Responding to Overzealous Followers While Representing Your Brand

Scott Monty has a tough job. As the head of Social Media for Ford Motor Company, it may seem like he gets paid to goof around on Twitter all day. And with over 6,000 followers, he certainly has built himself a pretty big megaphone for reaching his social media audience. Sounds easy – toss out a few mentions of your company’s minisites, interspersed with a few wisecracks, 140 character anecdotes, and the occasional link to a hilarious YouTube video, and it almost seems like anyone could do his job for their own company.

Yet Ford is unbelievably lucky to have Scott representing them in the social media arena. There are lot of people out there talking smack about Ford right now, and as Motrin learned, Twitter provides the ideal medium for an few individuals’ petty gripes to snowball into a mindless mob riot in the blink of an eye. It’s impressive to see the unbelievable amount of outreach Scott accomplishes every day: acknowledging and thanking countless Ford evangelists, objectively fielding criticism, and helping to set the record straight to cut off the spread of misinformation. Some have argued that his efforts singlehandedly averted a PR disaster surrounding a lawsuit last week.

All of that seems pretty tame when compared to the sheer insanity that I happened to observe Scott dealing with last Friday. Michael Leahy, of the self-evidently conservative group Top Conservatives on Twitter (#TCOT), came out left field to assail Ford under the auspices of offering marketing and operations consulting. I had actually been following Leahy for a while, intrigued by his overtly conservative bent among a community that would mostly seem to skew in a more progressive direction. I’m not sure what provoked Leahy’s berserk assault on Scott, but I watched in fascination and horror as the following trainwreck unfolded:

Scott, in the middle of a top level all-day communications strategy meeting, took the time to actually engage Leahy and his bizarre, belligerent requests to “sit down Ford CEO talk free market big help” (to paraphrase). I was truly impressed with the rational, respectful, yet assertive responses from Scott. He also made the wise decision to take this conversation to email as quickly as possible.

In this case, Scott chose to engage a critic — but the other challenge that he faces on a daily basis is knowing what to ignore. Maybe you’ve got dozens of Google Alerts set and live Twitter searches running 24/7 — you can’t respond to every mention of your brand, and in fact you probably shouldn’t. Prioritization is a big part of the reason for this, to be sure; but at the same time, it’s often even more effective to let other consumers — brand evangelists — come to the defense of your brand. Other times, the act of acknowledging a disparaging remark will bring far more attention to it if it was left alone, free to float away into obscurity.

Representing your brand in social media is no joke. Twitter, for instance, is by its very nature a fertile environment for the proliferation of misinformation — something that was brought to attention during the recent Mumbai attacks. Ultimately, though, a delicate balance between personality and professionalism underlies all the other tactical considerations. Be human and be helpful, and the rest will follow.

December 15, 2008 | Filed Under Business, Social Media | 8 Comments

Inbound Marketing For The Win!

I got a sneak peek at 6:30am this morning at the music video debut of the endlessly talented Rebecca Corliss (aka @repcor), who wrote, directed, and edited the following two minutes and fifty-three seconds of unbound awesomeness promoting inbound marketing:

Also featuring cameos from Hubspot cohorts Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille), Pamela Seiple (@pamelump), Mike “If you’re not dialing, I’m not smiling” Volpe (@mvolpe), and others (watch closely for the Fail Whale).

December 8, 2008 | Filed Under Advertising, Just For Fun, Social Media | 1 Comment

The Only Thing You Need to Know About Using Twitter

A contact recently reached out to me with a Twitter etiquette question. Many of the Twitterati have written about “Twittiquette” already, but I see no need for a primer on professional conduct. The people behind the “@” signs that you interact with on Twitter are exactly that — people (with the exception of Sockington and the Mars Phoenix). My response to the question in question was simple.

The only thing I ever suggest to people about using Twitter is to be human (even if you’re representing your company) and be helpful. Stick to those principles and you can’t go wrong.

That’s it. Shortest blog post you’ll ever read.

