Social responsibility campaigns from the social media industry?

By Marit Sillavee, Consultant, ReputationInc

A recent study found that social media is more addictive than drinking wine. That in fact, people are more likely to give up a glass of bubbly for an opportunity to check their Facebook account. Probably not a surprise to many but got me thinking about what this means for the social media industry in general.

In a few years’ time, will we have institutions trying to cure the social media addiction? Will we see, in the future, some kind of ‘social responsibility’ programmes from Facebook, for instance allowing only grown-ups to sign up and use the sites and have little note ‘use responsibly’ on social media adverts? Is it time for the social media industry in general to start thinking more about how they could prevent this from happening and avoid their reputation being torn down by health, privacy and human rights activists?

Well, some say the fault lies with people themselves. That people are too weak and just too lazy to build willpower to resist temptation. For instance, Jon Henley wrote in the Guardian last week how people with strong willpower in general grow into wealthier and healthier adults and are more likely to achieve success in life (hence, less likely to fall to any kind of ‘weak’ addictions). He brought examples of several studies that have concluded the same, the most amusing one conducted by a sociologist Walter Michel who studied children’s’ behaviour by offering them a marshmallow immediately or two, if they could wait for 15 min. Tracking down the children years later, Michel found that those who had the patience (and willpower) to wait, had become more successful. And there is no chance of accusing bad genes here – apparently willpower is something you can train and become better at.

So, the social media industry, if accused of causing addiction, might just not do anything about it and accuse people of being too weak (although this attitude didn’t work for the tobacco industry). We’ll wait and see…I’m looking forward to seeing some social responsibility campaigns from the social media industry before their reputation gets damaged by those who accuse them of causing addiction.

Bad reviews travel fast: Tripadvisor and online reputation management

By Eileen Lin, Consultant, ReputationInc


Here is the situation: You have just over an hour before the evening performance, and stumble upon what looks like a decent pre-theatre menu.  After all, anywhere with fast service and reasonable food will suffice.

The punter at the door promised you snacks within 5 minutes and drinks within 10 minutes. You enter full of hope, only to find that after 20 minutes, you have not been served at all, despite having asked the waitress twice. Then, when your food is finally ready  45 minutes later, it never reaches you, because it sat on a service stall for 10 minutes in the middle of the room, where all the guests and staff had to walk past.  At the end of the meal, you find a 12.5% ‘voluntary’ service charge added to your bill. What do you do?

Do you…
1) Refuse to pay for service
2) Ask to speak to the manager
3) Pay the full bill and vow to never come back again, or
4) Pay the full bill, nod, smile, thank the staff for their hospitality, only to scurry home to write a long and whining online review criticising the poor service?

Let’s face it.  Britons are no good at complaints or confrontations. Most of us faced with this situation would probably prefer to avoid the embarrassment of making a scene and quietly ‘vote with our feet’ instead. However, with social media, things have changed. Popular review websites such as Tripadvisor.com have enabled consumers to get their own back on restaurants and hotels that disappoint.

The extent of such influence was well-documented by a recent documentary by Channel 4, entitled ‘ The Attack of the Tripadvisors’, where a group of B&B owners, whose life and business fortune had been made hell by the review website, confronted their critics. For the hosts, the hardest things to come to terms with was the fact that customers always seemed happy when leaving the premises but as soon as they reach their nearest computer, the meal has turned sour and the stay uncomfortable.

Why didn’t you tell us so, they cry, rather than simply slating us online? We would have done something about it, they say. To illustrate the emotional damage the site has caused, one B&B owner went as far as to say that she had ‘considered paying for a hacker to destroy the website’ because it had turned her childhood dream into a nightmare.

I cannot honestly say I don’t have sympathy for these struggling independent businesses. However, they are missing a fundamental point: the reviews websites are merely a reflection of the increasingly high standard modern consumers have come to expect from anyone that seeks to take their hard earned money from them. We all laughed when watching Fawty Towers, but who among us would actually be happy to pay to stay there?

Over the years, consumers have become increasingly conscious of their collective power and rights, while social media has enabled individuals to have influence beyond their immediate network.  This rise in citizen journalist has forced businesses to re-examine how they obtain and manage customer feedback.

Rather than blaming the reviews website for mis-management and accusing the critics of being cowards hiding behind computer screens; businesses, large and small, must learn fast. Not only on how to deal with customer complaints online, but also how to turn each crisis into an opportunity, using feedback to inform business strategy and action changes. After all, we know that customer satisfaction and advocacy tends to increase when a complaint is cordially addressed, compared with when there is no complaint at all. Managing customer feedback, and thus business reputation, is no longer a communication tool, but a business imperative.

Social media’s political side: Is microblogging the new platform for exposing discontent in China?

By Eileen Lin

Compared to the tens of thousands of lives claimed by recent natural disasters in the country, the 39 casualties sustained in China’s high speed train crash must have felt like a small incident to the officials at the Ministry of Railways, especially given that train accidents routinely prove much more deadly.

However, that was in a world before the microblog.

The Ministry’s decision to bury the wreckage on site reflected the priority of the authority: to return to normal service as soon as possible, and not to dwell on the cause and consequences of the incident. However, what was initially branded a ‘local’ incident created a social media frenzy and quickly grew momentum before eventually drawing Premier Wen to the scene. Given the surge in public outrage at the Ministry’s handling of the crash, the Premier was forced to declare a thorough investigation and compensate victim’s families.

Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, played an as yet unprecedented role in exposing the government response to the tragedy with the kind of transparency and speed that officials proved too inexperienced to handle.

Unlike blog posts and forums, Chinese internet police have to now omitted microblog posts from their stringent censorship, both due to the posts’ short life span on net, and to the sheer volumes of content that require monitoring. This ‘oversight’ meant that near real-time messages calling for help at the crash site, and also video footage of the clean-up operation, were amongst the material shared simultaneously across the country.

Remarkably, the government was left completely wrong-footed and perceived as out-of-touch when over 2 million posts relating to the topic were posted within two hours of the accident.

During the week that followed, more posts questioning the handling of the situation flooded the internet, inspiring even the mainstream media to take an openly critical line. Surprisingly, this included CCTV and People’s Daily, traditionally the principle government mouthpieces. And, all of this despite an official gag order preventing media from reporting on the story.

When magazines were ordered to remove the incident from their covers, journalists again went online to publish their articles, apparently undeterred by the pressure from the state. This was certainly a rare occurrence in a country that regards the ability to suppress popular discontent as vital to social stability, especially through its extensive control over media.

What this episode underlines is that, in the era of social media, news reporting is no longer the exclusive preserve of a select few. On the contrary, more and more mainstream media is drawing its reports from the net, using this medium as a litmus test of popular opinion.

In the business world, the most forward-thinking political and corporate leaders have long understood that finding an effective strategy for handling social media is a top priority in managing the reputation of their governments, countries and companies.

However, it is not until relatively recently that the full potential social media holds for destabilising power has come into view. For example, Facebook kicked-off the Arab Spring, while microbloggers have given voice to millions of Chinese who have otherwise been silenced in the name of preserving the country’s unity and stability.

I believe that what we are witnessing is nothing less than a popular revolution being brought about by social media. The unpredictability that this will continue to bring to the global social, political and economic order makes it a mega trend of crucial importance not only for reputation management professionals to observe, but also to understand, in order to give best counsel to clients.