Category Archives: Media Analysis

A Reality Check on Social Media Crises

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United and the broken guitar, moms insulted by Motrin, snotty-nosed Domino’s pizza employees; they’ve been analyzed and analyzed. Each element picked apart and pontificated over. I too am guilty of that. Let’s face it, they make fur juicy fodder to citizens alike and those of us engaged in the social mediasphere. Now it’s about to get a lot harder for Joe-citizen to get anywhere with social media.

Time to take a deep breath, step back and look at it from a different perspective. The likelihood of many of them happening again, to the degree that they did, is minimal. Each has changed an industry; mostly for the better. But what happens after the first big crisis in each industry?

United wasn’t the first airline to suffer from a social media crises and it wasn’t the first time United suffered from social media either. JetBlue gets that honour on valentine’s day 2007. Taco Bell will likely wear the unadorned crown of first for restaurants in 2006 with the rat scare and Domino‘s second.

Most of the social media crises have happened with major brands. Not all, however; we’ve dealt with smaller businesses facing more localized crises. These big crises are likely to happen again, but one can speculate they’ll be in different industries. The airline industry groaned yet again with the United issue. Food services with Domino’s.

If citizens want to truly make a point with a negative experience via a major brand, they’ll need to become increasingly creative. Dave Carrol wrote a great tune and added a video behind it. Simply text blogging his experience likely wouldn’t have worked. We picked up on the Motrin issue more because it took a series of practitioners involved in Social Media to push out the message on how flustered moms were.

While it’s not impossible that another video of fast-food employees doing gross things to customer orders couldn’t go big, it’s not likely to happen to the degree it did with Domino’s.

There are still a lot of industries to be hit in a negative way, but as we did our research into the discussion volume around these crises, we found that each time around (with only United and the guitar incident as an exception) the volume of discussion decreased as did the viral factor and the Echo Ratio increased (the story stayed quite contained.)

Essentially, we’re saying that it’s going to get harder for the average Joe to use social media as an effective weapon for change or compensation when done wrong. Messages are 30% less viral the second time around in an industry and 65% less the third time around. The story will also have less of a long-tail effect; although it can stay alive forever in the digital world of Cyburbia.

While this can still be damaging to a company’s bottom-line, it’s less so than before; unless your industry hasn’t been hit. In that case, brace yourself if you’re the first to be targeted. Business will (and are) get savvier in dealing with them and citizens will have to work harder to get the message out.

Youth Like Video, Adults Like Photo’s; Social Media Age Differences

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The under 25 age group prefers video and adults like photographs better our research finds. Using our monitoring tool and looking at average ages in Social Media profiles, plus language analysis, we wanted to know if video as a medium was popular in the same way across all age groups. Obviously it isn’t. Why? Understanding such preferences can help marketers understand what medium works better for different age groups.

We were somewhat surprised by this finding, given the popularity of video sharing services such as YouTube and MetaCafe. Our findings showed that the older the person, the less likely they are to create and share video. Watching video online is more level across age groups. Of the profiles analyzed we found that less than 10% of those over 35 were likely to create and share their own videos while 40% of those under 30 were likely to create and share a video. Once we go under 20 we see that there is an 80% chance a user will create and share their own video.

When it comes to photos, the over 30 set are more likely to post to photo sharing sites like Flickr or PhotoBucket, while the under 30 groups  are more likely to restrict photo uploading and sharing to their social networks. This is not entirely surprising to most I would suspect, but validating as well.

The over 30 age groups however, will share and watch online video almost on a par with the under 30 segments.

A Hyper-Local Social Media Crisis

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Much emphasis on Social Media crises is focused towards large brands – JetBlue, United, Motrin etc., and there’s plenty of them. But what about the small local business? You’ll have to forgive me for not revealing the name of the client – I’m not into bringing my company down in one fell swoop, I have kids to feed after all.

It was early 2009 and a “tweet” came through my feed from someone I follow locally. They’d had lunch at a local restaurant, but were soured by the service. They said this on Twitter. Over the next 2 hours over 50 people within the city, and over 20 from outside, had engaged over this “discussion” with many relating their negative (and a some positive) experience with this restaurant. After the third “tweet” I started to follow the discussion, then started to track if it went elsewhere (most of our clients are large and in the US and UK, so this local one was of keen interest). It did. It hit Facebook and by 3PM that afternoon it had reached 3 bloggers within the city, whereupon several readers of those blogs also commented. The discussion ran to more general comparisons of bad gustatory experiences locally and other fine establishments were bashed as well. Yet the focus remained on this one particular establishment.