December 5, 2008 | Filed Under Social Media | 1 Comment

The Dawn of “Social Anarchy”

A few major media outlets around the world have picked up on recent stories of organized teams of party crashers raiding residential parties in England and trashing homes. Nick ONeill posted a summary this morning on AllFacebook:

A group calling themselves the “Facebook Republican Army” have rampaged through a 16-year-old girl’s house in Sussex according to Sky News. There has been a continued string of parties, which started on Facebook, that have gotten out of control in the U.K. Less than two weeks ago we wrote about a party in London which “ended in chaos after up to 60 hooded youths gatecrashed the event”.

I’d love to know more about the FRA’s purpose (or manifesto, if you want to give them that much credit). Is it just a bunch of angsty British wannabe-anarchists trying to live the Clockwork Orange dream, or are they trying to make an actual point about Facebook and society through the avant-garde medium of property destruction? I’m counting on folks like Nick ONeill and Justin Smith to keep me posted as details unfold.

Metro Boston, my favorite low-cal daily newspaper, reported this morning on the evolution of “social terrorism.” With the rise of the Facebook Republican Army, are we entering a new era of what might be considered “social anarchy?”

(Photo credit: Sky News)

December 4, 2008 | Filed Under Social Networks | Leave a Comment

The Ultimate Measure of Twitter Influence: Average Clicks Per Link Posted

I have a pretty simple metric for how I measure engagement within Twitter and the growth of my own influence: average clicks per link posted. This shows me exactly what my reach is within Twitter when I share something.

Why is this the ultimate metric?

Anyone can amass a couple thousand followers on Twitter — that’s nothing special (would someone please tell Matt Bacak?). Do your followers listen to you, engage with you, and look to you as a resource? Clicks per link is a concrete measure of the value you bring to your conversations.
With URL shorteners, links in Twitter are blind — you can’t see the domain, so you don’t know if you’re clicking through to Google.com or VirusThatWillEatYourFilesAndSpamYourContacts.com. Clicking through a link that someone has posted to Twitter requires a certain degree of trust. (To be fair, most of the trust with regard to spam and malicious sites comes from the culture of the Twitter community itself.)
Since most of your followers are also following hundreds if not thousands of other people as well, the majority of them are not going to see your Tweet as it goes flying by. So your average click per link posted is going to be a very small fraction of your followers (unless it gets re-Tweeted, etc). Guy Kawasaki has made the argument for Tweeting the exact same thing multiple times over the course of a day, to catch the people who missed it earlier, but that’s another discussion.
Besides the trust and curiosity factors, more people are likely to follow a link you post if you’ve a) engaged them them in the past, and b) demonstrated previously that you link to stories/videos/pages of value (i.e. don’t just link to your own blog all day long).

To measure this (and a host of other information, I use a little-known URL shortener called Cligs (http://cli.gs/). I have been nothing short of thrilled with this tool. It tells me things like: ”The last 100 cligs to get traffic got a total of 1574 hits.”

So I know that in the last few weeks (or however long it took me to post 100 links) I’ve gotten an average of 15.7 clicks per link posted. This is up from a few weeks ago when I was around 13.5, so it would appear my influence is growing.

I can also see at a glance how my recent links have performed on Twitter:

…as well as a map (a la Google Analytics) of where the users clicking my links are coming from in the world…

…and how my link has propagated out through the interwebs (through retweets, search engines, etc):

With Cligs I always know what my influence is, up to the second. And I can at a glance the most important metric of all: average clicks per posted link.

(Full disclosure: I am in no way associated with Cligs — just a great tool I use dozens of times a day.)

December 3, 2008 | Filed Under Social Media | 2 Comments

Promote Your Way to Irrevocable Personal Humiliation

Going on now over at Twitter Search is a flurry of discussion regarding the self-proclaimed “Powerful Promoter,” Matt Bacak. Bacak recently published a press release touting his recent ascendance to the hallowed halls of the Atlanta, GA “Twitter Elite.”

OK, that’s pretty shameless. It gets more embarrassing still when people start to call you on it. But the fact of the matter is that Bacak does not even make the top 50 Twitterers in Atlanta — and that makes him a fraud.

Here’s a glimpse into the Twitter backlash: