Banning employees from social media is insane
If you believe the numbers, as many as 25—50 percent of all companies still restrict their employees from using social media during the workday. No messing around on Facebook. No connecting with digital friends. And God forbid, no sharing or talking about your employer or company.
These philistines of the business world remain convinced that time spent on social networks can only serve to jeopardize office productivity.
On the contrary, those of us who appreciate the value of listening, connecting, and engaging know just how absurd that argument is, regardless of the research. But guess what? It turns out that even when we’re just wasting our time watching senseless videos or keeping track of a friend’s late night exploits, it still might be a good thing, especially if we work in an industry where problem solving is part of our job.
Need evidence? You can find a pretty compelling one in a recent Wired column Driven by Distraction – How Twitter and Facebook make us more productive workers. Arguing convincingly that social media participation is well suited to stoking the creative mind, Brendan I Koerner reminds us of the following:
“Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.”
OK, so Wired is clearly vested in advocating almost anything digital. But this argument has been around since before the social web. Check out Creativity and the Mind, Discovering the Genius Within by Ronald A. Finke and friends. He’s written and entire thesis that will convince you that:
“People are more successful if we force them to move away from a problem or distract them temporarily.”
Of course all the companies still slapping a lock on digital access can roll out another argument: the confidential nature of their company’s information or the even more effective government regulation and compliance excuse. Alas, that line of reasoning seems a little stale now, too. I mean if the Department of Defense can embrace social media, can’t an insurance company?
In its new policy (Directive-Type Memorandum 09-026), announced last week, the Department of Defense states that the default for the DoD non-classified network (the NIPRNET) is for open access so that all of DoD can use new media.
“Service members and DoD employees are welcome and encouraged to use new media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or deployed — but it’s important to do it safely. Keep in mind that everyone has a responsibility to protect themselves and their information online, and existing regulations on ethics, operational security, and privacy still apply. Be sure never to post any information that could be considered classified, sensitive, or that might put military members or families in danger.”
As U.S. military. Capt. Nathan Broshear, Director of Public Affairs for 12th Air Force (Air Forces Southern) who is currently leading Air Force communications in Haiti, says:
“We’re not launching missiles, we’re launching ideas.”
My friend David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, sums it up better than I can. So I’ll leave you with this quote from David.
“There is a huge number of companies that are putting their organizations at a disadvantage. If I managed a hedge fund, I’d sell short a basket of stocks of companies that block social media like YouTube and Facebook and buy stock in the companies (like IBM) that encourage employee use of these new tools and have an established social media policy like the DoD.”
Works for me, David. What do the rest of you have to say? Is there a legitimate excuse to restrict employees from using social media?
Good customer service deserves a shout out
Rolls Royce customer service is as legendary as the motorcar
OK, the examples I’m about to share do not rival the legendary tales of Rolls Royce. You may have heard the oft repeated tale of the plutocrat whose Phantom develops a transmission problem in the South of France. He telegraphs Rolls Royce and that evening while he’s sleeping blissfully in his hotel room, the motorcar manufacturer helicopters in a team of mechanics who repair his touring car before dawn and then leave neither bill nor record of the repairs. After all Rolls Royces do not experience transmission problems.
Stories like that live on since they epitomize both the brand and the definition of service. These days we have come to expect the total opposite. And, in fact, they are the stories that get told. Usually via social media. Receive lousy treatment in a restaurant? Shout it out on Yelp or Foursquare. Airline refuses to replace your broken guitar? Compose some angry lyrics and post them on YouTube. Comcast doesn’t show up when scheduled? Rant about it on Twitter.
True, more often than not such condemnation is deserved. It feels good to vent. And in some cases our outbursts actually yield improved products or services.
But it strikes me that if we can so effortlessly dish out anger and accusations, we ought to, at least once in a while, offer up praise when it’s deserved. Just maybe, by doing so, we’ll encourage other brands and marketers, service providers and retailers to emulate that Rolls Royce behavior – or something remotely similar — that could earn our loyalty.
So here goes, a recap of some good service I recently received on a family vacation in Florida.
Jet Blue is responsive on Twitter
Delayed flights are the bane of every traveler, but when you’re on vacation with your family it’s even more annoying. Worse yet is not having accurate information. The word “Delayed” doesn’t quite cut it when it comes be keeping you informed. But on a recent trip to Florida, I found that all my questions regarding the arrival of my aircraft, accurate departure time, and other updates were delivered in close to real time via @JetBlue on Twitter. I even got more information than was available on the airline’s mobile website and got it fast. Not sure how they do it and if they can do it all the time for their many travelers, but definitely impressive.
Hertz delivers exactly as they said they would
I’ll start with the fact that rental car prices the week of school vacation are nothing short of highway robbery. In fact the sales manager at Tampa International Airport’s Hertz office actually admitted that the company jacks up prices by 15 to 20 percent that week. But I can’t argue with how great the service was. We had a brand new VW Routan that ran fine, but a few days into the trip, when a malfunction indicator light came on and left us reluctant to drive any distance without knowing the cause, Hertz delivered another brand new vehicle to us less than two hours after we called. No insistence that we come to them. No questions asked. A pretty good way to assure my next rental will be with Hertz, too.
