Video Clip of the Month: Social Media Revolution 2

July 2, 2010 by

My July 2010 video clip of the month is a recently updated video by Erik Qualman, author of the Socialnomics – Social Media Blog, demonstrating social media’s explosive growth in recent years. The video is a follow-up piece to his original social media revolution video from last summer. While some of the information is similar to last year’s version, Qualman has updated the data and included new figures for the first time. 

A few of the highlights include:

  • If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world.
  • 50 percent of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook.
  • Amazon sold more electronic books for the Kindle than physical books on Christmas.
  • 96 percent of millennials have joined a social network.
  • Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
  • 1 out of 8 couples married in the United States met via social media.
  • Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic.
  • Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama.
  • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is females 55 to 65 years old

Here’s the YouTube video:

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What Bad Web 2.0 Customer Service Looks Like

June 30, 2010 by

After my Verizon e-mail went down for several hours yesterday, I checked the Web 2.0 “newspaper”: Twitter.  I quickly discovered many tweets and even a few blog posts, such as Verizon Email Outage: Twitter and Central for Webmail, about the outage, which appeared to be national in scope.

To my surprise, however, @Verizon, the official Verizon corporate Twitter account, and @VerizonSupport, the official Verizon customer service Twitter account, weren’t acknowledging the outage. Take a look at the side-by-side screen shots below of what @VerizonSupport contained in response to customers (including me) sending out public tweets asking for information (you can click on the image to view a higher-resolution version).

The last question @VerizonSupport answered for the night was in response to @nerdstarresq’s installation problem, even though customer questions immediately before were about the outage. @Verizon was equally Orwellian with tweets, such as “PODCAST: Our Chief Sustainability Officer on Green Is Good radio show: http://bit.ly/c5pNCA^ac” and “Ck out latest Twitter feature on FiOS.When Tweeting via the TV it now says “via FiOS TV” at the end of your Tweet.”

Even though Verizon is in the Internet businesss, its Twitter team seems to be stuck in a  one- or two-way message time warp. As I noted in my Exciting or Scary? Rise of Social Media Swarms, we’re in the middle of communications renaissance. For the first time in history, every customer has a voice that can be heard worldwide and then amplified exponentially if his/her conversation creates a buzz that turns into a swarm. These swarms can attack companies who fail to monitor and address online comments and controversies in real-time:

  • Intel was attacked by a swarm of activists opposed to minerals mining in the Congo
  • Nestle was attacked by a swarm for using palm oil from companies harming Indonesian rainforests

If either company had joined or initiated dialogue early on before the attacks turned into swarms, the impact might have been mitigated. Big companies (especially ones with tech-savvy customers with high-speed Internet, such as Verizon) should have learned from Nestle and Intel’s mistake and applied the principles of social media to their customer operations.  

In Verizon’s case, being honest, upfront and listening to customers would only have meant a few extra tweets from @Verizon and @VerizonSupport about Verizon’s e-mail being down for maintenance and the company looking for a quick fix to the problem.

Not hard, but that is what bad customer service in the Web 2.0 world looks like.

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World Cup, NBA Fans Break Twitter Record

June 22, 2010 by

Two major sporting events this week created tweet tsunamis that helped Twitter reach all-time records for tweets.

After the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament started two weeks ago, the social networking site began seeing huge traffic whenever a big goal was scored. Though Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second on an average day, a record was set Monday when tweets were sent at a rate of 2,940 per second just 30 seconds after Japan scored against Cameroon. 

That record, however, was short-lived. Twitter users sent out as many as 3,085 tweets per second Thursday night immediately after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory against the Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals.

While Twitter, Inc. is probably celebrating the record level of tweets, regular users of Twitter are not. Enormous traffic from the World Cup frequently has exceeded Twitter’s capacity resulting in too many unwanted appearances of the Twitter “fail whale.”

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Facebook COO Thinks E-mail is ‘Probably Going Away’

June 18, 2010 by

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir this week when she boldly said, “”E-mail—I can’t imagine life without it—is probably going away.”

Speaking at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what teenagers are doing today.”

Her assertion is big news for businesses and online advertisers because Facebook may connect consumers with brands more easily than e-mail. While ads in an inbox are called “spam,” Facebook users will even sometimes click “Like” on a brand’s Facebook page and volunteer to receive messages directly from advertisers.

Here’s Sandberg’s talk.

Do you think e-mail is going away? Please leave your comments below.

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Video Clip of the Month: BP Commercial Spoofs

June 2, 2010 by

British Petroleum’s (BP’s) failure to adequately enlist social media in the communications battle over the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill made picking a single video clip of the month too difficult. So I’ve chosen two BP commercial spoofs, both highlighting BP’s growing credibility gap as it desperately tries to control information and ignores the new (social media era) communication rules: collaboration, openness, transparency, and timeliness.

While BP is on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, the information and images it’s sharing are either out-of-date and wrong or way too obviously sanitized.  As Glen Gilmore wrote in an excellent blog post on BP and the social media battleground:

Looking at the collection of photos uploaded at the bpAmerica Flickr stream, one might think that BP’s work crews had been sent to the wrong beaches and waters, as the ones shown in their photographs have shining white sand and clear waters…. Nicely-polished productions and squeeky-clean images are precisely the sort of content that makes board members smile – and the rest of the public go elsewhere for their information.

In this case, the public has turned to satirical YouTube videos, such as a Lady Gaga BP gingle and my below two picks for video clip of the month; a BOYCOTTbp Facebook fan page; and a fake Twitter account. @BPGlobalPR pokes fun at the real oil giant’s public relations campaign with tweets such as:

  • We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.
  • If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair
  • A bird just stole my sandwich! You deserve everything you get, nature!!! #bpcares
  • I’m sorry, are people mad at us for drilling in the ocean?!? Maybe God shouldn’t have put oil there in the first place. DUH. #bpcares
  • BP: Cross you fingers and pray for our riskiest operation yet. We sent Terry to get the lunch order.

Apparently, BP’s communications strategies aren’t going to leave the 1980s anytime soon. BP just hired Anne Womack Kolton, a former spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney, to be its public face for the disaster. While at Cheney’s side, Kolton was an ardent defender of secrecy, and she comes from the Brunswick Group, the international communications and crisis management firm running BP’s failed public relations response. While I could be surprised, I suspect this “change” will only lead to more of the same. It’ll be interesting to watch and find out.

I’m so glad I sold all my BP stock earlier this year! Enjoy the videos.

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