My prediction: a cabin full of disgruntled air travelers will use the net connections at 30,000 feet(whenever it arrives) to unleash a torrent of complaints about underwhelming airline service. This is my take after a truly aggravating experience flying coast-to-coast on Continental Airlines earlier this week, providing me with enough material for my latest Times column.
- Bernhard
Unless you're part of the legion of eBay merchants, you may not have heard that the online auctioneer is making a series of changes to its business, including the baffling idea to eradicate negative seller ratings. The changes haven't gone over so well as this YouTube video of an angry merchant disrupting a presentation at last week's annual eBay seller conference demonstrates. Posted last week it has already 166 nasty comments that seem to capture the sellers' frustration and the prospect that sellers could be ready to abandon eBay enmasse.
eBay shares have taken a bit of a beating in the past 10 weeks (down almost 20 per cent). Now, the revolt at the seller conference, captured by this fuzzy, barely audible YouTube video, is sending shares down further. As the Motley Fool wrote yesterday in a stock picking column titled "Throw This Stock Away":
... things aren't exactly verbalicious in eBay's world these days.
Meg Whitman, the charismatic CEO who guided the company through most of
its growth spurt, left in April. Power sellers are more restless than
usual, as if the wave of boycotts, lackluster growth, and unimpressive
turnout at last week's eBay Live annual powwow weren't putting enough weight on the namesake site's shoulders.
You can expect this very public break-up to play out for weeks on every social media forum and in the mainstream press.
- Bernhard
I'm something of a Flickr and YouTube appassionato. So, when I saw the announcement earlier in the week Yahoo was opening up Flickr to allow users to post videos as well -- a kind of FlickTube -- I was elated. There are incredibly talented photographers on Flickr and I was interested to see what they could do with multimedia. It's also a good move for the market, I thought, still feel. Flickr has a passionate and creative audience that could really elevate the quality of what we see in video-sharing forums, perhaps inspiring the aspiring auteurs out there. It also boils down to something Matt and I firmly believe -- online video is the future (a subject I cover in my latest Times column). It has already begun to supplant blogs as the emergent social media influencer. Give it another year, with faster broadband speeds, and watch consumer activists take on companies and causes in slick video form. Much more effective than static text.
Ok, and the response to Flickr's moment of innovation? Protests. Again.
Continue reading "When the community goes nasty. Video at 11" »
I wanted to add my two cents to what Matt discusses below. The insights of The Times' Brian Stelter has generated some fascinating discussion about the power of word-of-mouth referrals on the news process, most notably from Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Ingham.
The line in the NYT piece that has Jarvis, Ingham and many of us in the journalism field buzzing is a comment from a college student sitting through a focus group. The student, a member of the so-called "social media generation" remarked, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Consider that for a moment. In this indexable, searchable, sortable, mashable, Digg-able world we now live in, there is no such thing as burying bad news. It's impossible. This is pretty unsettling for big businesses and governments. If bad news makes it into the public domain you can bet it will be scrutinised and amplified by concerned citizens over an excruciatlingly long period.
Matt & I see this all the time (what Matt referred to as the 'half-life of information') when we conduct social media audits for our clients. A negative news event will occur, at first only generating minor reverberations. The mainstream media often misses the first ripple, but some specialist reporters and activist groups see it and they start to report on it or blog about it. That's Stage one.
Continue reading "The "social media generation" also dictates the news cycle" »
Much digital ink has already been spilled over the new GM Next social media platform complete with employee blogs, collaborative photo galleries, video clips and even a build GM-history wiki.
A fair amount also has been said about the recent online fracas on GM Next's "green" section of the site where supporters of Rainforest Action Network took to haranguing GM for what they called the company's "greenwashing" campaign (GM not having the most environmentally-friendly reputation to say the least.....and not helped by the climate change-skeptic comments of exec Bob Lutz).
What's interesting to us however is the evolving conversational dynamic between corporations and activists online and how social media is making both sides reconsider a long-standing m.o. of posturing and stonewalling.
In this instance, RAN got a lot of press and some hearty back-slapping in certain sections of the blogosphere for causing GM to close its green comments section in the face of a barrage of greenwash criticism.
Shel Holz and Neville Hobson have a good podcast interview with the GM communication execs who explain why they shut down the conversation on this particular issue.
One key point that emerges is, following the comments assault, GM decided to hold an online town meeting (RAN was invited and attended) for customers and 50 journalists to debate the greenwashing charge. This is pretty laudable and suggests GM really does want to discuss difficult issues rather than simply issue pretty green marketing. GM communications execs also responded directly on RAN's blog.
That said, listening to Shel Holz' podcast it is pretty clear that GM was thrown off guard by the speed and intensity of the RAN mini-protest. As a result its communications team decided to pull the plug on the "debate" as they feared it was getting out of control (my words, not theirs). Even though the RAN protesters were definitely out to spoil the site (more on the strategic weakness of this ploy in a minute) GM handed them a mini-victory by halting the conversation.
Now to RAN (disclosure: RAN have been a source of mine on many stories and provide a link to one of my blogs on their site): it seems to me that RAN's tactics in the case of GM Next may have backfired if they were trying to make their points to a wider audience than their own supporters.
In the past, RAN has excelled in persuading companies like Staples, Home Depot and Bank of America to abandon environmentally-damaging polices through a combination of very public displays of agitprop protest (scaling buildings, flamboyant shareholder meeting appearances) AND intelligent, inside negotiations with the top-management of these corporations.
This was a pioneering model for consumer/environmental activism but one that needs to be retuned for a social media age when companies open up their sites to public conversation/commentary.
