CitizenSpin

Citizen blackmail or legitimate consumer campaign? Land Rover response contrasts Dell Hell

In contrast to the Dell Hell and Dell Hell 2 postings, it appears Land Rover in Britain is attempting to engage with consumers who’ve bought their new Discovery model and are dissatisfied with it.
Adrian Melrose has been cataloguing his troubles with two successive Discover models at his site www.haveyoursay.com. Apparently the site gets 700 visitors a day, and built up quite a head of steam amongst consumers via the blog. He eventually had his faulty motor replaced.
Neville Hobson has followed the saga and reported that Land Rover were planning to use the www.haveyoursay.com site as a forum for consumers – to engage them in a dialogue about issues. Land Rover’s Customer service chief, Mike Mulholland, said that the company had not been across online issues, but now customer feedback can be found here.
It’s a big move for a company to tackle criticism head-on – and is a brave move. It’s also a great opportunity – they have an audience of bloggers out there, and if the company listens to them they will have converted them from being detractors into brand advocates. The company can start a corporate blog and also start a genuine two-way dialogue.
But these new instances of consumer campaigning raise new issues around the role blogs can play in forcing a poor customer service issue into the public eye. Is it ground breaking citizen journalism, or a case of one consumer with a gripe being able to hold a company to ransom?
However, now that Land Rover have the ear of thousands of interested and connected customers, they have un unrepeatable opportunity to change the climate of opinion about them, as they have started doing with Mike Mulholland’s response.

Matt

Dell Hell - it continues

Following up to my previous post on Jeff Jarvis’ battle with dell – here’s proof that what goes on in the bloggsphere is picked up by mainstream media.
The whole sorry tale of Dell’s refusal to acknowledge problems with customer service is played out in the Media Guardian – the media supplement of one of a UK national paper. Jeff Jarvis explains his motivation for using his blog to attack Dell in the first place:

“I decided to turn this into a test: Was Dell reading blogs? Would Dell respond to me in our public forum? Would it recognise the PR crisisette that was brewing? Simple answer: No. Dell was silent. Dell failed the test. I emailed its marketing department: Anybody home? Anybody blogging? Nothing. I finally sent (and blogged) an email to the chief marketing officer and US VP (and the chief ethics officer, for good measure), begging for relief.”

… and the buzz that grew up around it – damaging Dell’s reputation:

“My blog saga garnered not only comments and links but also press coverage from tech blogs, newspapers, and magazines (see www. buzzmachine.com/?tag=dell). But the most telling moment came in a blog post by Toronto venture capitalist Rick Segal, who overheard a bank teller in his office food court saying, "I was going to buy a new Dell but did you hear about Jeff Jarvis and the absolute hell he is going through with them?" Says Segal: "Lots of people are making the assumption that 'average people' or 'the masses' don't really see/read blogs, so they can take a little heat and move on. Big mistake."

It just goes to show that good environmental scanning – by looking at what’s being said online – and using sites like Technorati.com or Icerocket.com to see what’s being said in the blogshpere – can help to highlight upcoming issues before they become much bigger, and more possibly costly, corporate issues.
Jarvis offers two other pieces of advice for corporations:
1) Talk with your consumers. A Dell PR executive told blogger and Houston Chronicle columnist Dwight Silverman that the company's blog policy was, in Silverman's words, "look, don't touch". How insulting: You ignore you customers. How much better it would be to ask their advice. Beats any consultant.
2) Blog. If execs at Microsoft, Sun, and even GM can, you can. Show that you are open and unafraid to engage your public. Beats PR.

None of it rocket science, though it does require a proactive corporate communications department with the clout to instigate some action when they see and issue arising.
Matt

Podcasting passing phase - factor in the fad factor

In a well-argued post on Chalene Li’s blog, Ted Schadler of Forrester Research suggests that podcasting is a feature of Internet Radio – rather than being a new phenomena in its own right.
He neatly summarises the approach of the main players so far:

“In Apple’s view of the world, podcasting is radio reinvented -- as long as it runs on an iPod. To the rising tide of podcast hosts, podcasting is better than blogging for becoming famous. To venture capitalists like Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, podcasting is a bet on the next big thing. To commercial operators like Clear Channel, it’s yet another channel for selling advertisements.”

He argues that while take-up of podcasting is expected to be rapid and show dramatic growth, it is always this way on the internet – early enthusiasm followed by disenchantment:

“A sober view will acknowledge podcasting coolness -- how else could Dawn and Drew reach beyond Wisconsin? -- but will also consider the fad factor. Like other Internet-enabled things, podcast listening will follow a natural progression: enthusiastic experimentation, disenchanted abandonment, and value-driven adoption.”

