After the event I got to speak to several attendees and was surprised to learn that the idea of “dark sites” hasn’t thoroughly spread through marketing and communications field. We’ve been recommending dark sites for clients for close to ten years so I just assumed everyone was doing them now. That was a valuable learning for me.

So, what’s a dark site? A dark site is a website that is built in advance and kept password protected to help a company protect against vulnerabilities or manage an issue/crisis situation. If and when a situation requires a public response the dark site is “turned on” by removing the password and is made available via the web. Dark sites have many applications – they are used for all sorts of vulnerabilities ranging from public safety, product liability, anti-trust, legislative, criminal, financial, and many other crisis situations. Dark sites should be built in advance during “peace time” and deployed if and when necessary. In brief, they should have audience specific messages, aggregated social media content, media materials, and two-way communications vehicles such as contact us forms, subscription updates, etc. This is a critically important step in managing a crisis as the dark site is the only place online that you can truly own your message. Having a well-produced and robust dark site is critical to tell your side of the story when a crisis situation hits.

Companies such as Microsoft have been able to refuse or decline journalist request for comments while sending links to where requester may find relevant information – in employee blog posts.  Yet there has to be a well thought out strategy in doing so. 

Erin Byrne, chief digital strategist of Burson-Marsteller says that: “A company blog, when written by employees, has to balance the genuine nature of the blogosphere with the needs of the company…We never recommend that companies take a personal approach from the perspective of sitting around in your pajamas”

While there always will be spokespeople, corporate blogs at the very least can compliment and help companies answering journalist and/or blogger questions…

What do you think – questions / comments should be sent to our spokesperson (just kidding)…

Some time ago, a post by Jeff Jarvis caught my eye. Entitled “The King of Twitter”, the article wonders about the role played by TV channels in the creation and distribution of information, more particularly in light of Mickael Jackson’s death and the latest events in Iran.

The first above-mentioned event increased so considerably the number of exchanges on Twitter that servers were saturated (25% of the total number of “twits” on the night of M.Jackson’s death and before Twitter’s crash), due to the spreading of the information published by a media website (TMZ.com).

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The second event – contested elections in Iran on Twitter – illustrated the gap that sometimes exists between the citizens’ expectations and the information provided by news TV channels. While there were many exchanges on that topic on Twitter, the (American) citizens highly criticized the very poor coverage of these events by traditional media, starting with CNN, which lead to the creation of a new Twitter “tag”, #cnnfail (and the associated dedicated website http://cnnfail.com).

According to Javis, the journalists who covered the Iranian crisis created or kept on using a new kind of journalism called “social journalism” or “collaborative journalism”. Since very few of them were in Iran, they had to use the information available on social or any other kind of networks. Then, they no longer had to tell what was going on but to put things into context and perspective, to (try) to check out and to explain a piece of information created collectively by Web users.

Actually, this journalism did not appear because of the situation in Iran but in 2005/2006 with the creation of “collaborative” media websites on which the Web user was first invited to leave comments. Lately, he has been more and more associated with the Web content creation (see the new recent example below from the NYT : “Send us your Jackson Memorial Photos”):

Twitter encourages the “all emotion” trend

I tried to represent below the scheme of information circulation before its arrival on Twitter:

The scheme shows that time is necessary for the information to spread:
• time for the reporter-journalist to check out the information and to corroborate it,
• time to transfer it to his/her office
• time for the office to publish it (press agency)
• time for the media to edit and check it out again
• time for the media to publish it ( time obviously depends on the nature of the considered media, the least favored one being the traditional press).

In this “traditional” system, the chief editor decides the importance he want to give to the information comparing it with other information he has and wants to publish, depending on readers too. He/she creates “his/her” own information hierarchy.

With the development of the use of Twitter, the information circulation has changed:

“Stark” information (sometimes false, for that matter – an element that Benoît Raphaël refers to in his point 6 – Automated translation) can be published directly on Twitter by an eyewitness, as by a journalist, before it goes through the editing process described above.

As the functioning of Twitter favors the redistribution of content by those who feel concerned ( via the RT), an information published on it can easily “saturate” the system ( see the statistics related to Michael Jackson’s death above) and reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

Obviously, journalists “follow” Twitter and it helps them to see new published information very quickly (there is even a specific following Twitter tool for journalists: JournoTwit) and to publish them even more quickly: to a certain extent, it favors their reactivity in front of events.

The confrontation of 2 logics
On one hand, Twitter helps identifying – on a narrow sample (from 16 to 20 million people on a global scale) of an overconnected population – the more discussed topics in real time (also called “trending topics”).

Necessarily, sensational topics (such as show biz, accidents, death, sex and scandals) are more popular than topics involving analysis and reflexion. To be clicked on (and twitted again), a link must necessarily attract the audience.

On the other hand, there are some chief editors who want information to make sense and are willing to put it into context and perspective.

When these information professionals consider that a topic does not need to be given too much importance, Web users can now ring the bell (see the example of CNNfail mentioned before). Does it have an influence on these media contents so that it forces them to treat in priority sensational topics before those that are more common?

Eric Mettout, the chief editor of the Express online, explained in a post his responsibility towards Web users and readers as an information editor:

“No, you are not “clients”, we have nothing to sell, we are just doing our job that is to say dealing with current topics. In general, if you consider our job is good enough, you read what we publish (in the widest sense). If you think we are doing a bad job (and this is your right, obviously), you don’t read.”

It seems that this discourse is becoming more and more difficult to keep in a media landscape in which newspapers are losing money. Then, the only solution would be to get some audience (to use advertising) and the only way to get the audience is to… deal with “clicked on” topics, topics that people are talking about (on Twitter and elsewhere)… In a word, journalists have no choice but to deal with sensational topics.

