Social Media

An Annoyed Indian God, Fanatic Fans and ‘not so’ British Airways

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If you’re reading this, you probably already know about the ‘mishap’, the ‘debacle’ the ‘mistake’ and whatever the people are calling it. To summarize the event, Sachin Tendulkar a.k.a ‘The God of Cricket’ tweeted about the inconvenience caused to him while traveling by the British Airways as given below:

The fans (read bhakts) went crazy when the brand replied back saying this:

 If you’re eager to catch the glimpse of the fan outrage and other tweets, try going here.

Now putting the Sachin hangover aside for a while, let us revisit the event, but from a brand’s perspective. A celebrity felt he was not treated well by the brand, brand replied with a template like response… some people just found it funny, tried to troll it while the fanatics actually dragged the issue to a next level showing their outrage and labeling it as disrespect to their God by asking his full name and address.

Where did the brand go wrong? Was getting the details of a customer for solving his query a wrong thing to do? Maybe not… but now see this tweet conversation from HTC

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The tweet isn’t really from a genuine celeb, but the tweets were coming rather frequently. Here is the reply by Jason Mackenzie, President of HTC America.

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The cases actually aren’t exactly the same, but the point here is… can a brand give personal attention when needed?

The bigger your brand scales, the more important it is for you to manage its interaction. The British Airways already fares well on the Airline Industry Social Rankings, but here they could not recognize the conversation. To give another reference, this is not the first time British Airways has been in bad light… here is another example of BA’s good presence on digital, but a really bad CRM service.

If handled in a better way, the conversation must’ve been recognized, escalated to the correct CRM level and hence the whole event could’ve got contained in a less worse of a shape that it later became.

Sachin’s handle is one of the top 10 most popular twitter clebs in India and hence it was a predictable thing, that the issue might trend, or at least inflate to a greater extent, such that it creates a problem for the brand.

The situation was later controlled with an apology by the British Airways 

and thanks to the fans, the hashtag stopped trending after 12 hours. The case is a lesson, to why a strong CRM is necessary for any brand and I hope people take some positive insights, rather than cursing BA even more… Off you go British Airways, go fly to inside the books of the MBA courses!

How to – Balance your Social Media and not suck at it

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Social Media was developed to bring people closer and build dialogues. But slowly it’s becoming a profession, and an obligation. The intent of normal conversations is changing and everybody is looking to be an influencer. In this race, people are missing their natural dialogues, which eventually makes them boring/monotonous. Tell me, haven’t you seen tonnes of quotes appearing from one of your friend not once but multiple times a day? It sometimes in fact becomes amusing to see such people become a wannabe rather than an influencer.

The following points will help you bring a balance to your social media, but yet again remember, it’s all about conversations.

Don’t be a Preacher
You may be good at your profession but remember, people go to the preacher only once in a while; people do not spend time with someone who is not approachable, friendly and has a boring serious tone all the time. Bring colours to your posts, keep calm, and have a mix of tone in your talks.

Listen to the People who are relevant to you
Of all the Social Media channels, especially twitter is built to listen to the people you want, and the 140 character limit makes it easy to consume a greater collection of content. Do not hesitate to follow the people of your domain or people who think can post good content, use Twitter Lists to maintain your favourite experts/friends/personalities, retweet the posts you like and when feels like appreciating, express it.

Take a look back, at least once a while
At least once a week take time to analyse yourself online, look for what people are saying about you, what all have you posted. There are many benchmark and analytics solutions available such as KLOUT and TWENTYFEET. Use them to filter inactive and irrelevant people on your social media network and acknowledge the ones who are contributors to your knowledge.

Need of Leveraging Digital Media in Modern Advertising

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Risk is always part of any business, hence it is always considered good to keep the numbers in mind before making decisions. PR and Advertising for a brand is essential part of Marketing mix and one of the very unpredictable part too. ROI in promotional practices is very uncertain, though lot of tools and techniques are brought in to get certain figures but most of these are assumptions. For e.g: The AC Nielsen-Kantar product uses the TAM peoplemeters to measure and predict the TV viewership in India. The survey involves approx. 9,000 peoplemeters in different areas of India that track the activities of these viewers with peoplemeters. But, for a country with a population of 1.2 Billion+, which might also be more than 1/6th of the world, is this a right sample? The research provider might have their own logic and facts to prove it, but practically it does not seem viable to predict behavior with one sample to One hundred and forty thousand people.

This becomes even more complex with assumptions such as one Newspaper may have four readers and thus pricing is dependent on these assumptions. It is just wonderful how still Big brands put their money in these damn expensive ads, some even without media planning. The question here is certainly not about the recall value of ads on television or newspapers, the question is ROI, because these ads might be so expensive that they can inflate your product’s price by worrisome numbers, especially because it is a tough decision when to advertise and how much to advertise.

Kyle Bagwell in his paper The Economic Analysis of Advertising (Department of Economics, Columbia University , New York, NY 10027, August 2005) mentions that, ” advertising of one firm may steal the business and thus diminish the profit of another. This business-stealing externality raises the possibility that advertising may be excessive. In multi-firm markets, it is thus unclear, a priori, whether advertising is inadequate, excessive or optimal.”

This is where we talk about the Digital Mediums. The decision making in traditional medium suffers because of extrapolated figures. The digital analytics provide you right figures and ppc (pay per click) option avoids your payment for visibility, visibility their can be considered free, while if somebody shows interest to the ads, and clicks on them, then only they cost you something. Not only this, you do not have to wait for another expensive research and plan to analyse the OOH space or Spots on TV/Radio etc. you can target your audience according to gender, age, interest and what not! And the surety is quite better than the traditional mediums. Nitin Prajanpe, CEO and MD, Hindustan Unilever on a media conclave in 2011 expressed his evolved thoughts about how big digital could potentially get, in India, He mentioned that in the US, TV was still a lot bigger, but in the UK, digital had become bigger than TV, in media spend. Could such a scenario occur in India as well, he wondered?

To be continued… keep posted