While the tools are there to allow users to experiment and download numerous podcasts, Shadler argues that consumers will soon become overwhelmed with the content available, and sometime less than enamoured with the quality of the programming. We’re in the early days of the land grab to establish a podcasting bridgehead.
Forrester is predicting 12 million households will be podcasting listeners by the end of the decade.
However, I think this very sensible approach is missing some of the opportunities offers. Here in the UK, sponsorship rules are restrictive, and the BBC has a big impact on the radio market. What’s to stop major brands supporting product launches with podcast programming, or to run their own regular podcast programming? French Connection launched their own radio station to support product promotion FCUK FM (see the link from FCUK.com), podcasting would provide a less expensive version with a distribution mechanism that’s already in place. Podcasting could have many other applications – programming for corporate employees who are involved in a geographically diverse business could easily download a weekly update – taking internal corporate communications to a whole new level.
I think the land grab by big media is diverting attention from the many new uses for podcasting.

Matt

Dell Hell – consumer complaints prompt corporate blogging u-turn

It looks like Dell has learned an expensive and difficult lesson about consumer blogging. After a customer service row has been enacted online in the blogsphere, it has instigated a new policy to deal with unhappy consumers. But at what cost to its corporate reputation?
The company was accused of ignoring bloggers, and ignoring the growing body of discontent with its products. Over the past few months, Jeff Jarvis used his popular Buzzmachine.com blog as a platform to name and shame the company. Jarvis first wrote about the topic in June, and continued posting updates through the summer.
Most recently Jarvis wrote an “open letter" to Chairman Michael Dell, calling for the company to heed the growing band of dissent online over its poor consumer relations.
In his post, Jarvis points to evidence that Dell has suffered a slump in customer service, market share is shrinking, and share price dipping.
A pretty powerful argument that Dell’s business is drifting.
BuzzMachine frequently receives more than 5,000 visitors a day. According to Itelliseek’s BlogPulse the posting was the most linked to post in the blogshpere last Thursday.
Subsequently, Dell spokeswoman Jennifer Davis told Shankar Gupta in Online Media Daily that the company will now monitor blogs. And when they see a problem crop up, she says, the details will be passed-on to the customer service department, who will contact the blogger directly to try to resolve it.
"Obviously, Mr. Jarvis' experience could've been handled better," Davis said.
As for other bloggers, Davis said that ideally, when customer service receives forwarded complaints from bloggers, representatives will approach them directly to diffuse the problem. "That's certainly what they're supposed to do," she said. "I can't comment that it happens 100 percent of the time, but that certainly is what the process is designed for."

As a case study, it’s a powerful example of the blogsphere having an influence on corporate image and reputation - the Jarvis blog was picked up by numerous other blogs, and by journalists who wrote about it in newspapers and magazines. Dell appear to have been slow to respond and therefore exacerbated the problem.
However, another interesting debate has sprung up on BuzzMachine – if Jarvis had been a lower-profile blogger, would the result have been the same? Is the blogsphere an egalitarian community where all bloggers wield equal consumer power? That may be the dream / intention – but I don’t think it’s true.

Matt

Corporate reputation and share performance

We know that image + identity = reputation, and the role that PR has in establishing image and identity. The problem has been proving that the cash spent on PR impacts on the bottom line. Now new research links reputation with share price movement.
A report in the FT quotes research by MORI, the polling company, which tracked UK companies for customer satisfaction. It discovered that changes in the level of customer satisfaction led to moves in the share performance – between 3 and 12 months after the customer satisfaction snapshot.
The five companies tracked were Tesco, J Sainsbury, Vodafone, British Airways and Marks and Spencer.
The FT article goes onto explore this area for investors – saying that institutional investors, fund managers and the like, are trading on this connection between reputation and share prices. Some are commissioning their won private polling data.
The paper quotes its own report from March – in which it revealed that Scottish Widows Investment Partnership sold most of its four per cent stake in William Morrison after polling of former Safeway customers showed that many switched to rival supermarkets following the takeover by the Yorkshire-based group. Morrison shares collapsed over the following months.
It will be interesting to see what impact the current dispute at British Airways has in the future.
The FT quotes Waheed Aslam, MORI development director: "Investors believe in the link and increasingly want private data that add value to their investment decisions. They do not want information that their rivals can obtain."
It’s not clear yet whether this link works for other sectors – the five companies examined by MORI were all in customer service and three are retailers. MORI is planning to research other sectors like energy, banking and technology.
It’s all a blatant pitch for more business for MORI of course – who can see a new market opening up in research for investment banks, but it’s great ammunition if you needed it to justify PR spend and get that voice heard. If you need any extra ammunition the MORI Reputation Centre has some good pointers.

