When Not to Say Sorry
When you make a mistake, you apologize.
We learn this as children, and often re-learn this as professional communicators. Apologies are especially important during times of crisis or disasters to allay public fears and retain customer and shareholder confidence.
Timothy Coombs has suggested that social media can be used to monitor impending crises. But social media can also be effective for clients to build a relationship with the public during a crisis. Blogs can be particularly effective in conveying rapid updates and at the same time providing a forum for feedback and questions.
Other tools can include RSS for stakeholders that need constant updates, podcasts, and even videos.
On Feb. 14, 2007, a Jet Blue plane was stranded on an airstrip for nine hours due to a snow storm. Nine other planes were delayed the same day, and for four days following normal service still had not resumed.
In addition to offering compensation for similar events in the future, Jet Blue CEO David Neeleman issued a public apology that was listed on YouTube. He outlined strategies the company planned to avoid repeat incidents, and asked the public for their business and support.
The Jet Blue incident is frequently lauded as an effective way for a corporation to personally reach out and deal with the public during a crisis through social media. Apologies can be especially effective in maintaining positive relationships with the public, and even mitigate damages.
Many communicators suggest that an apology is the first step in any crisis. Eric M. Wagner points out that it is important for apologies to be sincere, and come before a company gets “caught.”
But there are times why sorry simply isn’t appropriate. In many jurisdictions an apology amounts to an admission of guilt, opening up doors to legal liability.
This issue was recently discussed in Canada, where various jurisdictions have different rules regarding apologies.
Richard Levick, President of Levick Strategic Communications has said,
When it comes to managing crises, attorneys should be on the bus, not driving the bus.
While this may be true, it is still important to check with legal counsel about the laws in your area before jumping on the bandwagon and issuing apologies using social media.
And preferably this advice should arrive before the crisis does.
Compulsory is not on the list
The key idea is control of me, by me, for me!
Do you prefer to drive an “automatic” or a “stickshift”? To be honest, I have never driven an automatic. When I drive, I like to have a relationship with the vehicle. But if I sat in tail-backs everyday, I might change my mind. I would change my mind.
None of us want our lives to be “dumbed-down”. We get pretty irritable when that happens. Think of the retired school teacher who writes wonderful letters by hand.
But she probably also types letters to bureaucrats on a computer and prints them out. She’s a smart gal after all.
Social media needs to give us control, not take it away
Horses for courses, cars for different driving conditions, writing utensils for different purposes. Technology makes us happy when it improves our ability to get things done.
If we start taking control away from people, they will get unhappy with us, or best work round us.
Colin Walker has a great post telling how his mother-in-law uses the internet for some tasks, and not for others. She understand without studying psychology & computer science, what a computer will do more smoothly, and what a human does better : repetition vs discretion.
The five C’s
Colin also lists five ways social media can augment and make IT more useful to us:
- the opportunity to contribute - easy sharing of information
- the opportunity to comment - your chance to have your say
- the opportunity to collaborate - work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal
- the opportunity of conversation - getting involved in discussions with others
- the opportunity of community - building relationships online
Please note : compulsory is not on this list!
Case study: Using e-mail newsletters to engage with your audience
Chris Brogan, a well-known blogger in the social media sphere, has recently started disseminating information related to social media to an audience that can opt in or out of it (primarily readers of his blog), through e-mail. Chris Hambly, our very own Godfather of the SMM, blogged about this recently as well. I wanted to use e-mail newsletters as a case for understanding how to channel your social media knowledge in a way that benefits others, and create a legacy of sorts, so to speak.
No matter what everyone says about their social media consumption patterns, e-mail is here to stay. I don’t think Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed or any new application can replace e-mail, and the reasons are that it is personal and targeted. When you e-mail someone, it isn’t just to say ‘Hi, how is it going’ (those kind of one-line enquiries are best used on a Facebook wall, if you ask me) - it is to communicate something of value. It could be about work, your personal life, something you think or did, but it is not usually purposeless (unless it is a silly forward, but that’s a different issue).
I’ve already admitted I don’t use RSS feeds, so e-mail newsletters are a great way of sending me information that I want. Chris Brogan’s newsletter is short, to the point, and packed with useful information. Newsletters are a great way of having an impact on someone’s life even if it isn’t written just for you. This particular newsletter, for example, sent me information about social media tools like Zoho Show, Tiny Paste, Mixx and Evernote that I wasn’t aware of before.
Similarly, our SMM newsletter keeps us in the loop with SMM-related information.
I say way to go, e-mail newsletters.
