I read a tale of woe from the Economist this week, about how both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways had flown into turbulence over their respective employees’ use of blogs and social networks. Seems that passengers took a dim view of being described in less than flattering terms online.

Odd that a similar furore didn’t arise when Air Babylon was published, yet the idea is essentially the same. Hence, I guess, the use of ‘Anonymous’ as the alleged source of the insider’s view.

It’s amazing how badly some organisations are dealing with the democratisation of production and distribution of content that characterise the web 2.0 world.

I recall a couple of years ago being on a panel at a marketing conference at which we were asked by a marketer from a University how he should handle the fact that students were using social networks to actually tell prospective students what life was like at his university. Should he ‘control it’?

My jaw is still bruised from it’s severe drop when a fellow panellist told him “Yes!”

That is, not just contribute to the discussion, but actually try to quash genuinely expressed views.

I wonder if the same answer would be give a couple of years later? Surely to do this is merely chasing bubbles in a water bed. You might stop them appearing in that location, but the commentary will merely appear somewhere else - and probably with deeper bitterness.

Anyone remember f***edcompany.com? I wonder if we’re due a version of that for social media snafus.

Tags: air babylon, BA, british airways, economist, facebook, fuckedcompany, snafu, social media marketing, virgin atlantic, web 2.0

It’s a personal bugbear of mine: the emphasis on getting a good measurement versus the actual delivery of results. It manifests in many ways - I recall a conversation with a digital media sales guy who was determined to tell me that the best thing about the web was that you could measure everything. Never mind how WELL it worked, the measurement was the best part.

And yes, measurement has value (usually to help improve results), but there is a point at which the actual value of what you are doing gets lost.

This is very apparent in customer service situations.

My wife took her car to the local dealership for its annual service a few months back. The customer service was, at best, average… actually, we had cause to feel it was not even that good. But the Service Manager was determined we should, nevertheless, give them a 10/10 in the customer satisfaction survey we were about to be invited to complete. Anything less than that, he told us, and his operation would get a black mark.

We were then told several more times that a survey was coming up. Despite having nothing to do with the service, I was telephoned and asked what I thought of the service - and to make sure we’d give a good mark in the service. When I indicated dissatisfaction, I was pressed to put this aside for the forthcoming service and still give a good mark.

By the time the survey came around… well, I’m sure you can guess my mood.

All this came flooding back to me with a piece in the paper today about a man who, having been told (rudely, it seems) that he could not extend his overdraft with the Abbey, was pressed to give a good mark in the post-call survey. The results make painful reading.

In either case, had a fraction of the effort expended trying to persuade the customer to mark the service well gone into actually providing good service, everyone would have been much happier.

So I will take actual positive experience over survey results every time.

… and that is reflected in the way consumers prefer peer reviews to marketing spiel every time too.

Tags: abbey, customer satisfaction, mercedes, survey

My post on Friday sparked a couple of conversations offline about participation in communities: how do you get people to contribute in an online community?

There’s a huge surge in interest in the ecommerce community, for example, in posting customer reviews on web stores. A couple of interesting businesses in particular (ReeVoo and BazaarVoice) are based around this concept, and both seem to be doing quite nicely thank you.

Over at the IMRG, I’ve participated in/listened to some discussions around the issues involved here - and a big initial concern for e-retailers is around the nature of things that people will say. The assumption is that consumers are far more likely to post negative comments than rave about good stuff. Apparently this assumption is false.

And yet, away from the direct retail environment, one of the themes I’ve heard from new (and new-ish) businesses is around the difficulty in getting conversations started at all. It seems that once they’re underway, it’s somewhat easier to keep it going, but seeding the discussion is a tougher proposition.

What does the Sandlines audience think? I’d love to hear back from people about their ideas on this? Or experiences?

Tags: BazaarVoice, communities, ReeVoo, Reviews

Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!

Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?

I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.

But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about - i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.

That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone - or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.

And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.

That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.

Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.

Tags: iphone, iPod Touch, local, location, relevance, social networking, ugc, user generated content, web 3.0

So it turns out that people trust what they say to each other much more than they trust what marketers tell them. Do I hear gasps of amazement? I’m not deeply surprised.

A friend of mine recently shared some research she’d found about levels of trust in various media. It deeply re-inforces Sandlines opinions about the shift in the balance of power from marketer to consumer in forming opinions. It makes for interesting reading, I thought. Turns our that our faith in Fleet Street is a little less than we hold in what a complete stranger with no credentials tells us in a blog.

What price your banner ad now?

Now, I’m tempted to give you a PO Box number and asking you to send me money - just in the interests of updating an experiment that was tried in a newspaper in the US last century…(which worked by the way). But maybe that’s where it all started to go wrong for that industry?

Seriously though, it does re-inforce why dedicated review sites and customer reviews on retailers sites do so well…

Tags: Reviews, ugc, user generated content, web 2.0, web 3.0