Matt

Podcasting useless to PR - lessons from radio

So what use is podcasting in PR? My posing on the the problems and possibilities of podcasting, and the upcoming conferences in London and California, set me thinking.
It’s something which has been vexing Don Crowther at 101PublicRelations. He came up with a number of advantages – it’s a great way to develop an emotional bond with your customers; it gives you more of a personality; it allows you to talk to people while they do other things.
He also noted some issues - Podcasts have to be sequentially listened to in order to derive value. They can't be searched, skimmed, or mined (He suggests checking out Dave Taylor's excellent insights for a more in-depth analysis)
He also mentions the problem of the business model – which I alluded to in my last post, and concludes that he’s struggling to find a compelling reason to podcast.
Here are a few thoughts from my experience in the radio business.
It certainly is a medium where people can do other things at the same time – drive, cook, jog etc. This is often perceived as a disadvantage, with people not giving what’s being said their full attention. However, research indicates (see the Radio Advertising Bureau) that people absorb a significant amount of information from radio commercials – even though they seem to be engrossed in other activities. The key factor in advertising seems to be the relevance to the listener of the message or product – bring this back to podcasting, and make your podcast relevant and engaging and you’ve got the audience where you want them. The fact that radio / podcasting is also brought into the listeners everyday life makes it closer to the listener – they listen in the bath or in the shower – who else would get a look-in then?
To use the old cliché, the pictures are better on radio. Do it well and you can paint pictures in people’s heads – take them to places that TV and film would struggle to go. Think about the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – the radio series on BBC Radio 4 was so much better than the TV series or recent film. The visual media had to create a literal interpretation of the book – the radio could play with the listeners’ imagination.
In advertising research has been carried out to demonstrate that this manifests itself with successful ads engaging the listeners’ imagination – making them memorable and more than just rattling their ear drums. (See RAB again)
Radio is very good at conveying emotional information and engaging with the listener on this emotional level. As opposed to visual media where you HAVE to show a picture, you don’t need to on the radio. In a holiday brochure, if you don’t show a picture of the hotel, people assume it hasn’t been finished yet. If you show an artist’s impression they assume it hasn’t been started, and if you show a photograph they think it looks like all the other hotels. Which of course, it does. Not a problem on radio.
At the BBC our guidelines state that the mention of brands, products or services will be more prominent on radio than TV. With all the visual clutter on TV – the mention of a beer on a soap opera or the like would be lost in the noise – in radio it punches through.
I’ve been involved in a number of corporate radio programmes in the past for large clients in the UK. These proved that radio delivered to the desktop (which could include podcasting now) is useful for internal communications – especially when your company has a wide geographic spread. Staff rarely read in-house newspapers; with radio/podcasts you can engage them in a ten minute programme which they can listen to at their desktop.
As for other applications, I’m sure someone cleverer than me is out there dreaming them up now.

Matt

Podcasting: problems and possibilities

The challenges to Podcasting will be discussed PodcastCon UK 2005 – taking place in London in September.
Speakers includ: my colleague Chris Kimber, head of radio interactive at the BBC; James Cridland, head of strategic development at Virgin Radio; Neville Hobson of For Immediate Release; and international award-winning podcaster, Richard Vobes.
As podcasting enters it’s second year there are a number of challenges to be discussed.

• The experience at BBC Radio 4 has shown a huge thirst for MP3s of programmes. At the moment the figures need splitting out – to distinguish podcasters from people who are simply downloading files to the PC, or simply using the listen again function that the BBC provides.

• Rights seem like the big headache. Speech works well – and the UK experiments with music radio podcasting involve edited highlights of the speech content of breakfast shows.

• There is also the question of the business models for established broadcasters and hobbyists based on demand for downloads.

• Also on the horizon will be the ‘next big thing’ – convergence: when phones with storage that can download podcasts. Once these are available it will bring distinct new possibilities for broadcasters.

A detailed conference programme and sign-up page for anyone wanting to attend PodcastCon UK 2005 can be found on the BritCaster wiki and at www.podcastcon.co.uk
Tickets for PodcastCon UK 2005 are available for £30. PodcastCon UK 2005 is a not-for-profit conference organised by a team of UK podcasters with professional expertise in conference organisation, law, media, and public relations.
Also – I’ve booked my place at the Portable Media Expo in California in November – to go to the podcasting events – anyone else going?

Matt

So where does this citizen-journalism impact big business?