Connecting to consumers through social media
I am beginning to feel Twitter fatigue. I was incredibly active on it when I started, which was just a few months ago, but now don’t do much more than a cursory check once a day or so to see if anything interesting is floating around. Twitter used to be much more about links to interesting articles or even blog posts being bandied about, in addition to the usual status messages. That’s what drew me to it. Now, I feel it is more about conversations between individuals and status messages than the information I found so useful. And Twitter’s continuing technical issues aren’t helping either. I’ve been patient for a while because I understand that any website can have technical issues and things need to be sorted out, but it seems to be taking a much longer time than necessary.
Anyway, I wanted to explore the uses of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, by companies and brands as a method of influencing consumers, which apart from link publicity (which sometimes counts as spam) is easily the best way of employing social media usefully. Jo pointed me to a useful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang that aggregates some examples of companies using Twitter in this way.
What’s important with what these companies are doing is that they are listening to their consumers/users and responding to them. The single most important thing for any consumer is to know that their opinion counts. If you ask me, every business in the world should have a mechanism like Twitter where people can contact the company with queries and be assured of a response from a human-being, and not an automated response like we usually receive by email. Ernst & Young, for example, has one individual responding to all queries that prospective graduate recruits have about working there on their Facebook group.
This video, an interview of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research speaking about the influence of social media marketing, is very informative and relevant to this topic.
Pop goes that bubble, but it is not social media
Image via Wikipedia
There is a toing-and-froong going on over at Mashable today about metrics.
This is a familiar story now. Some people, Drama 2.0 being one, equate ROI with immediate numbers. Get me page numbers, etc. Others, are looking for an amplification factor or an qualitative outcome.
In his rebuttal, Drama 2.0, uses the example of having a beach front property in St Kitts. If you try to sell a beach front property without being able to point to it, people will call you as an imposter.
Well as I know St Kitts (anyone want to move there?), I wouldn’t bother with the owning the beach front property. I would just connect you up with people in St Kitts.
I don’t have to set up an office and get people to list their properties publicly and make a general display of themselves. I would just patch you in to the St Kitts community. They’ll tell you what’s for sale, show you the properties discreetly, tell you the rules about residency, and how long the paperwork will take, and so on. They’ll also help you decide whether you will enjoy living there and help you build relationships so that living there is enjoyable.
This is why “bolting” on SM in a manipulative way could be a large mistake. You build up your big fancy website? What is the “barrier to entry” for anyone like me from using your website to enhance my network?
I can use yours because it is based on “things”. You can’t use mine, because mine is based on people. And god help me if my friends found out I took money to introduce you to them. That’s called pimping last time I looked. I do that once, just once, and I am over, so-over!
The game has changed folks. You didn’t really have exclusive access to a property in St Kitts that we all want desperately. That was just an illusion (who wants to live on island without friends anyway?).
The illusion has been blown out of the water.
What can we do?
So what use are negative messages? None in my opinion. I don’t help you be telling you what you can’t do. So what can we do?
a) I can organize a site for people in St Kitts (their orphanage needs some help BTW)
b) I can think hard what value they will get (its a small place - they might get more value from connections off the island than inside it)
c) I can think about why they might be bothered with strangers.
If I can’t phrase what I am doing in human terms, all that IT is going to be down the plug, anyway. The opportunity of social media is saving costs, but not for greater manipulation. The opportunity is for saving costs of something that used to be really, really, really expensive : building relationships.
Social media allows you to move from a transactional, easy to copy but capital intensive business based on owning and protecting the ownership of expensive things
- to -
a relationship-based business where some financial capital is replaced with reputational capital.
And you don’t have a choice. Because if you don’t move, other people will do it. And you will be left holding the parcel - like that house you paid too much for (sorry! ! have other disasters in my life).
Social media is bursting the bubble of overpriced assets and pretentious claims to exclusivity.
Whats the buzz?
I don’t know anything about social media apart from visiting some mediacamps.
I don’t have a website and I have never blogged in my life. Yeah can you imagine!!!
My academic background is mainly sociology but I wouldn’t call myself a sociologist in the pure sense. I have a PhD on hold and so it has been for a couple of years. My main professional career has been consultancy in project management. I am also a sound engineer and musician on a semi-professional level.
I am on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Secondlife etc. but I never use them. I can’t find the point to use them. I have been surfing around last week to check so-called social media freaks sites. They have a new blog almost every day but do I find any comments on their blogs? No, not very often.
Are all this people sitting and writing stuff for themselves?
I went past an Internet cafe the other day and saw about a hundred people sitting in nice aligned rows silent checking, writing in their so-called “social networks”.
Shouldn’t it be called asocial media or anti-social media?
Don’t get me wrong. I am interested to plug in to this “world”.
What have missed?
What is the big news everybody is yelling about in these communities or on their blogs?
Has really something changed since the quote from Frank Zappa?
“The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows”.