Tommy Bahama Tropical Café is not laid back when it comes to service
I can honestly say I’ve never had this happen before, and I’ve patronized some pretty good restaurants all over the world. Two days after eating at this popular spot in Sarasota’s St. Armand’s Key, I got a call from the manager asking about our experience. In a brief but meaningful call she wanted to know about our reception, the preparation of the food and the service of the wait staff. I’m pretty sure she was even taking notes when I suggested the sauce on my grilled Snapper could have been a tad more subtle. She told me the restaurant calls most of its patrons who make reservations for a quick follow-up. Given that the place did virtually everything right and nothing wrong, one might conclude that they actually listen.
It doesn’t seem it should be that hard to provide great service. Zappos (a Mullen client) does it all day long every day. Apple delivers it in virtually all of its stores. The W Hotel has built a brand around service.
If you want stories told about your brand, perhaps you should forego trying to save money on service by trying to limit the length of phone calls or refusing to treat customers as individuals (Chase, are you listening?) and take a lesson from some of these companies.
What do you think? Is it possible to encourage better service with praise? Or should we resume venting?
Lessons from Brandbowl2010.com
Brandbowl2010.com delivered real time brand ranking
As many of you know, Mullen and Radian6 just finished a pretty cool project/experiment. On Superbowl Sunday we invited everyone and anyone on Twitter to join us on critiquing the always-anticipated ads. We drew from all of Twitter’s 40 million users to capture real time conversation so we could track each brand’s performance. And, by early Monday, we’d posted results, including volume of tweets, sentiment and overall rankings.
It took us weeks of development time to code and build Brandbowl, most of it at night long after the “regular” workday had ended. We didn’t generate any revenue since we were too busy getting it done to sell a sponsorship (though we did get a couple of inquiries at the last minute). In fact a bunch of us had to forego enjoying the game or even the ads (the few worthy of enjoying) as we were consumed with managing the site, responding to requests or simply interacting with the thousands of folks who joined us.
So why did we do it? What was in it for Mullen? How are we measuring ROI? Why would we go to the trouble? I got asked these questions a number of times; mostly from reporters, but also from industry colleagues and college professors. So here’s the answer: We did it because we can. We did it because the digital tools are available. We did it because in the age of social media you have to give to get. And we did it because doing is better than talking.
As for the ROI, well there’s this: learning, listening, conversation, press coverage, industry buzz, media impressions, awareness, community enthusiasm, employee pride and new business inquiries. All the same things we tell brands and marketers they can enjoy if they do social media right. In the case of Brandbowl2010 the ROI beat even our most optimistic expectations.
But the real reason we did Brandbowl is this: it reflects much of what we believe about marketing, advertising and social media.
Create utility not messages
Many marketers, advertisers and even agencies continue to think we’re in the business of creating messages. Messages interrupt. Isn’t it better to conceive experiences, utility and platforms? Content that sparks engagement, interaction,conversation and even relationships? We think yes. No message, press release or ad could have connected with as many people as Brandbowl did.
Share your content
In this case we shared our idea with Radian6. They shared their tools with us. We both shared the experience with everyone and anyone; it was open to peers, colleagues, even rivals. (Note in the ad business we’re friends with our rivals and compete with our sister companies.) And, of course, we’re sharing the results, willingly offering data to some of the brands that have come to us after the fact and requested it. (New business is a long dance and it starts with that first conversation.) Remember what Chris Anderson tell us in Free: you have to give stuff away if you want to get anything back.
Invite participation and co-creation
Brandbowl may have been informative if all we’d done was capture the chatter and data from the Twittersphere. But it wouldn’t have been as much fun. People want to join in, play along, participate. Being able to tweet from the site, reply to others, and be part of a bigger conversation was our version of CNN/Facebook’s Inauguration mashup. Nearly 8,000 people joined us in the conversation and in the process gave us insight, ideas and tips for making our own efforts even better.
Build a community that will help spread the word
If we had no friends or followers on Twitter, Brandbowl would have been invisible. But if you have a community with whom you engage, share, converse and interact on a regular basis, chances are they’ll lend their support (presuming they genuinely believe in what you’re up to). I was fortunate that @bbhlabs, @bigspaceship, @schwartzie14, @eproulx, @thebeancast and others thought this idea was worth a shout out. No doubt they know I’d do the same for them.
Measure everything
It doesn’t matter whether you do it for yourself as an individual (blog, video, website) for your company or for a client. If you’re making an investment of time and money to create something you should measure it. Impressions, engagement, response, traffic, reaction. Obviously Brandbowl was all about measuring. Not only do we have stats and data about the success of all the brands that advertised on the game (now in high demand by the brands themselves) we have numbers that tell us whether this little project was worth it as well.
Suffice it to say we’ll be back next year. What’s your next social media project going to be?
Are those Superbowl ads any good? Twitter will tell us.
