The other side of “Marketing” - head off problems immediately - solve problems immediately. The NYT offer a great case study today about what this means for the travel industry.
As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.
Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”
Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter’s “direct message” feature: “@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!” After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.
Mr. Wagner suspects he received better service because of Twitter’s viral nature. Twitterers habitually “re-tweet” one another’s posts, not unlike forwarding an e-mail message to everyone in your address book. Companies, he said, “want to head off the conversation as quickly as possible,” adding, that “it’s in their best interest to make people who have a pulpit happy.”
JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Disgruntled customers “tend to be the biggest opportunities,” said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the airline who helps manage its Twitter account, which has more than 770,000 followers. “We can take that person aside and kind of pull them in and say, ‘Hey, you seem to be really upset in front of several hundred or thousand people.’ ”
That might explain why some customers prefer Twittering over contacting customer service directly. “Their reaction time is speedier than being put on hold,” said Sydney Owen, 24, a public relations intern from Chicago who recently tweeted about a Southwest boarding pass she had misplaced and received a nearly immediate response from the airline.
In Canada, our Southwest is Westjet. Here is how Westjet plan to use Twitter. I think that this is a first in Canada and others will be forced to follow. The beginnings of a a Tribe!
Twitter account will give guests access to great deals
CALGARY, June 26 /CNW/ - WestJet today announced the
introduction of a new service that leverages the power of
Twitter to provide its guests with instant access to great deals.
Those Twitter users who sign up to follow "WestJet" on twitter.com
will be provided with seat sales, special offers and
other uniquely-WestJet opportunities. This Sunday, June 28, 2009,
the first of WestJet's Twitter deals will be made available to
those individuals following "WestJet".
"We are a young, vibrant and healthy company," said
Richard Bartrem, WestJet Vice-President, Culture and Communications.
"We need to employ all media possible to reach guests and
prospective guests to offer them relevant information and great
deals.
Today's announcement is a reflection of how social media has
become a staple for many of our guests and our WestJetters.
The viral and word-of-mouth nature of social media is perfect for
companies with great offers, great products and fun cultures
like WestJet.
"We are encouraging as many people as possible to sign
up and follow us on Twitter.com before Sunday, June 28, so that
they are in the know with the first of many wonderful deals."
In addition, each day from Sunday, June 28, to Thursday,
July 2, WestJet will be offering its followers on twitter.com
one trip for two people anywhereWestJet flies in Canada.
Visit WestJet's Twitter site at twitter.com/westjet
for more details.
What is democracy? Is it just a vote every 4 years? Is that all the citizen has?
Who ensures that even that limited moment of choice and opinion is secure and trustworthy. How are the votes counted? Who ensures that the people have even voted? You don’t have to be living in Iran to wonder about that!
How does a candidate get chosen? In the west it depends on a party and immense sums of money. In other places, the regime makes the call. It is all but impossible to become powerful without having made a deal with the in group whether this is in Iran and the Mullahs or anywhere.
What might democracy become in the age of Social Media?
Could President Obama have gathered the financial and voter support in his campaign without it? I think that it would have been unlikely. Are most politicians responding to what happened in that election?
I don’t think so. For I think that they miss the point.
The tools of social media are just that. Tools!
The point is that to engage the people you have to have a cause that strikes to their heart. Obama had that.
What the tools do is to make a real cause too powerful for the status quo to push under the rug.
In Iran, people are risking and losing their lives for change. In the before Social Media times such as at Tianemen Square, the regime can and did utterly squash dissent. I don’t think that this is possible today if the cause is well enough supported. Yes, the regime can set up a massacre that may stop the demonstrations. But the legitimacy of the regime will be ended. Their only chance then will be to become a North Korea or an Burma - a true pariah. The story will not end there.
The tools and the supporting global community are enabling the story to be told. The world is a witness.
There is also another aspect that I see. Our response to the traditional media is usually helplessness and then numbness. We see terrible events but we can do nothing but feel bad. Traditional media is so one way and so passive.
