I’ve long thought of First Capital Connect’s ‘thamselink’ service as the train line that time forgot. So I was quite surprised earlier this year when they launched a potentially great Twitter service, promising that, if you tell them where you travel to and from, they will direct tweet service announcements that affect your journey.
The direct tweets generate and email and a text message to give me more-or-less instant notification of problems, so I can plan around them. This is a great customer service/marketing promise… I signed up.
I’ve since had all kinds of updates about stuff happening at opposite ends of their service, on trains that have no connection with my own little branch line. Oh well, you come to expect disappointment from train services I guess. Not the end of the world, just somewhat spammy.
This week, I’ve tried to use their trains on four separate occasions, only to discover that, for reasons that have gone unexplained (unexpected autumn leaf falls?), they have been unable to offer trains. Or, it seems, notifications on their twitter feed.
I’d never seek to discourage organisations from trying new things to improve their customer service or perception – and I strongly believe that the types of service messages First Capital Connect promised show enormous promise.
But if you make a promise, you have to keep it.
My frustration at the cancelled trains is severely compounded by the failure of the train company to keep their notification promise. I’d not have like the cancellation anyway, but would have been impressed with their ability to advise me ahead of time and therfore allow me to make other plans.
In the language of tweets, #fail
*===* UPDATE *===*
(no) more trains?
(12th November, noon) – I’ve found out why First Capital Connect are in such a bad way: they’re suffering from industrial action. They’ve even devised a new timetable. They just haven’t bothered to tell any of their twitter followers (to my knowledge) about this. Genius.
Oh – and it turns out compensation can be claimed at their website. Maybe that’s why they’re not telling anyone?
A voice in the wilderness?
I met with the panellists I’m with at Local Social Summit next week, and we were discussing several issues that we want to cover next week.
High on the list was a subject I’ve talked about many times before: how you attribute value to social media marketing. Over the past year, as an industry, we’re getting better and better at figuring out some things to measure in the online world itself. This is good news… but it’s not always the most important thing.
How do we track what happens at the point of sale? How we measure that ‘last mile’ is going to be critical to understand the value of social marketing – where ’social meets local’ is a wonderful place to make that connection count.
Please come along and join us if you’d like to add to the debate – the panel details are below:
Social Media Marketing – The Rules are Changing
With the rise of social media and powerful self-publishing tools (Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia etc) the conversation between brands and consumers has changed forever. In this session we will explore the new rules and what this means for advertising, marketing and PR. All of which have been changed in a flash and forever. We will also dig into what engagement, the conversation and the attention economy really means for marketers.
Moderator: Mike Weston
Panel:
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- Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO TrustedPlaces
- Paul McCrudden, of the #6weeks project fame
- Carolyn Watt, Profero
- Nathan McDonald, Managing Partner – wearesocial
The line between personal and professional on social networks has been much discussed already, but a new angle (for me) arose over a coffee yesterday.
As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?
I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.
We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing. For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).
Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.
So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?
Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.
But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.
Broad's career takes off
Disclosure: I’m a bit schizophrenic when it comes to nationality – I’m a Kiwi by upbringing but have lived in the UK since I was 20. In other words, this weekend, in sporting terms, was golden for me: NZ’s All Blacks beat the Australian Wallabies 18-19 in the Rugby to secure the Bledisloe Cup and England clinched the final (cricket) test match of the Ashes series to win the trophy back at the Oval.
Throughout my time in the online business world, I’ve recognised that sport is a key ‘passion centre’ driving the way that people consume media online – be it on any of the ‘three screens’ we like to talk about.
But for me, one of the key elements of this summer’s Ashes series has been the way in which Twitter has played a significant role. If I had a pound for every time I’ve read Lily Allen’s comments about cricket…
Not just that, but there have been tweets galore from various cricketers – including Graeme Swann (who got into mildly hot water when clearly tweeting while driving), James Anderson and (most controversially) Phillip Hughes, whose one and only tweet revealed that he’d been dropped from the Australian side before the news had reached the England team in more conventional fashion.
Against a backdrop where a research company derided most tweets as ‘meaningless babble’, it seems to be meaningless babble that newspapers love quoting…
More to the point, to me, it signals again that we have moved further and further away from a world where what makes it into the public domain is controlled by how interesting the comments are to real people rather than to the editors of various forms of broadcast media. Or, put another way, the ‘democratisation of the means of distribution’ of content.
It’s a delight to see well-thought out and well-reasoned arguments being put forward about online marketing.
I should declare an interest here – I’m VP International for wunderloop, who offer behavioural and other forms of targeting, wrapped in the Connect ad exchange… so I’m not exactly impartial.
However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.
How much of a factor depends (at least in part) on the aims of the campaign – for example: is it the influence of brand associations or is it purely direct response?
