When Times Square was evacuated again last week for a potential bomb scare, an interesting thing happened (besides the fact that Times Square looked like a ghost town). The Wall Street Journal broke the news over Foursquare by checking in to the Times Square area and posting: “Portions of Times Square have been evacuated after a report of a suspicious package.”
The release of breaking news via a Foursquare post was a first of its kind for the media giant, and interesting to me that Foursquare may be a new go-to source for getting breaking news.
With Foursquare surpassing 40 million ‘check-ins,’ it is certainly something that PR professionals need to be paying attention to in the world of social media. Foursquare is something that we discuss now with our clients as appropriate, and are excited to see different ways in which it can be utilized to be part of a strategic campaign.
Companies are already seeing results from being active on Foursquare, and since Foursquare can be used in an immeasurable number of ways (Jimmy Choo shoe hunt in London, or the recent recreation of Ferris Bueller’s infamous ‘day off’), the possibilities are endless.
Recently, Facebook launched new features on the site that have since caused somewhat of an uproar regarding user privacy. Four U.S. senators have called for a change to the updates, expressing concern over the amount of personal data that third-party partners of Facebook will now have access to without your permission, as Facebook adheres to an opt-out policy rather than opt-in.
For marketers, however, the new features can be seen as a window into consumer behavior – and sites such as Yelp and Pandora are already partnering with Facebook to get inside your head, and tell you what your Facebook friends like as well. As Dan Tynan says, both cool and creepy.
As a PR professional who has clients on Facebook, I’m interested to see how this will change the way that people interact with what is formerly known as the Facebook fan page, now just a page that you can ‘Like’ on your profile along with the rest of your profile information. Also, as word of mouth and peer recommendations are often seen as more credible, the new ‘Like’ feature is going to change the definition of a recommendation of a certain brand or product on Facebook, and likely increase user engagement with a brand or third-party site.
Facebook users have been willing in the past to sacrifice a little bit of their privacy for the use of certain features…
…but with the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘doesn’t believe in privacy,’ and the potential for the increase of personalization on the Web based on Facebook data and actions to seem overwhelming, it makes me wonder if many Facebook users may be drawing the line soon.
I’ll admit, I was one of the millions of fans that were depressed when Conan went off the air in January. Since then, an amazing online campaign has taken over and propelled Conan, or Coco as many fans so adoringly refer to him, perhaps somewhat unwillingly into the world of online marketing and social media – a completely new space for someone that didn’t even own his own Web site name.
Starting with the ‘I’m With Coco’ Facebook fan page, created by fans to rally support for Conan O’Brien during the NBC battles over The Tonight Show, Conan’s online presence has now expanded to include TeamCoco.com and Conan himself is even on Twitter with a verified account, regularly tweeting jokes and funny commentary. He wasn’t already a social media obsessed celebrity – for him, this is a whole new world.
Why do I find this fascinating? Since leaving NBC, it almost seems that Conan’s popularity and audience has been able to grow rather than dwindle, due to ‘Team Coco’ embracing the technology of social media and the Internet. No advertising has been purchased to promote his upcoming 30-city ‘Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television’ tour, which starts next week.
As many speculate about which network Conan may eventually land on for his next gig, for now it will be interesting to watch his fan base continue to grow as he moves from city to city, using technology and the Internet in a groundbreaking way for a guy that is now just a stand-up comedian on tour.
Even if you’ve been living in a cave, you have probably heard of Twitter.
As a person that is somewhat obsessed with travel, the majority of people that I follow on Twitter are companies and influencers in this industry. Twitter has grown to become a major resource for travelers, as it is easily accessible for the ever-expanding number of smart phone users around the world. The site also offers access to real-time feedback from other travelers and may eventually replace the bulky guidebook.
One category of travel companies on Twitter that is well-represented is the airline industry. Every major carrier, both domestic and international, has a presence on Twitter. As a PR professional, one thing I find to be interesting is looking at how the various domestic airlines communicate to their followers on Twitter.
In my opinion, there are only a few airlines that truly shine on Twitter, injecting humor and fun into their tweets, posting photos, fully engaging with their followers, being a travel industry resource and also a customer service resource for travelers when needed. Virgin America, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue fit in here.
On the other hand, you have other airlines that do what I would consider to be ‘the basics’ – tweet about sales, reply to some customers, and post the occasional industry link – but there is just something missing, that special spark. United Airlines and US Airways come to mind.
To me, the difference that I have found interesting is how the perception of the ‘fun’ airline personality on Twitter seems to be directly related to the airline’s mainstream popularity among travelers.
Last year, both the Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards 2009 and the Condé Nast Traveler 2009 Readers’ Choice Awards ranked Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines in the top 10 for domestic airlines. United and US Airways are nowhere to be found on either. Also, as of today in the voting for Budget Travel’s Readers’ Choice Awards, the three airlines in the lead for Favorite Airline are (you guessed it!) JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, and Virgin America.
Perhaps this is a ‘chicken or the egg’ question – are these airlines popular because they’ve communicated a fun brand on Twitter, or were they able to create this fun persona because they were already popular?
Regardless of which is the case, even an airline that is loved by over a million followers can suddenly find itself in the middle of a social media firestorm, as was true in the recent Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines fiasco. As CNET’s Caroline McCarthy points out, this was another example of how communications and customer service departments are finding themselves having to work together to get the message out when social media enters the scenario.
And it’s my belief that since Southwest Airlines was a meaningful part of the conversation about their company before the Kevin Smith drama, the resulting effect was ripples instead of tidal waves.
