Alex Hunter

My interview with Zoopy at Tech4Africa

// August 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Brand, Interviews, Living in England

I had a lot of fun doing this interview with the Zoopy team at the recent Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg.

Brand Reputation Management

// August 4th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Brand

I don’t understand some of these social media agencies and “gurus.” There’s so many of them out there that offer a range of services that I don’t think they can possibly deliver on. Let’s look at the one that really irks me.

Brand Reputation Management

What they say: “We’ll manage the fallout when something bad happens and you’re getting negative press.”

The Reality: HOW? How can you possibly manage something you didn’t create. You’re going to suppress negative press? If I have negative press chances are I deserve it and *I* need to react and respond to it. If my product is crap or lots of customers have a bad experience, a certain percentage of them are going to let the world know about it. That’s just how the game works today. With Twitter, Facebook, etc the consumer has become infinitely more powerful than they’ve ever been before and we, as brands, are much more accountable to our consumers (this is a good thing). If we put out poor product, poor customer service, make bad decisions then we’re going to get called out in a very public manner. If you pay someone to bury this negative press, two things will happen 1) it won’t work; it’s impossible to bury all that negative buzz no matter what underhanded tactics are used, and 2) someone is going to find out what you’re trying to do, expose you and you’ll suffer even more damage to your brand.

The key to winning here is three-fold:

Create good products and experiences – Duh. This is a no-brainer. If you’re creating good product and experience, the chances of that product or experience failing is substantially lower, thereby minimizing the risk of a user (or several users) getting upset and taking their grievances online. Look after your customers’ best interests ahead of your own and it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever need brand reputation management “services”.

Create genuine brand evangelists – When something goes wrong or someone criticizes  you on a public forum (blow, facebook, twitter, message board, etc), it’s relatively easy for you to go on there and respond with “NUH UH!! That’s SO not true!” But there’s so much more credence and relevancy and pure power if your users, your customers, your FANS do this on your behalf because they feel genuinely compelled to do so. If 10 of your customers immediately jump to your defense, the original criticism will immediately be discredited AND you’ll actually enhance your brand with that public display of loyalty from your users. And you didn’t have to do anything. So focus on creating something people genuinely love – the rest will take care of itself.

Listen to what’s being said and REACT when something goes wrong – If you’re a young brand without legions of brand evangelists, you may need to take action yourself. If the criticism or complaint is true then hold your hand up and admit to it, apologize, explain the problem and what you intend to do to fix it. If it’s not true then counter with polite, fact-based argument and do your best to reconcile with the complainer. Reconciliation isn’t always possible, some people are just haters. But at least you tried and that attempt is out there for the world to see. But remember, people have to be pretty upset before they start putting time and energy into talking smack about your brand online. That means that they’ve probably expressed their frustrations, be it directly or indirectly, in the past i.e. they’ve given you a chance to remedy the situation. You can’t heed these warning signs if you’re not looking out for them in the first place. So be aware where the conversations about your brand are taking place, monitor the chatter, and react when necessary. Keeping in constant conversation with your customers means you almost always have an opportunity to nip any service delivery issues in the bud.

Have you ever needed brand reputation management services? Why? How did they work? Let me know in the comments below.

My interview with Taxi

// June 14th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Brand, Interviews

I had fun working with the guys at TAXI on this interview about the future of branding, loyalty, traditional marketing vs. “new” marketing. What do you think? I’d love your thoughts.

http://www.designtaxi.com/article/100759/The-Future-of-Digital-Marketing/

Why retweet marketing campaigns are the devil

// May 26th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // Brand

Recently United Airlines (@UnitedAirlines) ran a campaign on Twitter to celebrate the 1st anniversary of their Twitter account, or “Tware” as they like to call it. The basic structure of the campaign involved asking Twitter users to retweet the following:

So essentially, to enter the contest you had to retweet the contest message and hashtag, as well as the URL, which was basically the Ts & Cs for the campaign. You can retweet it every day for the duration of the campaign to increase your chances of winning.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. At best I would call it disingenuous and against the spirit of the platform. At worst I would call if fucking annoying. I would strongly discourage companies from ever doing this type of campaign. Here’s why:

It’s effectively spam. You’re encouraging your followers to pollute their tweetstream with meaningless crap. A few of my friends retweeted the United message and I called them on it. We had an interesting debate about the merits of this type of campaign when a friend said this:

My answer to this is no. Categorically no. And the reason is simple. I don’t follow Southwest on Twitter, and if I did and felt they were tweeting too much per day, I could easily unfollow them. With United’s campaign, I could potentially receive the same campaign message 178 times a day for the duration of the campaign (5 days.) So let’s look at this:

I follow 178 people on Twitter, who could all retweet the same message every day for 5 days. Remember, one increases one’s chances of winning by retweeting the message each day. So, 178 x 5 = 890. I could receive essentially the same tweet 890 times in 5 days. Fuck. That. Of course the chances of that are low but at least 10 of the people I follow retweeted the message at least once so I had the possibility of getting it 50 times in 5 days. Still absolutely unacceptable. The whole retweet thing was bad enough but encouraging users to retweet the same message 5 days in a row is completely ridiculous.

A simple way that UA could have made this a successful campaign AND added value to followers receiving the RT is if they had added a UGC component. For example, instead of retweeting a meaningless marketing message that is of zero value to an entrant’s followers, why not have the entrant tweet a travel tip each day with the contest hashtag. That way the entrant is enrolling in the contest AND providing a service to their followers.

Also,  users should NEVER be encouraged to retweet your same marketing message multiple times to enter a contest, or for any other reason. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.

Let’s be honest here, if your contest isn’t complete crap, then your followers will retweet it because they WANT to not because they have to. I have a feeling that the people I follow who retweeted the UA contest would have done so on the merit of the prize alone and as a service to their followers. I know I would.

I think this quote from Snipe.net sums up my feelings nicely: “Encouraging your Twitter followers to spam their friends with contests and promotions that they very likely may not even be interested in will only result in their followers resenting you *and* unfollowing the original tweeter. I treat RT contests very much like the recent syphilitic plague of Twitter-based games such as Mafia Wars.”

BTW, if you’re looking for GOOD Twitter marketing advice, check out The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web by Tamar Weinberg. It really is an excellent book.

Tag line of the year?

// December 29th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Brand

One of the funnier tag lines I’ve seen this year.

Is this the future of restaurants?

// December 16th, 2009 // 9 Comments » // Brand

My brother took me to a sushi restaurant in London recently and I was mezmerised by the entire experience. Check out the video below.

Is this how all of our restaurant interactions will be in the future? Would you be ok with that? What part of a restaurant experience is customer service vs. food, ambiance, etc.? I’m keen to hear your thoughts.

Coke vs. Pepsi

// December 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Brand

Anyone who has seen me speak knows of my love of Diet Coke and the Diet Coke brand. So this just made my day!