But people outside of Iran not only know what is going on but many are actively engaged in helping or in providing emotional support. This was even true for the Obama campaign. Millions of non Americans became personally engaged in the election in a way not possible by simply reading the paper or watching TV.
The Obama campaign - but regretfully not the Obama administration - and the Iranian push-back - will surely be seen in retrospect as a Tipping Point in the evolution of democracy. What will happen, I cannot know yet.
But the regimes everywhere will have to take note. There is a line of self interest and oppression that cannot be crossed. For if it is, the “Sleeper will awake”.
The voice of the people is no longer restricted to the ballot box. No longer subject to the control of the ballot box. No longer subject to the needs of party affiliation or millions of campaign dollars.
I don’t know how this will play out but it sure sounds more democratic to me.
For the most part I have been ambivalent about Twitter for most of the past two years (I’ve used it on and off since November 2006).
I’ve read much of the pros and cons (not all) and understand why some people consider it the best thing since sliced bread, and why others consider it a massive time sink and / or an invitation to get bombarded by unwanted marketing activity.
What seems clear to me is that it can often function as an effective means for searching for pertinent information. To my mind, Twitter replicates the experiences I have often had after blogging for some time … because of my social networks mainly focused on issues, and people who are paying attention to those same issues, there is a regular experience of ”synchronicity”. When something is on my mind and I start searching for information, I mre often than not “stumble upon” it, almost as if by magic (why do you think the web service Stumble Upon came into being ?).
When we use Twitter, we make decisions about who we follow, and so I think we invoke a social-network-of-purpose-driven filter that we apply. Yes, we can follow thousands of people, but by and large we interact most with those concentric rings of trust and connection closest to us. Often, the innermost rings of connection and trust are people that we have already connected with (through blogging or or professional / interest-driven networks), or whom we are learning to trust and to whom we come to pay attention.
This selection of people with whom we interact (the innermost concentric rings of connection) provide context like no algorithm can (I’d love to know what the FAST search experts think of that assertion on my part). The people with whom we interact most frequently on Twitter are paying attention to the same or similar things (and different things) as are we, and we are reciprocating. So, when you push a question out into the twittersphere, those who are paying attention to you or notice your tweeted question may well have something to offer you that may be directly or closely aligned with the search you are carrying out. There is the “ambient intimacy of context” that comes into play.
Now for the “on the other hand” … there’s an awful lot of noise to churn one’s way through to get to the signals. I know that there are various efforts underway to enhance the relevance and pertinence of finding one’s way through the mass of content that’s in the daily twitterstream, but I suspect that there’s a long way to go yet for such efforts to take new Twitter-related capabilities beyond the purview of the early adopters.
I also think that as large masses of people take to the newest socially-connected-streams-of-content to engage in purposeful activities, rather than trying to drive or acquire attention for attention’s sake (or to make money), we will find that Twitter-like capabilities or Twitter clones will be built into most, if not all, social-network platforms and collaborative-work platforms.
I suspect that this emerging concentration of attention and time allocation onto purposeful activities is what is behind the thinking in this extract from a WebGuild piece by Daya Baran titled “Twitter Will Be Obsolete In A Year“.
He says Twitter won’t be as important as some think. He points to Friendster and how it was surpassed by MySpace which in turn was surpassed by Facebook in a shorter time doing the same thing.
He says as with any internet “gold rush,” as soon as others demonstrate success, everyone moves in, and the “next big thing” is born.
“All I have to do is mention QuickBooks, and I have 30 QuickBooks “experts” following me in hopes of getting business. How long will it take to wear people down dealing with these kinds of requests?… I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”
He also points out the retention rate of Twitter is ONLY around 30 percent, which means seven out of 10 people try it out once and don’t come back. So to get users the hype must continue and the process it becomes overhyped.
