Marketing Blogs
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by Matt Granfieldon Aug 14 |
Optus and social media's critical mass
Let me introduce, if I may, Bradley Hughes. Bradley is a self-described 'social entrepreneur' who likes cycling, chess, gardening and reading. Bradley wears glasses, suits, votes green, has a keen interest in water conservation and he lives in Rockdale, NSW.
I’ve never met Bradley Hughes, in fact I’ve only known he existed for 10 minutes, but I do know he is an Optus customer. He caught my attention because at 6.59pm on 5 August, writing under the pseudonym @Entregreeneur, he tweeted that:
“Optus called following up another tweet I sent re. issue with my service.”
He then went on to write that he was:
“Liking [their] new social media responsiveness.”
This means nothing to you of course, but up until recently Bradley had been a fairly notorious #badoptus Twitter hashtagger. (For the non-Twitter users out there, that’s not a good thing.) Furthermore, a few hours later, Optus had done such a good job of swaying Bradley Hughes’s opinion that he felt compelled to tell his 4,268 followers:
“You may have seen some of my past #badoptus tweets. Thanks to Scott at @Optus social media response team I can now say thank you #goodoptus.”
I suspect Brad’s above-average number of Twitter followers may have gotten him some preferential treatment. If Optus were doing their social media monitoring right they would have also noticed that, apart from liking yacht racing and chess, Brad is actually also a politician. A Greens Party Councillor to be precise. He’s what you call a ‘key influencer’. If Brad is whinging about your brand you want to be certain you get him on side because lots of people will be listening. Whatever Optus is doing, it appears to be working quite well.
Pandering to politicians is something good PR managers have done since the Magna Carta was signed, but it’s obviously only one brick in the corporate communication wall (and yes, that’s a typically accurate analogy). My ears pricked up last week when I’d heard through Mumbrella that Optus were pulling their sponsorship of the Kyle and Jackie O website. I was happy with the decision, in fact I’d actually started a mildly successful Twitter hashtag campaign calling for that outcome. Judging by the response Kyle got when he went on The Punch, and the subsequent boost in hits that site received, Australia’s social networkers were united against Austereo.
“It would appear that our society is experiencing death (or moral decay) by 1,000 cuts – and no one is putting a stop to it for fear, I assume, that the dollars will stop flowing,” was Naked Communications managing partner Adam Ferrier’s cry in an open letter to the ad industry that called for organisations to pull their sponsorship dollars. 112 people commented and most agreed. Almost all except for one Mr Ajax McCoy:
“What delusions of grandeur some of you people have in thinking taking a few sponsors away will cause the show to implode. Absolute dreamers,” he chastised.
“Optus couldn’t give a sh*t about its customers. I can’t even get a network half the time. You’re wasting your time... I doubt SingTel could really give a flying f**k that a few over-sensitive whingers are upset that a 14-year-old girl came into the studio with her mum for a radio prank, and it went wrong. They’ll be looking at the market penertration [sic] and the demo’s, not a handful of twitter posts.”
Ajax, it turns out, was spectacularly wrong.
While no official announcement has been made by Optus about the show’s sponsorship, their ads have most certainly been pulled from the website and it would seem that they were indeed listening to what people were saying about them in social media.
Considering that Optus were relative latecomers to the social networking game (their Twitter page only went live a few weeks ago), I thought it was worth asking what role social media played in shaping their communication policies in light of the recent rape scandal.
“We are not a sponsor of the Kyle/Jacquie O morning program – just an advertiser. I have actually made no comment about our plans, except to say that Optus regularly reviews its advertising relationships, but as a rule we don’t talk about our commercial agreements,” was the official response.
That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for, but the spokesperson did open up a little more when I asked in more general terms what their plans were.
“Now more than ever, our customers are communicating online – so we want to engage with them and respond to them online too,” the spokesperson said.
