Recently,  I caught the video of We are the World 25.  It is the remake of the original We are the World song with proceeds going to support Haiti.  The first thing that struck me was I could not believe it had been 25 years since the original We are the World.  Let that soak in for a second, 25 years!  I work with some folks who were not born yet when the original came out.

It kind of blew my mind because I totally remember the original We are the World.  I was 13 at the time and only one of my friends had cable TV.  We all went over to his house to watch the video of We are the World on MTV.  MTV was running it once an hour every hour.  And now 25 years later, there are all new rock stars participating in this one.

I have to tell you the first time I listened to the new version, I hated it.  I think it was more because it was different from the original that I had grown up on and loved.  Though I have to tell you, the new version has grown on me.

What do you think?  See below for both versions.  If you are old enough, what memories do you have from the original one?

Original:

New:

If you took some time off yesterday to spend it with a loved one,  you might of missed the Twitter cage match that went down between writer, actor and director Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.  I am not going to supply the blow by blow details, but you can read all about it on Gawker.

To summarize what took place, Kevin Smith was removed from a Southwest Airline plane because the captain deemed him too large to fly in just one seat.  According to reports, Kevin was strapped in and on the plane and was forced to get his things and leave the plane before takeoff.

If something like this happened to you, you would be embarrassed and probably pretty pissed off.  Kevin was and immediately took to his Twitter account with more than 1 million followers to express his anger and frustration towards Southwest Airlines.

This incident and Southwest Airlines “size policy” is going to be debated for weeks.  I think both sides have valid points.  Though this is not what I want to cover in this post.  What I want to focus on is the great social media case study this incident represents.

An out of touch captain for Southwest Airlines kicks a famous person off of his plane.  Kevin Smith would absolutely be considered an influencer as he has more than a million Twitter followers, not to mention millions more who watch his movies, read his books and listen to his podcasts.  No matter who you believe is right or wrong, you have to take your hat off to Southwest Airlines for how they handled this crisis.

Let’s remember that all this took place beginning Saturday night and things got interesting  Sunday Valentine’s Day.  Let’s break down the game film:

Kevin Smith sent out the first tweet on this incident at 8:52 pm on Saturday Feb 13th:

ThatKevinSmith: Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?

Southwest replied to Smith’s tweet a little under six hours later on Sunday Feb 14 at 3:10 am:

@SouthwestAir “Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening” All lines checked, no voicemail message on any 323. Try again.

This began a back and forth Twitter throw down that Southwest Airlines could not win.  When you are dealing with an influencer who has the backing of his people, right or wrong, the people are going to have their say against the big bad corporation. This is where Southwest’s social media strategy truly took flight.

They did the following:

• They responded to each individual who tweeted to @SouthwestAir about the situation.  No matter how mean the tweet was, they responded.  They apologized that Mr. Smith had to go through what he did and explained their company policy.
• They posted a blog post once again apologizing, but also explained the airlines position.  When their blog went down because of all the traffic they were receiving, they moved their blog post to another Web site so people could read it.
• If you check out the comments on the blog post, you will see users who left comments with curses and writing some not so nice things about Southwest.  Did they remove these comments or take the easy route and just turn the comments off, no. (Note: the Web site is still real slow because of all the traffic they are getting.  You might not be able to get to this page.)
• They had a VP from Southwest reach out and speak to Kevin Smith on the phone.

Can I remind you that all this took place on a Sunday.  How many large publicly traded corporations could of turned all this around within eight hours during the work week let alone on a holiday weekend?

Whether you agree or disagree with Southwest and the incident, the one thing I think we can all agree upon is how well Southwest has handled this crisis.  Instead of running and hiding, they immediately engaged in the online conversations.  They did so without legal or corporate communications double speak,   their responses were conversational and honest.  They knew they were going to take a beating but still decided to pull up a chair and be a part of the conversation.  More corporations should learn from this incident and how Southwest dealt with a crisis in the electronic age.

Special shout out has to go to Christi Day.  She is a member of Southwest’s Social Media team and was the author of the blog posts, comments and tweets this weekend.  Christi did a phenomenal job during what had to be a challenging time.

When I have developed and presented social media training for C-suites and Corporate Communications clients,  I try to get across a couple of main points.