Paradox chief editors have to resolve:
• How to deal quickly and efficiently with sensational topics to attract “consumers” to then prompt Web users to read serious topics, journalistic and intelligent topics?
• Is this even possible to do?

All of this has me thinking about the same thing we’ve been talking to clients about for several years now – the need to move from control to influence. When you let go of trying to totally control your marketing message you have the opportunity to be more influential than ever before. I’ll be talking about that shortly as part of the Influence at the Center of Marketing and Advertising panel discussion.

Fiat Mio (name of the car) mean Fiat Mine in Portuguese (and Spanish) – their tagline: “A car to call your own”

“Brazil was chosen as the home for Fiat Mio because it’s a digitally sophisticated and innovative market, and Fiat’s largest after the company’s native Italy. Fiat is Brazil’s No. 1 carmaker, with a 24.8% market share, and the country’s fifth-largest advertiser, spending about $80 million a year.” – Laurel Wentz, AdAge

We have seen this idea of crowd-sourcing and involving the community in making better products / services implemented before, particularly Starbucks and Dell.

In Fiat’s case, individuals will not only make recommendations on design, functionality and other aspects of the car, but also on the actual marketing and communications strategy.  The site is available in Portuguese and English; setup very much like a Digg (voting on ideas) and incorporating various social media elements, including Twitter – this will definitely be an interesting story to follow and an even better case study.

This weekend I was watching TV and came across an Allstate ad (believe it or not I was watching a program live and not on my DVR).  Ad made me go to their site and get a quote – turns out I could be saving a lot of money if I made the switch – about $100 per month.

Before pulling the trigger I thought it would only be fair to let Progressive counter – so I called them.  I spoke with two representatives – both extremely pleasant and helpful.  They made a real effort to work with me and keep me as a customer.  And what would you know, Progressive was able to provide me with an even better policy (keeping my limits exactly the same) – total savings per month: $170.  The only thing I would say is that Progressive might want to proactively help their customers reduce their rates – especially those that have been with them for a long time.

I decided to tweet about my experience on Saturday – a lot of followers asked me how and with who I saved the money.  And this Monday morning I also got a tweet from Progressive: “progressive: @fleander Thanks for the shout out! Glad you’re satisfied with your experience – thanks for choosing Progressive!”

To recap my journey: competitor TV ad, competitor website (quote), Progressive website (compared quote + customer service info), telephone with HUMAN contact, Twitter, and now this blog post.  All of these different touch points influenced my final decision, which swayed from one to another for a while, to stay with Progressive – and the fact that I am saving a lot of money.  But by the time I was talking to Mike – I thought to myself that even if they could not match or beat the competitor I would still consider staying with them if they came close.

A few important things:

• Customer service is so so so so important – a human that is friendly and willing to help (honest about it) can make the difference

• Social media is a great compliment to an experience with the brand, before, during, and after a decision

• A purchase decision CAN be influenced while a person is making up his/her mind

• Communications (marketing & PR) and customer service need to work together – and digital needs to be a integrated part of the overall strategy

• Customers will talk about you

The study found that 54% of the Fortune 100 were using Twitter to reach out directly to stakeholders, while 32% were using a blogs and 29% were actively using a Facebook Fan Page to engage. Despite the perception that Twitter is the newest kid on the block among the three platforms, 76% of Fortune 100 companies that were using just one social media channel were using Twitter over Facebook and Blogs.

Perhaps not surprisingly each company that was classified in consumer facing industries such as General Merchandisers (some examples Here and Here), Specialty Retailers (Here and Here) and Telecommunications (Here and Here) are Tweeting. Many companies in each of these categories have multiple Twitter accounts. For example, AT&T, has Twitter an account for Small Biz, Mobile Music, News, and Job Recruitment among others.

Our analysis found that about 94% of Fortune 100 Twitter accounts distribute company news updates and announcements while fully 67% are at least partially serving a customer service function.

The slides are available on our website…

Antigua is famous for its colonial streets and builds – this MCD was in one of these old colonial houses with a gorgeous patio.  Later in the day I was talking to some colleagues and I brought up my McDonald’s experience.  Turns out the the Guatemala Franchise is one of the best in the world – the happy meal and McCafe concept were born there.  But what really got to me was the home delivery service that McDonald’s offers – which can be done online and with a credit card.

Now this may not seem like anything out of the ordinary, but for me it was for a few reasons:

1. I have never heard of MCD home delivery
2. Online users in LATAM are “afraid” of using a credit card online

The complete menu is not available for delivery, makes sense, who wants a melted Sunday.

One might think that a country with a internet penetration of only 10.2% why would anyone offer online home delivery, but when you consider their growth rate of 1,930.8% since 2000 it becomes pretty clear that Guatemala is ready and evermore connected.

It was also obvious from the festival that digital media was one of the hot topics.

Here are some photos from my trip.

No longer solely for work, the smart phone has evolved to help us in our everyday tasks. What’s the weather like today? Check your phone. Don’t know how to get somewhere? Use the Google maps app on your phone. What’s the capital of Djibouti? Wiki it on your phone, (by the way, it’s Djibouti.) The prevalence of these devices has also sparked a whole debate regarding smart phone etiquette: when do you put down the phone?

Instead of altering the phone to fit our lives, we now have to consider how we alter our lives to fit the demands of the phone. Even Mark Penn has discussed the extremes of smart phone addictions, with the notion of the “Smartphoniac.” Mobile applications and digital expansion will only become more ubiquitous, so it is for us to decide how we set the precedence in using these powerful but slightly disruptive tools.

Does a smart phone rule your life?