This past 24 hours have seen the latest Twitter storm come hurtling through the social media atmosphere, sweeping up thousands before it in a big stinky cloud of outrage and bile. Not for the first time, the catalyst for the disgust was the Daily Mail, this time an article by Samantha Brick about “the downsides to looking pretty”. Whether or not they are cynically doing this stuff on purpose (1.5 million hits on one article is pretty impressive) is open for debate, but yet again they prove the sheer monumental snowball that can be created on social media if you do enough to sufficiently create the avalanche.  Read more »

I’m going to try and not let this post fall into the trap of Pinterest-bashing as seems to be increasingly easy to do so these days. The inevitable backlash from Pinterest being the cool new kid on the block is in full swing, and for all the fawning, doe-eyed ‘Pinthusiasts’ clamoring to praise the site, and all the marketers running round like headless chickens trying to discover how best to use it for selling stuff, there’s the growing band of dissenters taking the contrary opinion. Read more »

In amongst the good, the bad and the ugly of this year’s Technology for Marketing and Advertising exhibition at Earl’s Court (The ‘ugly’ being in the form of huge queue lengths to get into any of the seminars), I was lucky enough to get into a fantastic talk by Mark Zablan, Managing Director of Experian, and Simon Wilkinson, Head of Global Consumer Marketing at Dr Martens. The theme of the 40-minute presentation was ‘Big Data’, and how to filter that down to the ‘Right Data’; the stuff that will help you pinpoint and focus exactly how and what you serve up to your consumers, both offline and in digital. With a continuing focus on content marketing in social, it was a pertinent discussion around how to refine and target this content to create ‘sticky’ consumer experiences based on informed data.

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I was recently asked to help someone I know promote their business product on my personal Facebook page. “Just post a link to our webstore” they enthusiastically suggested. I refused. One, because I didn’t have any interest whatsoever in their product, nor did I think any of my friends would, and two, because it would look so utterly false and out-of-place on my profile that it wasn’t worth the effort. I explained to this person that I very rarely, if ever, post status updates on Facebook. So if I was going to break that habit, I was certainly not going to do so in order to flog a bunch of crap; I’d just post some song lyrics or a cat picture or something like you’re meant to.

I give my friends more respect than selling miscellaneous products to them, and besides, they would all recognise it as being completely incongruous with my usual mute Facebook behaviour. It’s this blatant, heavy-handed advertising-dressed-up-as-genuine-communication-between-friends that really irks me about social media, and it’s the cynical monetizing and hierarchisation of this concept by companies like Klout that irritates even further.

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Twitter has become the de facto location for most company’s social media customer service, and it’s becoming more and more common for a brand to have a full time customer service team manning a dedicated Twitter account to deal with customer complaints and enquiries.

It’s not hard to see why; it’s quick, convenient, and simple, and has a huge advantage over traditional lines of customer service in that it’s ‘pro-active’. Using Twitter you can monitor andlisten to customer complaints, and offer assistance before the aggrieved customer has even realized there’s someone listening. Read more »