Please give me comments on this one. I want to hear your thoughts around it. If you can explain to me and get me on the boat we could probably get a lot of more people on board.
Ok now I have to go and feed my goldfish (maybe I should write that on Twitter so everybody knows…).
Call to Action: UK Social Media
Look here at case studies of social media and American financial firms.
Shall we start adding min-case studies of UK social media on the wiki? Whether we helped, whether we manage it, whether we experience it, whether we know of it - The company, a brief description and an url??
HR - hold on to your hats - SM is here.
What makes an organization hum?
I am in HR,not marketing, and I think social media is going to change the way we do things for ever.
Jon Ingham wrote yesterday on organizational “mojo”. An organization must have “mojo” - that undefinable something. Yep, we know so many of them don’t have anything at all. Dry and dusty as a deserted museum.
“Mojo” is that difficult to define thing - charisma, character, personality.
Over the key years, I have settled on a key concept: collective efficacy. It is a variation of self-efficacy - that very specific self-belief that says “I can do this!” Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, but you give it a go, and you continue to give it a go.
It may not be enough to get you to the “top”. You need luck, talent and resources too. But you have fun trying, and without it, it doesn’t matter how much luck, talent or opportunity you have, you will not achieve anything - largely because you can’t be bothered. You don’t have the interest or the staying-power.
Leadership and Schools
Collective efficacy is the only known factor to influence school performance beyond SES.
Raising the performance of a school is really, really hard. Targets don’t help. Money doesn’t help. Busing doesn’t help. Collective efficacy is the only known factor to get one ‘poor’ school to out-compete another ‘poor’ school.
What is collective efficacy?
Collective efficacy is the teachers’ beliefs in each other.
We hand out a questionnaire to the teachers asking “how good are the other teachers?” The school where the teachers believe in each other is the school that wins (handicapped by SES of course - reality still counts).
So how do we get high collective efficacy?
Probably off the self-efficacy, self-fulfilling prophecy spiral. If the “Head” believes in him or herself, and in his or her ability to lead the teachers (meaning s/he believes they are quite good), then they all get going, and guess what, they get things done, and then they believe they get things done . . .
So how does social media come into all this and into HR and management?
Social media is “mashed inbound communication”. I only give a damn about what you say, if I I believe your mash-up is interesting, informative, informed, amusing . . . etc. Wanting to listen to someone (not the faked ah, mm of a professional), wanting to listen communicates belief in the other person. When I want to hear what you have to say
- I already believe you have something to say
- I already believe you are important
- I show you that I believe you are important
- I show others that I believe you have something worth listening to
Collective efficacy is already there (in greater or lesser amounts.) By providing more channels for “mashed inbound communication”, we amplify the collective efficacy that is already there, and amplify the upward spiral.
What if there is no collective efficacy at the outset?
Some people do flame on the internet. But that should be regarded as an opportunity - at least they are talking. In an organization, it is always silence that you should worry about. Someone who is not talking to you, really doesn’t care enough to be bothered. So I am not worried about flaming.
If my “head” was lacking a little in confidence, or self-efficacy, but was essentially sound, I would “hold” his or her hand a little. Get him or her to write a weekly round-up summarizing the concerns of the school.
Being listened to will have an immediate efficacy effect.
Actually, I think one laptop per third world child, be damned. I think every school kid in UK should be issued a laptop and cell phone for free, every year! The best part of all is that the kids can run this. Communicate some belief in their efficacy too!
Take away our breath!
Life isn’t measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the number of moments that take our breath away.”
We are in the business of mashed inbound communication
Metrics and clear minded thinking
I am more-and-more convinced that we need to measure social media against what we would have been doing otherwise. That is profound you know!
At Leicester, we heard the story of The Savile Row tailor who developed a successful blog and was able to move his shop to his house up north. Without the blog, his marketing cost was a shop on Savile Row. Well I would miss living in London. But there you are! Business is business. A blog vs a shop in Savile Row. No contest in terms of costs.
In terms of the other idea I picked up at Leicester, reputation - breaking into the market - was the constraint. Can social media be used to break in to the market - to release the constraint? In this case, yes. A lot of people who buy expensive suits enjoy talking about them and learning more about cloth, cut, etc.
SM costs are negligible - so we just have to look at our gains, how we would have got them the old way, and how much the old methods cost!
The business case for social media
Making the business case for SM is a different matter. Remember every business case is actually three business cases intertwined like a DNA helix:
a) the business case for the business buying the social media
b) the business case for the customer who will spend time on the social media
c) the business case for the person supplying the social media (YOU in other words)
I looked at Neilsen’s site again yesterday. It looks like magic. But lets face it. Unless you are Obama or Coca-cola, you don’t even register on their counts. Neilsen are selling off their excess computer capacity. That’s their business case!