So the next time you fly, thanks to Twitter, you may pause when considering your airline of choice – proving that Virgin America, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines are solid examples of how brands can communicate with people on Twitter through engagement that creates a sense of personality and, ultimately, increases their overall likability as a company.
Sometimes, keeping up with the rapidly-changing world of social media can be overwhelming for public relations professionals. That’s why we plan on presenting quick, timely guides to various topics in the world of online PR. So we’re proud to present “Google Buzz – Everything You Absolutely Need to Know.”
Hear that sound? Buzz doesn’t just describe the name of Google’s latest platform for social networking. “Buzz” also describes the angry, bee-like sound of a swarm of privacy complaints, a class-action lawsuit and the frantic revisions made by Google since the platform’s launch. But what is Buzz, why did Google release it and what does it mean for PR pros?
What is it?
Buzz is a social network tightly integrated with Google’s Gmail Web-based e-mail service. It provides the commenting, sharing and conversation-hosting features that have become commonplace on many social networks over the last two years. It also has a strong emphasis on mobile, location-aware features.
In order to understand Google Buzz in relation to other social networks, it helps to understand another site, FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a social network/aggregator with a strong emphasis on real-time results, search and hosting conversations around content from the Web. Buzz’s functionality veryclosely resembles FriendFeed (which was incidentally launched by two ex-Googlers and acquired by Facebook in August 2009). You can easily pull content from other Web properties such as your Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader and Flickr accounts so they are displayed in your Buzz feed. Your followers on Buzz can then comment or like the content, just like on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. The site now includes @Replies, made famous by Twitter and incorporated into Facebook earlier this year.
What’s different about Buzz from previous social networks is that it benefits from Gmail’s massive user base and allows users to leverage their Google Contacts (launched in May of last year) and Google Profile (launched in 2007) to engage in a social experience not previously possible on any of Google’s Web platforms.
This isn’t the company’s first foray into social networking the company previously acquired Jaiku (a Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball (a location-aware social network in the vein of Foursquare) years ago. Those services were left to die quiet deaths, but the company still has Orkut, the biggest social network Brazil. Social features like IM were added to Gmail way back in 2005 and services such as Google Reader, YouTube and Google Docs have incorporated social features for years now. In fact, you could argue that most of Google’s online properties (even search) incorporate some form of social interaction.
How they screwed up.
Despite all of these exciting features, the response to Buzz has been a litany of concerns, critcisms, general backlash, bugs and lawsuits aimed at the service. These problems were unanticipated by Google, but should have been. It appears the company ignored the historical concerns which have long accompanied social networking Web sites.
Social networks run into their biggest PR problems whenever they make a change to their site, whether it is a change to privacy settings, features or even just a general redesign of how the site looks. Site redesigns are a fundamental PR headache for every social network or social communication platform out there, from Facebook to Twitter. What’s worse, some of these other sites provide good models of what works and what doesn’t. Many of the proposed ways to fix Google Buzz on the Google Moderator page are simply suggestions that Google adopt the same functionality found in these social networks.
Google also failed to learn from past criticism. When you’re one of the world’s biggest companies that collects user data on hundreds of millions of people every day, people get worried about how you will protect their privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was criticized in December for saying that privacy didn’t really exist online. Unfortunately, the company badly misjudged the public’s privacy concerns again with the launch of Buzz. When the network launched, Buzz automatically followed everyone in the user’s Google Contacts list. It also made this list public. This is very bad, when users expect this information to remain private. E-mail information is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, in some cases. If they had launched Buzz as a standalone product, much of their problems could have been avoided.
Another possible problem may have come from the company’s internal testing. Google Buzz was tested internally, with no feedback from outside users. This was extremely odd, because many of Google’s best services or features have gone through the familiar, opt-in vetting that Google Labs provides. By relying on internal stakeholders only to vet their products rather than exposing to a subset of their public user base, the company missed an opportunity to avoid many of the problems they are now having.
What you need to know.
If you haven’t used Buzz yet, go here for a quick feature overview and how to get started.
Buzz has immediate implications for reputation management and media monitoring. Buzz’s content is very searchable, and you can begin using it immediately as a supplement for daily monitoring tasks. Google Operating System shows how you can save Buzz searches to make the process easier. Buzz content is already incorporated into the Google Trends real-time search results feature. Radian6 and Viralheat have both added Buzz results to their respective analytics platforms.
As you can imagine, building a Google Profile for your brand might be a good idea, right about now.
But Buzz doesn’t have the same mature feature ecosystem for brands that Facebook does. It doesn’t have the history of rapid-reaction corporate response that you find on Twitter. It appears to be very under-utilized by Gmail users. It will not be the “next big thing” in corporate social media PR (for at least a few months).
The Google Buzz story is really the story of several long-term Web trends coming to a head. Just as Google has slowly added social features to all of its Web properties (including search), social networks continue to add “traditional” e-mail and IM features to their services, if they do not already have them. This makes sense, because e-mail is a social network. We already have MySpace e-mail, and we will soon have Facebook mail. Even Microsoft’s Outlook will soon incorporate basic social networking tools. With all this sharing, privacy concerns will continue to be a major headache for all of the above companies. Features like @Replies and “likes” will become standardized across platforms, which will lead to commoditization of microblogging services such as those provided by Twitter. Buzz is built on a framework for distributed social messaging, which will lead to less-centralized social networks and more fragmented audiences. This will magnify the need for better research and monitoring capabilities in public relations. It will also make it more difficult to cut through the noise and connect with your target audience.
We hope you’ve liked this guide to Google Buzz. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.