Our estimate of reach by 5PM that afternoon was about 4,000 eyeballs in Nova Scotia with 90% of them in the Halifax area. Now, we’re a highly connected city with 5 universities of international renown and a strong financial sector and economy. But we’re only about 400,000 people. Small next to New York city.

But that in itself shows how Social Media is becoming hyper-local and can have an impact at a very local level. When I went to see the owner a week later and presented my findings he was shocked to say the least…I had some serious explaining to do. The sad fact was, he noticed a 50% drop in business in that time period.

Fortunately the issue wasn’t quality of food, simply the speed of service. A change of the menu, some staff retraining, a little PR and some advertising and now their lunch servings are up 15% over last year. He recovered. But the impact was there. For a small business within a fairly small market.

Social Media activity can have a local impact. Negative and positive.

The Evolution of the Blog

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As a social intelligence firm, we do a lot of research; that’s our life blood. So naturally, we look at trends and broader “uses” of Social Media technologies. Blogs are a key element in our research and here’s what we noticed this past year in how blogs have evolved.

A recent study by PEW Internet suggests about 11% of online people in the U.S. actively blog and of that only about 23% actually read blogs. Our findings are similar though we note Canada has a higher % of bloggers active. What we wanted to look at however, was the least and most successful blogs; how they have evolved in terms of architecture and usage.

Length: We found that of the most successful blogs, 87% tended to be 250 words or less in length for each posting. The longer the paragraphs, the less successful the blog.

Links: Blogs with higher search engine rankings have more outbound links with an average of 3.5 outbound links per blog post.

Video Blogs: Video blogs (vlogs) over 3 minutes in length tend to be viewed less. Our study group reported they  would view a video blog an average of 64 seconds.

Comments: The top blogs in our research saw an average of 10 comments per posting across the board. We noted that 75% of the time these were simple statements of agreement and 8% of the time a form of conversation would take place in the comment sections. We also noted that 22% of the time in comments, they would go off topic. With video blogs, comments tended to be shorter (4-8 words 92% of the time) than on text blogs.

Media Mix: We noted that bloggers who mix images, video and text had a higher rate of comments (31.4% of the time) than plain text.

Business Blogs: Here we looked at blogs written “by” a business, that is, not an individual who is a consultant, but a business with multiple employees, even an enterprise. They averaged less outbound links (1.5) per post and had an average of 3 comments per post and less engagement. We distinctly separated business blogs because they skewed our findings. We also found businesses tended to be less frequent in posting (62% less) than individuals and only 14% of business blogs ever had the author respond to comment strings after a post.

Our summary is that blogs have become shorter and “snappier” as our online attention span seems to be getting shorter as well. The comprehensive data is for clients, but we wanted to share the highlights of our findings.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Social Media & The Impact on Corporate Governance

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In 2001, market regulators in Canada, Europe and the U.S. required public companies to simultaneously issue press releases to the Web and the newswire. In addition, any public meetings were to be broadcast to the Web via video feeds. All this before the rise of Social Media in a significant way. The bulletin boards (newsgroups) for discussion on public companies have been rampant for years, Stockhouse being among the pioneers.

My days running communications for a public company at the turn of the century saw us monitoring those newsgroups every day. Some days it was hard to not tap a condemning response to the idiocy of some of the comments and speculations made there. But other issues became apparent, among them was the damage that could happen when an employee spoke of something to a friend who then posted to the BullBoard on that company – this could wreak havoc on a stockprice; and nearly ended up in a line employee being fired once.

This was several years ago. It’s not about to get better. Public companies will face even greater challenges with Social Media in the years to come. Regulators may eventually require public companies to also post information to Social Networks, the same time they issue a press release. Video’s might have to be posted to several video networks and across mobile platforms as well.

Given how the content is both consumed, shared and managed across these channels, public companies are going to face complexities in shaping, distributing and monitoring those messages. What if the company must also issue notices across microblogging platforms like Twitter?

What will public relations and investor relations practitioners have to to consider if such issues arise? Increasingly, companies that thought they didn’t really have to concern themselves with the Web beyond marketing, will soon find out differently.

2010 will, I think, see some interesting changes to governance on communications issues for public companies.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)