Again, this is not a binary question – there are definite shades of grey.
Either way, what the industry is seeing – and accelerated by the current economic conditions – is a shift in buying patterns from premium to discretionary advertising inventory. This is a trend that was happening in any case, but which a softer buying market is accelerating.
Targeting (BT or otherwise) offers benefits on both sides of the media buying/selling equation: buyers can get better placed campaigns to drive whatever measurable benefits the campaign is aimed at; sellers can get a better price for the inventory they select by making sure that they put the right inventory into the mix for their customers.
And what do the audience get?
Content, in one shape or form or another – and mostly free of charge.
When I started in the online business a dozen or so years ago, my dad would always ask “yes, but who PAYS for it?” In the late ’90s, that was a rare question to ask.
Most forms of payment, other than ad-funding, have been gradually debunked: subscriptions models have not really taken off; micro-payments exist but don’t provide the currency to compensate for the development of web systems or creating content; fees from ISPs have been stripped away, packaged or reduced to commodity pricing. So ad-funding is (for most online content) an inevitability – as well as very competitive.
Which means that attempts to add value to discretionary inventory are here to stay too.
| 3.2 |
Some interesting teaser campaign activity going on in London this morning – there’s a website (www.nudeinascarf.com) and a twitter account (@nudeinascarf) trying to build some excitement for something to be revealed (sic) at 3.08 pm today.
Now I don’t want to spoil all the fun, but there are pretty clear clues in the timing (and a simple DNS look up will reveal who is responsible for this).
But in an economic environment when there’s so much talk about the parlous state of car sales I’ll be very interested to hear how well this does in terms of shifting metal.
Is there a link to today’s budget announcements involved as well? £2000 to buy a new car anyone?
| 3.2 |
… but it seems that (some ways of using) Twitter might not be free for much longer..
Amid rumours that Twitter and Amazon are in talks about a potential acquisition, it seems that Twitter are considering how to charge people to use their services.
But surely there is some mistake in this piece over on Brand Republic, who quote SalesForce.com’s charging structure at $995 per month?
Maybe not: the idea is quite an interesting one. You are basically asking Twitter to scour tweets for customer comments about your company – allowing you to then respond directly (and publicly) to people who are complaining, complementing or looking for info about your business.
This reminds me a lot of the things that Jeff Jarvis talks about in his excellent book “What Would Google Do?”. He describes the fall-out from his ‘Dell Sucks’ post(s) a few years back – and the whole question around whether companies should be monitoring the buzz around their brands from blogs. (answer: yes). And lambasting the response that said: “We look but we don’t touch” given by Dell when they were asked about their approach to consumer comments on blogs.
In other words, I (for one) thoroughly welcome this idea. Who knows, maybe customer service will improve generally if companies start listening to their customers?
(I know, radical thought, isn’t it?)
| 3.2 |
I wish I could be more surprised about this news, but there’s a local/social media site in the US (and as of last year I believe over here now too) call Yelp who have been accused of some, let’s say ‘anti-social’ business practice.
There are a few sources for this, but this article in the East Bay Express (with thanks to them for the excellent illustration I’ve borrowed here) sums up the allegation pretty well.
Sandlines has a lot of interest in the intersection of local information with reviews/user generated content and to me this is up a level from what I’d feared about this intersection. I’d been concerned about customers using their ability to post bad reviews as a negotiating stick as something that fundamentally undermined the integrity of review services – much as happened on Ebay before ‘negative feedback’ was banished.
But Yelp appear, from this article, to have taken this to a whole new level.
Qype, who’ve been cast as a company who’ve, erm, borrowed liberally from Yelp’s business model have, I hope, left this element Stateside?
As I was writing this article Yelp’s CEO published a response on the Yelp Blog – sandlines is not qualified to offer judgment on which side of this dispute is correct.
However, I remain firmly of the view that – if your business is publishing customer reviews (whatever the business) – then editorial integrity should dictate that you do not mess with those reviews for reasons other than decency and accuracy. You certainly should not (IMHO) massage results in return for commercial consideration.
| 2.5 |
Sandlines is indebted to @simon_baptist for sharing two links to blogs talking about how Twitter is making some significant revenues for other companies.
- Dell has claimed to $1m in revenue last year from Twitter alerts – makes sense to me. Kind of next-gen email alerts.
- A terrific comment on a post about Twitter’s business model: investors are saying that they can afford to take their time in finding the right model. This is not the typical situation for pre-revenue companies in the current economy, to say the least!
| 3.2 |
the price of success
I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.
Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.
One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.
Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that @gordonm’s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.
I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.
So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?
One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.” This from my iPhone.
Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.
It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.
Anyone else?
| 3.2 |
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