Posts tagged ‘Twitter’

  • 28 Jun 2010 at 12:19 PM
  • /
  • Marketing

Customer Service Invades Cannes with Best Buy’s Twelpforce

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Every year the ad industry descends on Cannes, in the south of France, to hand out a few trophy cases of work for the best efforts of the year. In typical French fashion, the ad festival’s relationship with the real day-to-day business of marketing is flirting at best. That June week is a time for pink wine, pinker skin, long, sweaty nights of networking, and the celebration of big, flashy ad campaigns. Extended, careful rumination on marketing’s eternal questions — what makes people buy, or simply like, your brand — does not exactly flourish in that tropical sun.

One of those things that doesn’t get much attention is the hard business of customer service, something that changed this year that changed with the handing of the Titanium Lion Grand Prix to Best Buy and agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky for their work on Twelpforce. The program takes the business of customer service, so often confined to call centers located in the land of God knows where and the return counters in stores, and opens it up for all to see. Employing Twitter — hence the “Tw” — and open to hundreds of Best Buy employees who can tweet from a single account, it’s the mobilization of the retailer’s army of experts to deal with customer complaints or question as they’re expressed in real time.

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GM’s ‘Chevy’ Screw-Up: A New Coke for the Twitter Age

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Don McClean speaks out on the Chevy-Chevrolet DebateFor years now and despite all its woes, General Motors has been one of the more aggressive adopters of social marketing tactics among the big old American corporations. It has a social media team that pushes its products and fields complaints, using platforms from Twitter and Facebook down to Gowalla. Social’s been a big at GM for a while, with departed vice chairman Bob Lutz’ Fastlane blog being among the first of such corporate sites to gain traction. But in the new, post-bankruptcy GM social’s going to be an even more important part how the automaker relates to its customers, if we’re to believe this quote from Scott Lawson, director of customer and relationship services:

“In the old GM, we said you need to call us or you need to write us a letter. That’s not treating them how they want to be treated. In the new GM, we’re going to be where our customers want us to be.”

Too bad that doesn’t extend to what customers want to call your most famous products.

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  • 07 Jun 2010 at 12:50 PM

Betty White Hosted an SNL Episode; Now We Need @BPGlobalPR to Write One

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As much damage as has been done to BP—its market cap slashed by more than a third, its image decimated, its executives shown to be rich bumblers—you could pretty easily argue it’s only gotten a fraction of the pain it deserves. It hasn’t even been able to stop the flow of oil, let alone begin the long process of the remediating the gulf region it’s destroyed, yet somehow the force of public condemnation doesn’t seem strong enough. In amoral fashion, financial types are already discussing whether BP stock is now cheap enough to be a smart buy, and this Reuters story provides a tally of the consumer opposition to the company. It’s a rather gloomy accounting unless you’re roused by a handful of Facebook groups that add up to tens of thousands of people.

Which is why we need to get all Betty White on BP’s ass.

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  • 17 May 2010 at 11:37 AM

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

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When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.

Facebook PrivacySince Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

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How to Increase Your Twitter Following Using Neither Science Nor Snake Oil: A Case Study

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One of the most commonly available brands of social-media snake oil now available is the kind that will help you grow your Twitter following to Greg Odom-like proportions. It’s a rare day that my inbox isn’t violated by some multi-step program that will have thousands of folks hanging on your every 140-character burst overnight. Usually the bulk of the advice is either platitudinous–Be authentic, Engage your community, Provide value–or so highly technical in nature as to miss the point of Twitter, which is simplicity. If you want a platform to game, try Google. At least, the search engine’s algorithm is complex enough to warrant some thinking about how to beat it.

Not so for Twitter. Sure, you might be best off posting at certain times of day and there might be convincing, data-driven grammatical guidance on how to earn those precious re-tweets that will give your Tweets a better chance to go viral. But that’s not what really matters.

I can say that with dead certainty because we have a site whose following has exploded over the past four months–and not from two to eight or 100 to 400 or even 5,000 to 20,000. Since January, Fashionista.com— whose Twitter handle is @fashionista_com— has gone from about 23,000 followers in January to more than 124,000 today. And it did so without relying on any gimmicks, research, or profound social-media advice unless of course you count mine. Which you probably shouldn’t.

Fashionista.com Twitter ChartThe site’s editors, Lauren Sherman and Britt Aboutaleb (who is unfortunately leaving us), have built (unofficially) the third-largest Twitter feed of any fashion news brand, trailing only Women’s Wear Daily and Elle.com, both of which have staffs that dwarf our  operation. They’ve done it by taking the sensibility that informs their blog and applying it to their Twitter feed. A radical approach, huh? Though it’s best you check out the site for yourself, I’ll try to capture their approach here: Fashionista is smart and high-curated, enthusiastic without being frothy, critical without being catty. And, importantly, I can say it’s personal without being totally subjective because it pulls in hundreds of thousands of readers every month, some of them fashion’s leading lights. And some of those, Elle Creative Director Joe Zee, fashion PR maven Kelly Cutrone and Glamour Editor Cindy Leive, have even thrown us a few retweets.

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