“Twitter seems to be proud of the fact that it has no profit model. I’m imagining that the company will want to keep the hype building long enough to sell the company for a few billion dollars… I also cannot foresee Twitter’s user base growing too much higher than it is now.
The simple functionality of Twitter will also lead to a glut of competition in the next few months, with companies duking it out for the best implementation of the microblogging model. There’s not enough to Twitter to keep it on the top of the heap. Being first in this case, as we’ve seen, is not a guarantee that you will have longevity.”
Jack Welch, former GE chairman and the leading role model for best practices in the corporate world, says he and Suzy Welch are tweeting:
“Over the past few months, we’ve come to love Twitter. We’re not saying it’s going to transform humanity—as some of its proponents will tell you—but we certainly get its incipient power. Indeed, if Twitter continues to expand at its current rate, it may well become a high-value way for companies to help brand themselves and microtarget consumer groups, as well as another tool for managers to interact with their people, and vice versa.”
It all began when Suzy Welch began tweeting to promote her book, resulting in interviews and getting the word out about book signings. Jack Welch tried it out of curiosity, and found it to be a great way to communicate and debate.
The practice became addictive. “We tweet because we can’t stop ourselves.”
By the way, Jack Welch’s address is at @jack_welch on Twitter.
The Return on Investment (ROI) with respect to the use of social computing is a hot topic these days, as more and more organizations and business sectors are realizing social media and social computing are here to stay. Indeed, I just finished co-authoring (with Jay Cross) an article for CLO Magazine laying the groundwork for a new approach to making decisions about investing in social computing capability and dynamics in business environments. I’ll share an abbreviated version here in the next several days.
A number of other practitioners and theorists who pay attention to networks and their dynamics (such as FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald and Joe McKendrick, Dion Hinchcliffe, Valdis Krebs, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jessica Lipnack, and others) have covered the same or similar ground. It is becoming more apparent that the returns from network activities are found in intangibles that do not fit well into the industrial era concept of Return on Investment (an accounting concept used to make investment decisions in stable, time-defined, typically single-purpose use cases). New assumptions and methods for assessing what to do are needed.
So, I’d like to use the reporting in a ZDNet article that caught my eye titled “A Real ROI From Twitter ? The Start of Social Medical Networks“ to discuss several of the key issues about whether or not to use social computing to achieve purposeful goals and objectives..
.
There may not be a big enough return on tweeting yet to report it to your CFO. But it won’t be long before there’s a clear, return on tweeting to report it to your doctor.
[ Snip ... ]
At the Autism One Conference in Chicago, a Web-based program for collecting data on individual cases of the brain development disorder will be unveiled. It’s called ChARMTracker and is designed, at the start, to help ease the burdens of each parent trying to keep track of the drugs, nutritional supplements, physical therapies and dietary tacks being taken to treat their sons or daughters. They will also use it to keep track of any observations about their behaviors that might seem pertinent and how their children are performing academically, as a result of the constantly changing constellation of combinations that are being applied to the still-mystic condition.
[ Snip ... ]
Horn has, for instance, collected 60 two-inch thick binders of observations, medical and supplement records about Sophie, over the last 11 years. Those records would be available to Sophie’s doctors and health care aides, in an instant, if ChARMtracker had been around from the start. They would also be part of a growing mound of evidence on how drugs, supplements, therapies and diet affected autistic individuals, as they grew and evolved.
[ Snip .. ]
Pramila has founded another company, MedicalMine Inc., which will take what she has developed and try to extend the approach to other chronic physical conditions and forms of disease management.
If all goes well, parents and patients will not just be collecting and sharing data through sites like this on the Web. They’ll be communicating with doctors and providing real-time evidence of results, through tweets and other instant messaging technologies. In some cases, sensors will provide constant streams of data that will be put into the record and analyzed, for individuals and the group, as a whole.
These social medical networks could wind up being “the most fundamental IT app” that a family or its friends need, when desperately seeking answers about afflictions suffered by anyone they care about.