What is the business case for the company buying the social media and for you, if you were able to develop and sell a similar service?
I like data. It is amazing what a bunch of data tells you. Powerful stuff. Unfortunately it is usually in the realm of Emperor’s Clothes. The big boys have staked the ranch against an ego-trip, you know they are wrong, you run the data, then you run . . . Emperor’s Clothes aren’t called Emperor’s Clothes for nothing. Yes data is cool. But it pulls down without replacing it with anything better.
The real issue is getting the Emperor to put on some clothes. Actually, the real issue is social relations have become so distorted, a heck of a lot of people are pretending he has got clothes, and if you are the buffoon who points out his nakedness, even with wad of computer printouts as a shield, it will be “off with your head”!
I am not trying to be pessimistic here. I just don’t want you to be drawn to professional suicide. Data isn’t power - it is a bludgeon. I believe, like the social scientist, Karl Weick, we must define problems in ways that we can do something about them. That’s our task as managers, gurus, or whatever the privileged call themselves these days. If we feel we are in a cul-de-sac, turn, leave, find a better route.
So what is our contribution to the common good?
I got this from David Terrar who was talking at NLabNetworks about his work with the Chartered Accountants. DT and colleagues were asked to set up an online community for the Institute’s 133K members. We would expect the 1:9:90 rule to apply. So we would be happy with 1,3K active members. 12K listeners and occasional participants. 90% inactive or at best lurking. In 4 months, the new “online community” achieved: 3K users, 175 posts and 400 comments.
3 comments per post (on average - probably a J curve). 3 comments per post. This is the magic number and the insight. 3 comments per post.
For everything you say, how many replies do you get back?
We are NOT in the business of content. We are NOT in the business of broadcast (well I seem to be most of the time!).
We are NOT even in the business of sonar radar. When they ping, they don’t want a reply.
When we ping, we don’t want an automatic reply. We want the ping to circulate around a person’s emotional system and come back digested, mashed, and different. We are in the business of MASHED responses.
Going back to Emperors and their clothes
Social Media just amplifies what is already there. We provide an easy way for people to talk to the Emperor.
- We provide a system of inbound communication/
The first time the Emperor appears a little scantily dressed, some people comment. Because they trust the Emperor and the Emperor trusts them, he puts on some more clothes next time he goes out. He even appreciates the 3 comments from the “people” saying where the best tailor shops can be found and gives them some custom. Everyone is happy!
If the people do not deign to appraise the emperor of his lack of apparel, mmm . . .
a) no inward communication (how many mashed replies to each outward message?)
b) no inward communication on something that is obviously important (check the last time you updated your own beliefs about what is important!)
c) no one in the “court” wants to pass on messages that imply criticism or they miss any irony completely
These are all signs of an empire running on borrowed time. Now empires are like cars, they run a long time without a service. So, don’t panic. You have time. But don’t kid yourself that you will change the fundamentals with some social media. If things are this bad, keep your head down, buy a copy of “What Color is my Parachute?”, and figure out what you should be doing with your life and with whom!
It’s disappointing to find yourself in the court of an Emperor with no clothes, but it happens. It’s disappointing that’s all. It is not a disaster unless you make it one.
Inward Communication
Now I certainly don’t have the knack of opening up a discussion. There is a personality type “the chair” who is brilliant at that. The flip side, is that they just don’t get anything done on their own. But the front person is ideally a “chair/team player” - the inveterate socialite.
I’m the shaper, completer-finisher type. You can see it in my post. Is what we doing important and are the important things getting done? I tell the socialites to kick me under the table if my timing is off. I won’t necessarily get the replies, but I will read them!
We need a mixture of people in social media and I can see a course on Belbin team roles and social media coming up. We need to get both sides of the coin: a charming environment so the replies come in, backed up by people with a more analytical disposition.
The points
If someone asks what is the ROI of social media, ask back: what do we have to get done in this business, how will we do it, give me 24 hours to sketch out how we can use SM to do it more quickly and more cheaply.
If someone asks what is SM: we use modern internet as a system of inbound communication. We will leave automatic ping-backs to other people. We deal with “mashed” replies - where our consumer has added an opinion or a variation that is deeply valuable to us.
If their eyes glaze over, and they don’t want to know, don’t fight it! You have the answer to your business case! Your next step, then, is to look at the business case of everyone - consumers, rivals to your customer, rivals to you, and position yourself accordingly!
If I am right that we are in the business of mashed inbound communication, then we want to pick our clients. We want clients who can disrupt the current business model (like the Savile Row tailor) by using social media and who ‘get it’ - at least intuitively.
I want a session on July 5 about our clients - who are they, how do we understand their businesses, what can we do to help them.
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