At least one commenter on RAN's own blog suggests that the protesters missed an opportunity to really engage with GM and keep hammering home their concerns over global warming, fuel consumption and a lack of investment in new green technology. Instead, by bombarding GM Next with slogans, RAN, in this instance, may have played into the "radical environmentalists" stereotype that many companies and head-in-the-sand consumers find easy to dismiss.
Interestingly, both RAN and GM pay kudos to each other in the comments section of RAN's blog for at least getting a lively debate/argument going.
I'm sure the smart thinkers in GM realise that dialogue with RAN's leadership along with other sustainable-thinking NGOs (the Union of Concerned Scientists being just one) is an important part of helping a beleaguered company reinvent itself and prosper in a climate change age.
Personally, I think something like GM Next is a good first step (despite how stuffy and corporate it feels). Now GM, the NGOs and the customers and concerned citizens need to embrace the opportunity a conversational platform like GM Next can offer. Ultimately, how GM reacts to constructive debate will reveal whether the company "greenwashes its image".
- Matthew
Wikileaks.org is a new-style whistle-blower site that collects damning details -- from classified documents to internal memos -- that purport to demonstrate a big company or government is involved in some form of malfeasance. The identities of the whistle-blowers are kept secret so as to promote more Enron-style disclosures.
Perhaps I should be referring to the whistle-blowing wiki in the past tense. A California judge ordered it removed from the Net late last week. The judge ruled in favour of Swiss banking group Julius Baer who took the site's operators to court after it found several hundred classified documents dealing with its off-shore operations on the site.
In an extremely rare decision, the judge ordered the site operator, Dynadot, to not only disable the URL, but to wipe any copy of the site off its servers.
But this is the Internet. The site is already popping up elsewhere, hosted by sympathetic souls who want to see it live on another day and who don't fall under jurisdiction of the California courts. You can visit it here.
Meanwhile, in taking the case to court international attention is now focused on Julius Baer. What could this bank have done that it wants to silence a small group of activists?
On Friday, we asked 'are social networks stifling workplace productivity?' There are a number of new studies to suggest they are indeed.
Today, I'd like to turn this question on its head. Is it possible social networks are a force for good? Can they teach us all, particularly the younger generations, how to vet and build a network of competent connections? Can they rally citizens to be more active in their communities? Can they make our politicians and police more accountable? What about companies? Can they educate and motivate us about issues half-way across the world (there are over 400,000 Facebook members still piling in to support Burmese monks in their struggles against the oppressive military junta, a story that has all but vanished from the newspapers)? If we were to rate Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Bebo, etc. today, would they get a passing grade?
This was the subject of The New York Times' Freakonomics blog in which it asked:
Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook,
Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an
economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?
While there is concern that social networks are devaluing the true meaning of a "friend" and that these forums can easily spread gossip, innuendo and misinformation as quickly as they can legitimate information, there is overwhelming support for these forums among the academics, researchers and industry observers they quote.
As Nicole Ellison, a professor at University of Michigan says:
Yes, there have been cases in which students have shown poor judgment regarding their profile disclosures. However, tools that enable us to engage in online self-presentation and connect with others will be increasingly part of our social and professional landscape, as social network sites continue to be embraced by businesses, non-profits, civic groups, and political organizations that value the connections these tools support. IBM, for instance, has created an internal social network site, “Beehive,” to encourage more collaboration and communication across teams. In India, Babajob harnesses social networking tools to pair employers with those who seek work. We will continue to see these trends grow as social networking features are employed for fun, profit, and social good.
Fun, profit and social good. Is there a company out there that does not want to encourage such a lofty set of goals among its employees?
I've been updating some of our Custom Communication social media workshops over the last week and so I've been revisiting some social media case studies to see how they've progressed.
That's how I came across this social media activism campaign against Shell mobilized by some residents of County Mayo, Ireland.
To be brief, the locals are "protesting against a high-pressure pipeline to pump
unrefined gas from the Corrib Field in the Atlantic Ocean to [a] new
terminal inland," at Bellanaboy in Erris, County Mayo, as the BBC described it back in 2005.
Some of the protests have turned violent and the Irish government has installed a semi-permanent police presence to make sure Shell's work is not disrupted.
I first heard about the Mayo protests about a year ago when I received an email from the Tara Foundation, an activist group that campaigns to protect Ireland's natural heritage. They emailed me because I'd worked as an oil journalist and, as they explained, they were trying to raise awareness about the Shell project because they felt no-one in the media was interested in telling their story.
The Tara Foundation invited me to look at a video they'd made and put up on YouTube. You can see it here.
Now, this post is not about taking sides or making judgement on the Shell natural gas project in County Mayo. But it is about the influence of social media activism and it's effect of a company's reputation.
The original Tara Foundation video went up on YouTube in October 2006. It's only been viewed 12,000 times but I bet, if the activists sent it to me, they also found every other oil and environment writer in Ireland and the UK. And whether they realised it or not, Tara (who now have started the ShelltoSea action site) tapped into some powerful Google juice with the video: search Shell + Mayo on "the Google" and the video jumps out at you. By contrast Shell's own explanation of the project is nowhere to be seen.
Okay, so maybe Shell + Ireland is a better search term? Shell gets number one billing on that search but the ShelltoSea protest is number three with four other anti-Shell blogs and RSS-driven sites turning up on the first page.
Meanwhile, the longevity of the original Tara video is drawing more people onto YouTube where new anti-Shell/Mayo videos are being uploaded and viewed. This one, showing a police officer throwing a protester down a steep ditch has been viewed over 20,000 times in just the last six months.
Oh, if you want to read Shell's explanation of "Corrib Natural Gas Project, one of the most exiting and ambitious engineering projects ever undertaken in Ireland," as they put it, you'll have to go their corporate site and download a series of PDFs.
And who's going to do that when you can get live video on YouTube?
- Matthew