For that, every data element – and every tweet – will count.
And, over the long haul, produce a calculable return.
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So, to begin measuring increases in effectiveness and value in a networked social computing environment, please consider the concept of Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII), which we have derived from the principles of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks (as have many of the others cited above). Why, you may ask, do the above excerpts portend being able to identify and / or assess Return on Investment in Interaction ?
Identifying and Measuring ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)
The focus in purposeful networked environments is to do what’s important and involve those who know what’s important, why it’s important and what they know (or know how to find out) about a problem or issue.
Let’s define some core assumptions about ROII :
Continuous flows of information are the raw material of value creation and overall performance,
Information flows are carried by links, alerts, RSS feeds, search engines, aggregation and filtering of content, etc.
All leading social / collaboration platforms now feature social networking, search and computing capabilities,
These platforms’ architectures facilitate purposeful cross-silo communications and exchange.
Increase in number of projects formed from all three factors above
It’s important, we think, to note here that we are not proposing a definitive answer but rather the need to debate and clarify the issue(s). However, an attentive read of the ZDNet article referenced above clearly aligns with Krebs’ four principles:
1. Increase in size of network: As The CHARMTracker database grows and the volume of families’ data it holds increases, it’s utility to doctors, other health care professionals and the families themselves increases. And, as the article points out, if and when the data begins to be (appropriately) used by those networked around the health issues, the value of the interaction will increase in an (likely) exponential fashion.
2. Increase in internal network connectivity: Again, as suggested by the paragraphs excerpted from the ZDNet article, as more and more participants are networked into the CHARMTracker information and begin to use the dynamics of social networks to seek for and circulate pertinent and useful information, each time a piece of information is useful to someone there’s a tangible return on the intangible capacity offered by the flows of information and knowledge.
3. Increase in connection to valuable 3rd parties: As more information fills the CHARMTracker database, and more doctors, health care professional and families use it, the apparent value will become clear to others with expertise or value to provide to the social medical network that will have grown up around autism issues. Expect to see both volunteer and for-profit services to be added to the growing ecosystem of knowledge and attention.
This expected outcome reminds me of the core argument of Shoshan Zuboff’s book “The Support Economy - Why Corporation Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism”, wherein she argues that the complexity surrounding many issues in today’s society are such that all sorts of people (consumers, families, professionals, and so on) will need “support” that can be designed, built and delivered via the digital interlinked infrastructure we know as the Web.
4. Increase in number of projects formed from all three factors above: It’s pretty easy to imagine that as the CHARMTRacker database and its use(s) take root, there will be other clever and useful projects that grow out of the experience and the learning it affords. Doc Searls, of Cluetrain Manifesto and VRM (Vendor Relations Management) fame once sagely noted that one of the critical outcomes of operating in purposeful social networks was the “scaffolding” (building in layer upon layer) of useful knowledge.
That’s how circulating pertinent information and sharing useful knowledge works .. we don’t go backwards, we build on what’s useful and what works. That’s how Return On Investment in Interaction will work and will deliver value to organization and groups who decide to use social networks, linked information and data, and social computing dynamics to accelerate their effectiveness towards achieving their purpose.
Phweet is a very interesting service on two (or maybe three) levels.
First, if you are a heavy Twitter user, with a little bit of practice you can work it into your Twitter workflow, thereby offering you and followers a means to "escalate" from connecting via a tweet to a more intimate voice conversation.
Second, the same basic technology can be enabled anywhere … for example, on Craigslist or eBay or other community driven sites. In effect, the Phweet capabilities can become part of the Web’s voice communications infrastructure.
And third, although I do not understand well the technical aspects, I think Phweet can become a central part of telephony on the web, doing away with the big telcos stranglehold on the dial tone.
RECENT WEBCAST: Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry
On May 14th, the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott D. Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.
Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:
* the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
* the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
* the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
* framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
* the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
* the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
FASTforward Blog Guide to Twitter
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from last year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
