibility of exploring more about their audience, and, therefore, to establish a closer bond with them.

2. Low cost

Low cost doesn’t mean any cost at all, but Twitter is definitely a less expensive method to assure customer service. Depending on the size and workload, costs can range from small to high amounts. A small company with a medium work load will have to invest only in training a professional or hiring one, and use free tools available on the web for the rest of activities.

An important business with a high workload will need one or maybe more dedicated persons, and a range of specialized tools in order to monitor efficiently traffic and the activity.

3. Rapid implantation

Once a plan and a strategy are developed, the implementation is an easy and rapid process. Depending on the company, implementation can last a day or more than a month. It all depends on the amount of work the system will support, and the strategic importance it has for a business.

4. Measurable results

One of the main advantages that Twitter offers is that it’s measurable. The activity on a Twitter account can be easily counted, and divided into different areas of a business depending on the indicators used. On Twitter, companies can monitor different indicators like the ones mentioned in measure tools paragraph.

Conclusion

Twitter has proved to be a key of success in the case of Comcast, and this is just one the example of the many available in the short history of social media. As stated along the article, Twitter as a customer service tool should be a decision taken with high degree of seriousness by the company. Using Twitter can be a rewarding experience, but without proper planning and strategy, things can go wrong in a matter of seconds. As all the things in the world, no reward comes without responsibility attached, but in the case of Twitter, reward is usually far more significant than the responsibility involved.

As we stated in this article about Twitter and airlines, this social network can be the key to success in certain situations. However, traditional customer service remains an important indicator for a company. The ideal situation is, in our opinion, the one in which companies consider carefully and strategically the decision of using Twitter as a customer service tool, and integrate it correctly into the whole strategy of the company.

As referred in our previous feed approximately 40% of organizations are moving to the strategic approach what it comes to their presence in Social Media. Approximately 23% of the companies have already reached the strategic stage.

Fine so since proper planning is fundamental to any successful activity. “If you fail to plan you plan to fail”, as we know. In Social Media this involves structured, disciplined, and aligned preparations in order to increase web traffic, generate leads, and grow sales among other goals.

Obviously all the large, globally active enterprises are among the most advanced ones what it comes to strategic planning in Social Media whether it is done in-house or outsourced. Nevertheless, we have recently seen serious failures reflecting incomplete or lacking planning.  Apparently, the former one lead to the most famous failure ever in social media: the Nestle Greenpeace confrontation.

We are not going to re-write all what happened but just to state the known facts: The conflict began in March 19^th in YouTube and resulted in overload of negative discussion in both Nestle’s company and KitKat’s facebook pages. Nestle prompted Youtube to shut the propaganda video down and tried to control the fan behavior in Facebook. Being not succesful it then decided to shut down the Kitkat page which lead to a „loss“ of nearly 800.000 fans. Finally in April 13^th the Nestle CEO launched in Facebook an open letter on what Nestle has done or will do in order to solve the respective environmental issues and to achieve a consensus with Greenpeace.

Is Social Media different?

Social Media as a promotion channel is new, very economic, and it evolves in light speed. The opportunity to reach, engage, and to activate with a targeted audience with size of millions and to share information with them in real time is very attractive for most marketers. Indeed it is the dream to come true for the brands owners. This makes Social Media more powerful than any other marketing method before. Much more powerful!

Social Media Power

For brand owners Social Media offers 3 superior characteristics:

1.The brand supporters (and non-supporters) tell what the brand is.
2.The brand supporters share the information with the brand owners and other prospects.
3. The supporters can engage with their ideal brands thus they rather purchase the brand than search for other alternatives.

This all means that in Social Media the community has the ownership of the power. In generally this can be regarded as strength but it also makes the brands more vulnerable. The result can be a misinterpreted communication or in worst case scenario, a community attack as in the Nestle case.

Social Media Crisis

Recently, political criticisms lead to a shutdown of the US Marine Facebook page, Kentucky Fried Chicken got some negative publicity in YouTube not long time ago, and several other cases with negative brand impact have exposed the risks in Social Media. The Nestle case is most likely not yet finished, and there are many Social Media failures still to come. Obviously this negative publicity keeps some enterprises from entering into Social Media thus meaning that Social Media is going through its first crisis. While it is growing in very rapidly, it faces a number of challenges such as policies, guidelines, ethical rules, metrics,standards, and many more.

It is not recommendable to create a Social Media presence without taking all these points into consideration. However, Social Media can also benefit from these issues and mature.  At some point there will be more advanced strategic planning including disaster planning. Finally, we need to bear in mind that the fanpage shutdown is not a solution.

Social Media Disaster Planning

What to do when things go wrong?

1. Prepare upfront a disaster plan as a part of your Social Media strategy!

• Identify the most critical areas related to your brand.

2. Identify the key influencers and get them to defend the brand if needed

• Listen and monitor permanently the web 2.0.
• Understand the trends.
• Investigate the CRM database.
• Increase loyalty and brand advocacy among your clients.

3. Be prepared to show something positive

• Address the critical areas, prepare videos, statements, press releases to communicate brand perspectives.
• Turn the negative publicity into your brand VICTORY.

4. Keep in mind that Social Media is transparent so also you must be transparent

• Tell the truth and nothing but the TRUTH!

5. Do apologize if you make mistakes

• Mistakes happen, so be prepared to “OUR APOLOGIZIES” if you have not done things well.

6. Think before you act

• NO primary reactions!
• Know who and where your target audience is and act there.
• Assure that the message you want to communicate is aligned with the strategic planning.
• Assess the crisis situation with your team, prepare an action plan to rescue the brand, and then apply the disaster plan.

7. Consult Experts

• Social Media is new. It is hard and expensive to get on top of the learning curve
• Consider outsourcing whole Social Media to specialists.
• Outsource crisis planning to remain un-biased.
• Do not stretch out internal resources, it is not the same: Turn threats into OPPORTUNITIES.

Read here B.L. Ochman’s what’snext blog with his lessons learned in the Nestle case.

Finally, we want to modify the former aphorism to following: “if you fail to plan your failure plan, you’ve already planned your failure”.