“We have employed a dedicated social media team to focus on that area. The social media team are also training customer service staff on how best to engage with our customers using this medium.”
Given that Coles recently rejected Masterchef winner Julie as an ambassador in favour of a marketing strategy which involves “listening to customers and making improvements that really matter and moving the bar,” it seems the tide may be turning and the companies who’ve always said they listen to their customers might now actually be doing that.
Optus aren’t the first company to respond to customers on Twitter, and they won’t be the last to setup a YouTube channel, but we’ve definitely reached a point where social media has become an integral part of an organisation’s corporate communications strategy. Companies that aren’t active in the space have run out of excuses. If they aren’t engaging in social media, they’re actively choosing to ignore their customers. Customers have never liked being ignored, but the masses have suddenly become very publicly critical.
I wasn't picking on Optus, I just ran a few well known brands (think of Telstra, Qantas, Coles) through 48 hours of analysis and from a generally woeful set of results Optus stood out as the worst of the worst. My choice was purely subjective and my purpose was simply to illustrate real customer experiences and how that manifests itself in the social web. I collected up my screenshots and placed them into my presentation for that purpose, and they had the suitable effect. While it was subjective, the issues which caused the most heat and hate were those which rang true - internet service, iphone settings, and customer service.
I'd concluded that Optus's use of social media was skin deep at best, but your article points out otherwise. It's impressive that they have been able to isolate influencers and work them into advocates. That's a tough ask, but one which we recommend for dealing with the haters, and it's great to have this case study.
Whether this indicates that the "tide is turning" and companies are really listening to their customers I am not so sure. You gave the Coles example, but perhaps you should have mentioned the storm of vitriol which erupted when Coles announced that their new marketing "initiative" was all about listening to customers. It was an astounding response because you would have expected praise instead of almost universal condemnation. Comments poured in at 1.3 comments per minute for the first 4 hours and 99% were negative. This is typical of "hostage" customers who feel that they are trapped in a relationship where competitive choices are equally bad.
See here: http://www.walteradamson.com/2009/08/readers-rush-to-bury-coles.html
Coles is going to need a lot more than a clever social media strategy to make headway against this brand wreckage which litters its path to "listening" to customers. On the other hand the importance of a well conceived social media strategy is even more critical than ever, since its failure would aggravate the already broken brand promise.
You're right that companies who blindly choose to ignore social media are ignoring their customers, but I don't agree that is simply a part of an "organisation's corporate communications strategy". That phrase has an air of PR and "marketing channel" to it, which is why I would avoid those words. On the other hand if by "corporate communications" you mean the whole customer engagement model and customer experience lifecycle then I would agree with you. It's only when social media is analysed in that context, and aligned and deployed in sync with all other customer engagement initiatives that it can add real value and build customer equity value for a corporation.
To date, most social media initiatives are simply "campaign" and tactical initiatives with little or no lasting value to customers or corporations.
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy, Australia
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com.au
I agree with you on Coles, there was a lot of negative feedback on news.com.au, but that was only in reference to one particular news story, I don't think you can hold a candle to that and make a general assumption that people don't like Coles's 'new' marketing strategy.
I'd be interested in seeing your presentation if it's up anywhere. What sort of analysis were you doing?
Re the Optus "presentation" not it is not up anywhere as it does not make for family reading. It was a very simple analysis of sentiment and "cloud" keywords run over a 48 hour period. I can't say that it represented anything except that period, although the results did resonate with the particular audiences with whom I shared it. I just presented it as raw evidence of the cut and thrust of the customer engagement "challenge" in the social media - as motivation for proper business analysis and planning and execution of a social media strategy.
The negativity of these messages can sometimes override the key lessons, since we have to remain alert to the "15:1 ratio" of messages sent out by disgruntled customers as compared to satisfied customers. The social media is a source of new examples which all then have to be placed in context within the bigger jigsaw puzzle of customer engagement and the total customer experience across all touchpoints.
Walter