• In social media, you cannot control the conversation.  Don’t even try.  Your goal is to listen, understand, engage and potentially influence.
• You are never going to make everyone happy or solve everyone’s problem.  Using this case study as an example, Kevin Smith is not going to be a fan of Southwest Airlines no matter what they say now.  But Southwest understands that they are fighting for the hearts and minds of the thousands possibly millions of other people who are witnessing and discussing this incident online.
• Finally, half the battle is just showing up.  Southwest knew they could not win this argument.  They knew they were going to take their lumps, but they understood that not engaging in these conversations would be shortsighted and deliver far worse results.

What I think more corporate executives need to realize is something like this will at some time happen to their company.  It is not a question of if, but when.

A little random fact about myself, I am a strong believer and a big fan of loyalty.  I believe loyalty plays an important part in my life each and everyday.  I am loyal to my wife, my friends, my coworkers, my clients and yes I am loyal to specific companies.  I believe that when a company delivers an exceptional product or service, they deserve my loyalty.  That loyalty consists of me continuing to work with them year after year and recommend them to my friends and peers. This kind of customer evangelism is even more important today as the web has made the world so much smaller and allowed users to communicate and share their opinions effortlessly.

In marketing, there is nothing so sweet than a customer evangalist.  This person has absolutely no hidden agenda. All they want to do is freely share their happiness with a company or product.  They do this because they believe in it strongly and want others to feel as good as they do.  And when a customer evangelist has a poor experience with the company they have spent years promoting and recommending, it can be a blow to the system.

This is where I am at the moment.  I sit here perplexed with what has happened with Verizon Wireless and myself over the last 6 months.  I have been a Verizon customer for more than 10 years.  In those ten years, I have lived in 5 different states and with each move, my trusted Verizon phone and service came with me.  I am also an early adopter.  When the new hot tech phone comes out, I am usually there to buy one.  This is exactly what happened months ago when Verizon released the Blackberry Storm.  The first week it came out, I went and purchased two of them for my wife and I. 

Now I am not going to go into detail about all the problems that the Storm has had.  Let’s just say that if you do a search on Google for “Blackberry Storm Sucks“, there are 376,000 web pages willing to go into more detail.  Unfortunately, I also had my problems with the Storm which forced me to speak with Verizon’s customer service more than a dozen times.  They tried to fix things, but bottom line is Verizon and Blackberry put out a product that was not ready to be released. It was a half baked product that was rushed to market and both Verizon and Blackberry should be held accountable.

I use my phone for work.  The Storm just does not allow me to do everything i need to do in the time I need to get it done.  Fast foward to this week when Verizon releases the new Blackberry Tour.  I called Verizon and they proceeded to tell me that since I signed a new contract when I bought my Storm, I am not eligible for the $199 deal they were offering on the Tour.  I would have to pay more than $300! 

To be honest after all the problems I have had, I believe that Verizon should just give me the Tour for free and beg for my forgiveness.  Though I doubt that is going to happen.  But I actually thought they might give me the same deal they are offering to new customers since I have been paying customer for more than a decade? 

I have reached the point where this is really not about the money.  It is now the principle.  Doesn’t loyalty work both ways?  Haven’t I built up enough loyalty with Verizon to deserve to be treated better or am I being totally naive? Am I asking too much?  And if I am asking too much, what do I do now?  I believe that the only logical next step is for my wife and I to take our business elsewhere.  Though will I get the exact same poor service with AT&T?

Posted via web from Cord Silverstein

Posted via web from cord’s posterous

Did you ever see the movie Crazy People?  It came out in the early 90’s and starred Dudley Moore and Darryl Hannah.  The premise of the movie was Dudley Moore was an ad executive who reached his breaking point because he had to lie everyday in his work.  He eventually found himself in a mental hospital and began working with other mental patients on ads that only told the truth.  The movie was not the best movie, but it popped in my head recently when I watched a number of Sprint television commercials.  I am sure you have seen them, they have Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse walking down several New York City streets talking about the digital revolution and how “cool” these new cell phones are.  He ends the commercials asking us to join him in the digital revolution.

