Making Tweets & Sausage

Ambrose Bierce, the 19th century journalist and author once compared a lawsuit to a machine where “You go into (it) as a pig and come out of as a sausage.”

Let’s hope that is not the fate of Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen who is being sued by her landlord for the high offense of complaining about her digs on Twitter. It was only a matter of time.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, Horizon Group Management takes exception to this Bonnen tweet: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay."

A Horizon spokesperson told the Sun-Times the company hadn’t talked with Bonnen about her post, nor had anyone asked her to remove the comment.

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization,” he said, noting that the company manages 1,500 apartments in Chicago and has a good reputation it wants to preserve.

Horizon also responds that Bonnen filed a lawsuit first, but that’s irrelevant when it comes to Horizon’s claim of slander for a tweet.

Every company has a duty to protect its reputation just as fiercely as it does any other asset. However, suing a person for expressing an opinion on Twitter or any other social network site is not the way to defend yourself. From a brand and reputation point of view, that’s just about the worst thing you can do, unless you want to be a brand whose core value is intimidation.

Companies who truly care about their brand and reputation must join the social conversation. Listen. Respond with facts. Agree to disagree if necessary. And if you screwed up, admit it, apologize, fix it, and learn from the experience.

That’s a lot easier and cheaper than making sausage.

What do you think?

For more about brand and reputation protection in a digital world, visit C2M2 Associates or contact me at james.lee@c2m2a.com.

The End of the (Media) World

I love the movie Independence Day, the story of when an evil alien race arrives to the strains of REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

There’s a new book that chronicles a different end of our media-driven world. No aliens this time, but the life altering changes in civilization are real.

AdAge editor Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario looks at how the shift to a digital world spells doom for the symbiotic relationship between mass media and mass marketing. Garfield makes the case that the 400 year old practice of dictating to audiences is being replaced by consumer control that requires organizations to listen to people.

The core message – of which I am a true believer – can be found in this passage:
"(Consumers) aren't necessarily listening to you. They're listening to each other talk about you. And they're using your products, your brand names, your iconography, your slogans, your trademarks, your designs, your goodwill, all of it as if it belonged to them -- which, in a way, it all does, because, after all, haven't you spent decades, and trillions, to convince them of just that?"
You’ve heard it before from me and others: the days of companies being able to practice top-down communications with their stakeholders (employees, customers, shareholders and community leaders) are numbered.

The Independence Day aliens were set on destroying the human race. Media & marketing will survive the digital Apocalypse, but in very different forms.

Those businesses that are prepared to take transparency and consumer control to heart will also survive. And thrive. They're the people who will be singing the REM song...”it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”

For more information about how you can prepare for the new digital world, visit C2M2 Associates. To buy Garfield’s book (and you should), visit thechaosscenario.net.

When Good Brands Go Bad

Anyone who’s ever checked a bag when flying, spent hours waiting for the cable installer, or celebrated a birthday on hold with customer (no) service, wishes they wrote the latest YouTube hit “United Breaks Guitars.”

Poor service is always a risk to your brand and reputation. Thousands of successful transactions get lost when the one screw-up makes it into the social media. That’s not news and not particularly surprising.

Now comes a survey that explains, in part, why well known brands at seemingly marketing savvy companies continue to be caught off-guard by completely predictable and preventable events – like baggage handlers destroying a musician’s guitar.

According to findings from UberCEO.com:

• Not a single CEO has a blog. Zero. Zip. Nada.
• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
• 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, but only three have more than 10 connections.
• Fewer than 20 CEOs have a personal Facebook page.
• Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.

I know several CEOs and have worked directly for two who led multi-billion dollar public companies. CEOs and other execs are busy people.

However, irrespective of the reasons why – busy schedules, fear of technology, fear of liability – the survey reveals a shocking lack of respect for customers. It reflects executives out of touch with the people who pay the bills now and in the future.

It’s no wonder, then, that superstar brands keep getting caught with their shorts down by the folks who create YouTube videos and post Tweets about their bad customer experiences.

Until CEOs join the conversation on social networks in a meaningful way, we’ll continue to watch episodes of When Good Reputations Go Bad. And the rest of us will blog about it, even if the CEO won’t.

For more on branding, reputation and social media marketing, visit C2M2 Associates.

The Future of Privacy, Courtesy of CSI

So there I was diligently working, a recent re-run of CSI on the television in the background. That’s when I heard it: “It’s not that they don’t believe in privacy, it’s that they value openness.”

Turns out that “they” were people who gave a running dialogue of their life on Twitter, the level of detail shocking to one character who wondered what sort didn't share his conventional view of protecting information: “Don’t these people believe in privacy?”

I’ve had these same conversations with friends, colleagues and family. To a person they lament the so-called loss of privacy they perceive to occur when one joins a social network.

To a person of a certain age, privacy has a very different meaning. To younger people who have grown up sharing and showing all of the events of their lives (and I do mean ALL), privacy is not the precious right their elders prize. They believe in transparency in all things and think everyone else should, too.

For the time being, this is an interesting academic discussion and occasionally fodder for TV show banter. But soon, it will be a significant public and social policy issue as the young people who value transparency over privacy move into positions of authority.

Businesses have always hid to varying degrees behind literal and figurative walls. There are even laws that prevent disclosure of certain types of commercial and personal information. Attorneys, ministers and physicians make a living keeping secrets.

In the future, what will the kids raised on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook do when they take the helm? Will they learn to embrace a level of privacy they’ve never known or will they force new levels of transparency that would make Justice Brandeis cringe.

I’m thinking openness will be the new privacy. What do you think? And which do you value more – transparency or privacy?

Why Can't Old (Media) Dogs Learn New (Media) Tricks?

Time Warner is casting AOL out onto the street by the end of the year. News Corp’s MySpace has seen traffic and revenue decline so fast the site has gone from “Who’s Who” to “What’s That?”

Why is it that traditional media companies have such a difficult time with new media properties?
Ten years ago Ted Turner said the merger of AOL and Time Warner was “better than sex.” Rupert Murdoch, upon buying MySpace in 2005 said “young people don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important.”

There were both right and both wrong.

Both companies hyped the value of new media, then promptly tried to run them like their other media properties, where change is predicable and innovation glacial.

Time Warner milked the AOL dial-up service cow for all it’s worth, finally hitting on a money making strategy to own separately branded, ad supported destinations like MapQuest, Moviephone and Engadget.

MySpace, once the highest flying of the social network sites (and still the highest revenue producer) is seeing traffic and ad revenue decline and shift to rivals Facebook and Twitter almost as fast as users can type 140 characters.

MySpace is still the destination of choice for the young and the restless, but not so much for adults who have discovered the power of social networks. MySpace traffic fell 2% in April 2009 compared to 2008. Facebook traffic grew 89% over the same period. Ad revenue you ask? MySpace is projected to drop 15% and Facebook to climb 10% this year.

Why the rapid reversal of fortunes for MySpace? Web users, especially social networkers, are not like newspaper readers and television viewers. They are more demanding, and with an infinite supply of sites that will cater to their needs (and whims), very fickle.

Let this be a lesson to all owners of new media properties. Listen to your users. If you’ve been running a newspaper or television empire, they know more about what needs to be done than you do.