Even in an age of social media there’s still something about Superbowl advertising that appeals to us all. Maybe it’s because the game is the last big common media experience we share anymore; we know that everyone else will be hearing and watching the same jokes as we are. Perhaps it’s because we relish the fact that for one night every advertiser out there will actually attempt to entertain us, rather than insult us with the idiotic messages that interrupt most programming. Or it might just be all the pre-game hype that obligates us to pay attention. After all we’ll need an opinion come Monday morning.
Whatever the reason, we still look forward with anticipation to ads we hope will live up to all the anticipation.
But since this the age of social media – the ability to join in, share our thoughts, connect with friends and enjoy instant gratification – Mullen thought it would combine the two by creating Brandbowl2010. It’s a simple site that lets you tweet and follow posts from anyone using our hashtag #brandbowl. But thanks to our developers and UX team, and some help from our friends at Radian6, Brandbowl will also include close to real time reaction to the brands advertising on the game by analyzing conversation from everyone on Twitter, not just those using the hashtag.
If Twitter’s API cooperates, we should have a pretty robust experience, counting total number of tweets per brand (we can’t actually analyze each spot separately due to the challenges with isolating a comment, i.e. “loved that Bud spot,” would be hard to assign to a specific commercial), capturing sentiment, and calculating a ranking based on a combination of chatter volume and reaction. In addition, we’ll have word clouds to show you what people are saying. You won’t have to wait until until Monday morning and USA Today to know what brands did best; we’ll have it throughout the game.
It’s been a fun and challenging project, combining integrated teams from Mullen and Radian6, but not without its challenges. For example, how do we know we’re grabbing tweets that refer to the spots, not to a brand in another context? How do we resolve a brand named Dodge, when the word dodge would easily be used to describe a running back’s technique. In test runs we had to eliminate the word Charger, too, as there are lots of people on Twitter talking about San Diego’s football team daily.
So we’ve grabbed as many hashtags as we could find (#brandbowl as well as #adbowl, #superads, #SB44ads, et.al.) We’ve studied lists of spots and scoured the web for any information that would help – celebrities appearing in spots for example – and then created combinations of words to increase the likelihood we don’t grab anything that isn’t a comment about a commercial.
In addition we’ll monitor the game throughout, modifying keywords based on the storylines in the commercials. (If Honda has squirrels in its commercial, we need to add squirrels to a combination of words.)
Why are we doing this? Going to all this trouble ourselves, just so you and our friends and clients and employees can screw around on Twitter during the game? Because we can. Because it’s fun to make stuff, to experiment. It’s valuable to learn by doing. And finally because doing it is better than talking about it.
If it doesn’t work? Crashes? Falls victim to Twitter’s API? So what. Failure, too, can be a great lesson. Let’s hope that’s not the case, however. Wish us luck, and most importantly, join us at Brandbowl2010.com and #brandbowl.
Share medical procedures via social media
I’m pleased to announce my latest venture, SeeMyOp.com. It’s intended to be the first social network site that lets members share their surgical procedures live with friends and followers, both on SeeMyOp.com as well as on a user’s other networks thanks to an API that will enable users to stream live video from surgical scopes and instruments over Twitter and Facebook.
In addition, a simple interface will also tweet all vital signs during an operation while planned connections to Foursquare and Blippy will inform a patient’s community of his hospital location along with the costs of all procedures.
I think you’ll agree this is the next big thing, not only in social networking and community building, but in health care as well.
SeeMyOp oozes benefits. For starters, it’s the logical next step for social networks. Think about it. As we all collect friends, fans and followers it’s inevitable that they’ll want to know as much about our health as they do about our thoughts, whereabouts and spending habits. And as more and more aging baby boomers embrace the social web, what’s likely to be the most common shared activity? That’s right, medical procedures. Everything from the basic to the life threatening.
Secondly, SeeMyOp.com taps right into the same networks we already use, uniting them in a way that’s useful, informative, and conversational. With Foursquare we let everyone know where we are. With Blippy, we share, if not brag about our recent purchases. With Facebook we update our status and share images of our lives. And with Twitter we tweet about just about anything. SeeMyOp ties them all together in the ultimate personal revelation: the chance to see what’s really going on inside us.
SeeMyOp.com will be the ultimate social sensory experience. In addition to video and vitals, the platform will automatically upload still photographs from any procedure at pre-determined intervals chosen by the patient. Images will be available on Flickr, Facebook and accessible via a new iPhone app also under development.
Even more importantly, SeeMyOp could become an incredibly valuable resource when it comes to health care. It will familiarize patients with procedures, allow them to learn from friends’ experiences, and provide them with comparative cost information.
It could even help with tracking the success rates for different procedures by both hospital and specialist as its installation base grows and more users embrace the new technology.
SeeMyOp is still in the early phases of development, getting ready to raise capital, as we proceed with product development. But I wanted to share it first with my own community of friends and readers.
I look forward to making the platform available to users and the medical community in the not too distant future and in the meantime welcome all of your comments, questions and feedback.
What do you think? Is this the best social networking idea yet or what?
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