Now for the last what couple of years Sprint has been hemoraging customers.  If you take five minutes and do a few searches on the web, you would quickly realize that many of the customers left because they believed Sprint had atrocious customer service.  Give it a shot, do a Google search for “Sprint sucks”.  Now I don’t know anything about Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse and I have not been a Sprint customer for many years, but instead of spending millions of dollars on commercials that talk about the “digital revolution” wouldn’t that time and money be spent more wisely talking about how Sprint has heard the complaints and feedback and is taking steps to change?

Am I nuts or would a commercial with Dan Hesse sitting in a diner saying, “We have made mistakes in the past.  We have listened to our past and present customers’ feedback and we realized that without great customer service our cool phones and great plans mean nothing.  That is why Sprint has made the following changes….  Yada yada yada..”

I think a commercial like that would raise more attention and deliver a greater ROI than their present, “You can update your Facebook status from our phones, how cool” commercials.  Though if Dan Hesse Sprint CEO would ask me, I would say cut down your TV media buy considerably and put that money into engaging with your present and potential customers online.  Though now I am just plain talking crazy.

So last year The Age of Conversation was published.  This was a book that a 100 or so bloggers wrote stories about different marketing topics.  It was a great experience participating in it and all the money went to a great cause.  It looks like that there is going to be a second go around and right now the organizers are looking for people to vote on this books topic / theme.  If you are interested in voting on the topic or interested in writing for the book, please click here to get info on both.

I would like to preface this post by saying that there are many many folks out there that know far more than I when it comes to metrics and analytics.  This is another post in the Online Media 101 series that I do where I try to simplify and start with the basics on certain core areas of online marketing.  I wanted to state that early because I can envision the kind of replies that I am going to get from this post.  So now that the disclaimer is out of the way let’s proceed.

When it comes to analyzing what is happening on your web site and how well your marketing is doing there is an incredible amount of information available to you even if you do not have the money to pay for a analytics program.  Google offers what I think is an excellent analytics program and you cannot beat the cost, it’s free and fairly easy to install.

Now depending on what kind of web site you have, you will have different success metrics.  For an e-commerce site, you want users to buy; a lead generation site, you want users to fill out a form and for a content site, you want users to hang out and read your content.  Though no matter what kind of web site you have, I believe there are a couple of key areas that everyone should initially pay attention to when analyzing your web traffic.  I am going to start simply and focus on just one.

Bounce Rates – A bounce rate defined by Google is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).  Simply put, a bounce rate measures how many users landed on one page of your site (not necessarily your home page) and immediately left your site without clicking on any other link on your web site. They saw and hopefully looked at one page and then left by either clicking back on their browser, clicking on a bookmark, typing in a new URL or closing the browser window.

No matter if your web site is big or small, you want every page of that site to drive users to do that single goal we discussed earlier.  Bounce rates have always shown me whether my web site is accomplishing that single goal I am striving for.  When I come across a web site of my own or a clients with a high bounce rate, it is telling me that I am not doing a good enough job selling the value of this web site.  If I am seeing a bounce rate of over 85%, I immediately want to take a look at which specific pages on the site have the highest bounce rates and find ways on how I can decrease that number.

The first three things that I look at is the web sites look and feel,  navigation and content.  Is my look and feel appealing to my target market?  Do I look credible?  Do I have sound navigation that users can easily find what they are looking for and does my content speak appropriately to the market I am looking to reach?

I would love to hear from you on what you have done to combat high bounce rates and what has worked and not worked for you, let me know.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Online Media 101, online marketing, analytics program, success metrics, e-commerce, web traffic, Bounce Rates, bounce rate

Dear Verizon Wireless,

I have been a customer of yours for over eight years. For the last five years, I have owned several Blackberry’s which I use for both work as well as personal use. I believe that I have the most expensive plan you guys have totally unlimited minutes for both phone and data because of the huge time I spend on my phone. My bill is automatically paid through my credit card each month and before yesterday I don’t think I have ever contacted your customer service . I guess what I am trying to say is that I believe I am one of those customers that you want to keep.

The Blackberry I presently own is about a year and half old but it is already starting to show some wear and tear because pretty much I am the greatest product tester in the world. No matter how good a product is, I will find a way to destroy it in one way or the other. Since my phone is on its last legs, I have begun looking at a new Blackberry to purchase. Unfortunately, recently Verizon you guys have been getting your butts kicked by your fellow wireless competitors on phones. First obviously enough the iPhone and now AT&T has come out with the Blackberry Curve and all you got is the World Edition Blackberry which pretty much is exactly identical to the phone I have now except a wee bit thinner, no thank you. Oh and by the way, it is ugly as sin.

I have begun to think that maybe I should look to change providers who can offer me the kind selection I am looking for. Though before I do that, I decided to start looking online to see when and if you guys are going to come out with the Curve or other Blackberry’s. You know what I discovered, there are a number of blogs and discussion boards that are taking guesses when and if Verizon will come out with new phones, but there is absolutely no news or conversation coming from you! Why is that? Why wouldn’t you want to keep your customers informed of what is happening and what kind of new products and services are coming out in the future? I don’t know if you guys of heard about this internet thing, but there are a lot of companies that have this crazy thing called a corporate blog.

Last night I was on your website, verizonwireless.com and I saw you had a web chat feature that you could speak with someone at Verizon and I decided to give that a shot. Here is the conversation I had:

You are chatting with Greg

Greg will be right with you (Mind you I waited 6 minutes for Greg)

Greg: Thanks for contacting Verizon Wireless, how may I help you?

Cord: Yes, I was wondering if Verizon is coming out with any new Blackberry’s?

Greg: Yes they are!

Cord: Great, when will that be happening?

Greg: I do not have a date on that.

Cord: Well, will it be happening in the next 3,6 or 12 months?

Greg: I do not have a date on that.

Cord: Do you know what Blackberry phones Verizon will be supporting?

Greg: I do not have that information.

Cord: Ok, do you have any information that you can share with me other than that sometime before I die Verizon will be coming out with a new Blackberry?

Greg will be right with you

Greg will be right with you

Greg will be right with you

This is when I was put on chat hold I guess and after several minutes of waiting, I finally just hung up.

Verizon, it is time that you start communicating with your customers better. Your contract cancellation fee is not going to stop your top customers from leaving if they do not believe that you are meeting and exceeding their expectations.

I am wiling to place significant odds that no-one from Verizon is bothering to monitor what is being discussed about them online and no-one from the company will contact me from this post. Anyone wanna place a wager?

Technorati Tags: Verizon Wireless, Blackberry’s, customer service, Blackberry, Verizon, Blackberry Curve

I was recently attending a conference where I was scheduled to speak. I got to the conference about an hour or so early. (I am directionally challenged so I leave plenty of time for me to get lost once or twice.) Since I was so early I looked over the speaker list and saw there was a person speaking before me about online monitoring. If you are not familiar with this term, very simply put, a business or organization monitors what is being discussed online about their company, products, brand, etc. They track what kind of “conversations” are taking place online relevant to their business through text, audio and/or video. It’s something that my team and company have been doing a lot for our clients recently so I was interested to hear what this person had to say.

I watched in horror as this speaker proceeded to literally scare the living hell out of these attendants going through absolutely nightmarish scenarios of what could happen to their companies if they did not start monitoring these online conversations immediately. I was really wondering if this type of mortal death scenario really worked as a sales pitch for this speaker? And more importantly, I was wondering what was the worst thing that could happen to me if I stood up and smacked this guy in the back of the head with the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall behind him?

When this guy finally finished his 45 minute what I have aptly named “Holocaust” speech, he asked for questions and you know what, not one single person raised their hand. Why? Because this speaker who I have nicknamed Adolf did absolutely nothing for these people. These attendees paid money to come and hopefully learn something and all that Adolf did was scare them to death and overwhelm them on a subject they were already confused about in the first place.

What I have learned recently with a lot of the work we have done is that online monitoring and reputation management is absolutely important, but not for the reasons Adolf was proposing. The value online monitoring delivers is that companies have the ability to truly listen to both customers and perspective customers. They get to hear first hand what their target market is thinking, both good and bad. If they listen well enough, they can learn from this feedback and once they reach a point of comfortability, they can reach out and engage with these people; integrate themselves into the conversations.

Every company will have a crisis, but these are few and far between. Yes, when something bad happens or is said, you want to know about as quickly as possible so you can act accordingly. Though more often then not, what this type of engagement allows is for good and not for bad. It allows companies to reach out to new customers, continue communicating with existing ones and most importantly, turn a regular customer into a company evangelist because the company showed them they were willing to go the extra mile.

Technorati Tags: online monitoring, online conversations, online monitoring, reputation management

In my last post, we discussed the basics to social media in Online Marketing 101 and how to begin down the social media path. We started by developing a list of keywords and then doing searches to find people communicating online about those keywords. The next step is to be able to quickly and correctly identify which among all the links you have pulled together are coming from influencers versus non-influencers.

Topic: Influencers

Definition: Many people believe that an influencer is already a customer and that an influencer is the same thing as an evangelist. That is actually not always the case. An influencer is someone who can influence your customers and influence your market. An influencer does not have to be a customer to have great influence on the market that you are targeting. Wikipedia defines an influencer as, “An individual that have influence over potential buyers, and marketers orientates marketing activities around these influencers.”

Example: Before we go into further detail, let’s give a basic example. Let’s say that you are a technology company of some kind. One example of an influencer in your industry would be the blog TechCrunch. If you could get a favorable post in TechCrunch talking about your company or product you would see an immediate and huge increase in traffic to your web site and hopefully in sales. TechCrunch is an incredibly popular technology blog that has great influence on its huge readership. Because of the large audience TechCrunch brings in each and everyday as well as prestige Michael Arrington the blog’s author has, TechCrunch is absolutely an influencer when it comes to the tech industry.

Why is this important?

Depending on the popularity of the keywords you have chosen, you could be faced with a HUGE amount of links and information you have pulled together. Many of these links will be coming from people and places that have very little influence on your target market. It is your job to be able to quickly go through all this information and be able to determine which of the links are coming from influencers and who are not.

Did you ever watch the TV show M*A*S*H? If you didn’t, it was a show based in Korea during the war and the unit was a medical unit where they would bring wounded soldiers in to be operated on from their wounds the received during fighting. Each time a bunch of wounded came in, the first thing they did was go through each one of them to determine who was the worst off and needed immediate medical attention. I believe recognizing influencers from non-influencers is that same kind of triage.

How do we start?

First off, you need to be using the Firefox browser. If you are still using Internet Explorer, please immediately hit yourself in the head with a hammer several times. When you regain consciousness, please go and download Firefox, it is free. After you have downloaded and installed Firefox, please install a Firefox add-on called SearchStatus. After installing, restart Firefox and you should now see on the bottom right hand side of your browser the following:

SearchStatus shows you a couple of different things. The first thing it shows is a web pages Google PageRank. Google gives each and every page that it reads and indexes a page ranking of between 0 to10. The higher the page rank, the higher visibility that page gets in Google natural search results. I will do a 101 post about SEO in the future, for now consider the numbers for Google PageRank as follows:

• Anything ranked 0 to 4 – The web site has little visibility in the search engines.
• 5 to 7 – Some decent visibility
• 8 + – Rocking, stud!

So in other words, the higher number the better.

The second bar you see is the web sites Alexa ranking. An Alexa ranking estimates how much traffic the web site gets on a daily basis and then ranks it against all the other web sites it is tracking. For example, this web site, Marketing Hipster has an Alexa ranking of 157,230 which means by Alexa, this web site is the 157,230 most trafficked web site on the web. In contract, YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 3. So unlike the Google Page Rank, the lower the number a web site has for its Alexa ranking the better.

Before I get comments, I will tell you that you need to take Alexa rankings with a POUND of salt. Alexa determines these rankings through anyone who has installed the Alexa toolbar to their browser. This is a very small percentage of users and many of the anti-virus software on the market today actually consider Alexa to be a virus or spyware. This is far from an exact science, but it does serve a purpose when it comes to quickly identifying web sites that need to be looked at further and others which need to be kicked to the curb.

This post is getting to be rather long so I am going to be break this up into two different posts. For now, here is what you can do. Take that spreadsheet that you captured all those URL’s when searching for your keywords and begin going to some of these URL’s with your new searchstatus plugin running on your browser. Start taking a look at what the web site rankings are and start marking down on your spreadsheet which sites have the higher and better rankings.

In the meantime, I will catch you on our next post, Online Marketing 101: Influencer vs. Non-Influencer Part II.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing 101, influencers, non-influencers, evangelist, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, Firefox, Internet Explorer, SearchStatus, Google PageRank, Alexa