Social Media Sentinel – March 28, 2011

• Tweet
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  Pin It
  

• Tweet
• 
  

March 28, 2011

Having a CEO active in social media can be a blessing for a PR professional – it can create a direct relationship between your audience and company leadership and help humanize the brand. However, when a CEO’s hot button is pushed by the media or in some cases the head of a blogging juggernaut like TechCrunch, PR professionals can be left to deal with the fallout from a very public “tweet by counter tweet” conflict.

Hashable CEO Attacks BetaBeat Editor via Twitter for “Worthless” Story

When Hashable CEO Mike Yavonditte reached out to journalist Elizabeth Spiers about a negative post written about the company on BetaBeat – “Hashable is Worthless” – she posted their email conversation for the world to see. Yavonditte then took to his Twitter account to call her out for doing so, calling her “trash” and her actions “sleazy.” While social media does give executives a venue to respond to media criticism and share feedback directly with the press, when done wrong it can be pretty damaging for a brand. In this case, the Hashable CEO’s aggressive and immature response contrasts with the company’s positioning as a friendly app that’s all about making connections.

Here are our recommendations for a more appropriate way to use social media to handle the negative piece:

• Have Yavonditte write a post for the Hashable blog addressing some of the criticism in the BetaBeat post and offering his point of view on the review
• Yavonditte could share the blog post via his Twitter account and include an @techmeme tip to have his post appear with the headline on the news aggregator
• Monitor for additional discussion about the BetaBeat story and have Yavonditte leave a comment with his take linking back to the blog post
• Yavonditte could ask Hashable users and his Twitter followers to let Elizabeth Spiers know how the app has been useful to them

There’s also the option to not address the piece directly. Companies are used to technology reviews that neatly highlight benefits and weaknesses. This was an extreme review and Hashable might have been better served to launch a heavy campaign focused on the value Hashable is bringing to users, as opposed to facing off directly with BetaBeat.

With news that all users will see promoted tweets in their timelines by Q4, Twitter advertising strategies are getting hot. When Virgin America used hashtag #VXREDHOT to spread information and promote a contest, it saw its fifth highest day in sales, ever. Coke tested promoted tweets during the World Cup last year and recorded86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6 percent.

Here are three lessons learned from early adopters:

• Before You Buy, Anticipate Sentiment– when purchasing a hashtag to support a new product or service launch, it’s important to think through the role your promoted hashtag could play in aggregating negative feedback about your offering. Last week The New York Times promoted the hashtag #NYTimesNews and when the company announced its paywall, an overwhelming amount of negative tweets using the hashtag reverberated on Twitter – leaving the return on the NYT’s investment in question. Anticipating the sentiment from this announcement (who wants to pay for things these days, right?), the NYT might have been better served to invest elsewhere.

• Make Sure Context & Association Is Clear – to support the launch of Dell’s New Inspiron R laptop, which features lids you can change in seconds to personalize your computer, the company sponsored the #popclickswitch hashtag. However, if you track the hashtag, the majority of tweets are asking for clarification on what the promoted tag means or using it in a way that has no relevance to Dell – even with a promoted tweet from Dell that attempts to put the hashtag into context. Dell may have had more success with a hashtag that included its branding.

• The Pitfalls of Buying a Promoted Tweet for an Existing Hashtag – at South by Southwest this year every panel had a hashtag assigned for attendees and those unable to attend to track the discussion. At the “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious” panel, the crowd fired up their Tweetdeck columns for the hashtag #SMAROI and were greeted with a promoted tweet at the top of their streams from a social media “guru” that linked to his blog content about social media measurement. While his intent was to generate awareness with this captive audience, it backfired as the audience viewed his tweet as clutter and spam. People were encouraged to not click-through to his content, questioning this consultant’s acumen.

Spurring adoption of social media tools internally can be a challenge and is most successful when employees are using a tool that has a similar user experience to their personal social network of choice. We previously wrote about the launch of Salesforce.com’s Chatter and its Facebook-like user experience and now another player has entered the ring: Convofy. In the words of CNET’s Rafe Needleman: “It’s like a Facebook wall for business.”

So, what’s the big deal? When posed against its major competitors, Convofy’s biggest points of difference are in its real-time collaboration and context capabilities. Not only can users create groups, share files, and send messages, but Convofy provides each interaction with functionality that allows multiple users to comment, mark-up, and integrate outside information.

For example, integration with outside Web apps, such as Twitter and Google Maps, is seamless. Users can mark-up a specific portion of a map and send it to another user while retaining the zooming, panning, and all other abilities of Google Maps in the message. The application and collaboration infrastructure of Convofy is fundamentally different from its competitors in its ability to support this type of rich content.

One possible disadvantage for Convofy: Salesforce Chatter integrates with various business process platforms that create extra value. Convofy doesn’t do this quite yet, but developers claim this is coming in the future. Will the delay be enough to give Chatter the edge?

For more information, check out this video on Convofy’s website, or this “first look” with Scrybe founder Faizan Buzdar.