So, there are all these consumers out there busy blogging and writing content. What are the consequences for corporate communications?
We’ve seen the Ketchum debacle – whereby a video of the locks being picked hammered their business. Shel Israel & Robert Scoble have investigated Kryptonite further for their new book – see Naked Conversations. They conducted an interview with the company’s PR – and drew out the subsequent lessons that could be learned by corporate communications practitioners who are faced with an onslaught from the weblog community.
However, I’ve been sent another interesting example by Shari Aaron of Freshmarketing. The site, which is due to launch in five days, is aimed at ‘citizen consumers’ – a group she describes as caring, aware and empowered. He site – www.alonovo.com – offers information about the environmental and social performance of companies before consumers buy products. She says the data is provided by a company / organisation called KLD – so it’s not consumer generated content, but she says the site was started by ethically aware consumers.
An example of the market stepping in where government and big business have failed?
Here in the UK, the Cooperative bank makes a big play of its ethical credentials, and from what I understand this has helped carve them a distinct and growing niche in a competitive marketplace – Gary Davies at Manchester Business School has studied the Co-op Bank in some depth in relation to corporate reputation managment.
At a time when information is becoming universal thanks to the Internet, and news travels more quickly thanks to bloggers, and citizen journalism, there are fewer places for big business to hide. So transparency and clarity in corporate communications becomes essential for building a sound relationship with consumers.

Matt

Trust, blogs, wikipedias and viral marketing - big business gets it wrong

Big business often gets the Internet so wrong. A current example - from close to home involving the BBC – where, it appears unintentionally, a viral marketing campaign has upset an online community.
It involves a fictional creation – Jamie Kane, a boy band star – and central to an interactive drama created by the BBC - with an invitation on the BBC Online site to play, and a fictional website devoted to the 'star': http://www.jamiekane.co.uk/. Kane, who supposedly died in a helicopter crash, is part of an interactive game that asks players to solve the mystery surrounding his death.
However, articles about the singer appeared on Wikipedia and are currently being reviewed by the online community. The character's appearance on Wikipedia--as an apparently real person--has raised issues about online trust. In a world where anyone can post, how do you know what's real?
The BBC was promoting the game through "viral marketing," spreading clues and tidbits of information around the Web. Those clues included fake articles from the BBC and fake "Top of the Pops" appearances
Rob Cooper, the Senior Producer on the game, issued a statement:

"Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work for the BBC and was made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing."

It’s another example of how easy it is for big business to get things online wrong. Shel Israel & Robert Scoble quote the case study of Vichy, a division of French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.

“When Vichy was ready to bring a new anti-aging cream to market, it decided to use a blog as part of an integrated marketing program that linked the blog to advertising and PR efforts, etc. It was awful. They started with a fake character named Claire who whined about the difficulties of getting enough sleep while attending too many parties in a voice that was clearly cut, polished and contrived.”

The online community spotted the deceit and kicked against the ‘blog’. L’Oreal were forced to revise the site and turn it into a much more ‘honest’ promotional tool. What comes out of this is one thing that is encouraging – communities online are very quick to spot spam, marketing guff and PR flam. It annoys them and isn’t good for business.
So in terms of trust – are consumers online more prone to believe what they read from fellow bloggers, rather than content produced by corporations? Or are they more sophisticated consumers, who are happy to read corporate content, so long as it’s transparent as to what angle it is coming from?

Matt

Citizen journalists - writing the first draught of history?

The talk or citizen journalism over the past few weeks, and the piece in yesterday’s Media Guardian have prompted a few responses. My attention was drawn to dictionary definitions at ‘Those bastards’ – “a: the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news …” – but I’m not sure where looking at historic dictionary definitions takes us.
Clive Davis refers to the article citing Jay Rosen at PressThink who sees the current situation moving towards the hybridisation of blogging and the traditional media.
‘Dawg’ questions how ordinary citizens will get involved if BBC jobs are only advertised in the Guardian – of course the highly successful Guardian online also carries the job ads, and you can find all BBC vacancies at http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/ - quite apart from this it’s the job of the producers who are appointed to the new posts to encourage participation from people and empower them to tell their own stories. It’s something BBC local radio has already had some success in doing – BBC Radio Stoke has won awards for its ‘Inside Lives’ project - go have a listen, there are some fantastic stories, and they're well told . Listeners are encouraged to come into the Radio Stoke learning centre and are given the skills in radio writing and production to enable them to record their own stories. These are then broadcast on the radio station. It’s this kind of initiative that I see being extended – enabling ordinary people to tell their own stories.
There are more details of the BBC's ultra local TV news service in today's Media Guardian.
More specifically with regards to blogging, I was talking to Roy Greenslade - former editor of the Daily Mirror, and now Professor of Journalism at City University in London. He suggested that:

“Journalists still have a role, of course, to edit down the huge amount of material into a form that makes it either readable and watchable. They can also provide context, analysis and comment. All of us journalists have to concede that our former claim – to present the first rough draft of history – is no longer valid. More and more, it’s the public themselves who are providing the raw material of news.“

Citizen-journalism isn’t replacing journalists – but it is providing people with the tools in order to tell their own stories. It’s nothing new – journalists have always sought eyewitness accounts, case studies, human interest stories and the like. It’s just that the channels and the speed by which these stories can be told are changing.

Matt