Social media monitoring companies are dependent upon the use of data centres to store all of their data and allow their application to function properly. These expensive but powerful off-site centres provide the grunt for everything we do at Brandwatch.

This week, one of our competitors is scheduled to go offline for three straight days as they relocate their data centre to a new location. They will be losing all of their data running up until November last year as they move to their upgraded tier 3 site this week.

In light of this, we have decided to compile a short description of best practices to employ regarding data centres, and a brief description of how we do things here at Brandwatch.

Best practices

This is exactly what the future will look like

Although we don’t use it to store our own data at Brandwatch, essentially what we offer to our clients is cloud storage through our data centres. Our clients do not have to store anything on their own hard drives if they don’t wish to export anything.

However, many companies similar to ourselves are turning to cloud computing and storage for their own data too. Cloud computing currently accounts for 11% of all data centre traffic and there are now 1.6 zettabytes of the stuff stored in the cloud.

We personally prefer to be responsible for the hardware ourselves, which gives us greater control over our data, so opted out of this route, though it is a perfectly viable option for many other companies. It may be something we explore as the technology in this area improves.

When we do have to undergo some maintenance on our systems, we always make sure that the app is down for as short a time as possible. By working over the weekend, usually on a Sunday night, we cause as little disruption to our clients as possible so that any upgrades do not get in the way of our clients’ work.

A potential data centre move can understandably be a stressful period, though a gradual implementation from one site to another should mean that downtime would be minimal, even if it does mean that extra equipment might have to be purchased during the exchange.

Part of our data centre in Surrey

If someday we simply must take the app offline for a three day stretch, we would be sure to plan this to occur over a seasonal holiday, like Christmas for example.

When we were selecting our data centre(s), we were careful to select a tier 3 site, as determined by the Uptime Institute. The differences between the tiers can be found here, though we would recommend using at least a tier 3 centre when dealing with this type of data.

We have also factored future expansion into mind when planning our data centres, and we have the room to upgrade our systems in case any unprecedented demands are placed upon them. We check up on our babies every week and keep our equipment running smoothly and their environment clean.

When something goes wrong

In our scary age of floods, fires, terrorists and imminent nuclear holocausts, contingency plans are essential to data centre planning. As well as checking for realistic hazards like water damage and structural integrity at our primary data centre in Surrey, we also prepare for worst-case scenarios (Terminator).

The worst case scenario

We maintain a secondary site in Greenham Common, located in a former nuclear bunker. This ‘slave’ site is a live replica, meaning it is constantly updated from the ‘master’ cluster in Surrey. This means that when the nukes inevitably rain down in Surrey, we can escape to the haven of Berkshire and continue business as usual, even if all of our new clients are scary metal dictators by that point.

Our systems are equipped to transfer entirely from one site to another within 15 minutes, and if the worst case scenario happens twice (Terminator 2), then we can even run Brandwatch on our own servers in the Brighton office, albeit at a slower pace (Terminator: Salvation).

Also very important to us is that these two sites use different providers, as well as different energy suppliers, in order to plan against any external disasters, bankruptcies or other capitalist issues that may arise that are out of our control.

We really do go the extra mile to make sure our clients will never have to go without their beloved Brandwatch, but hopefully now you have a clearer picture of just how far that mile is.

Often funny, sometimes cruel, these personas have often proved so popular that they have transcended the original celebrity in numbers of followers.

One such satire account is the much-loved @petermolydeux, based on the notoriously ambitious game developer, Peter Molyneux.

The legendary Lionhead game designer is widely known for his over-hyped promises that are not always delivered and his blue-sky, out-of-the-box thinking that almost always seems to involve tragedy, dreams or children.

An anonymous game developer took it upon himself to set up the parody Twitter profile, which last week was approaching 20,000 followers. The bio clearly stated the account was not maintained by the real Molyneux and the tweets themselves were ludicrous, sly and very often hilarious – here’s a selection of a few of them:

“Imagine a game where 3 pauses and it’s game over. The game plays door bells, ringtones etc trying to make you accidently pause the game”

“You know, my dream for gaming is where in one game you’ll shoot someone and then during a game of say FIFA you’ll see their son crying”

 “There are 206 bones in the human body? Imagine, just imagine a 206 multiplayer game where each person controls a bone?”

“You know in cut scenes when it says ‘3 months later…’? What if the game ACTUALLY locked your save file for 3 months?”

How did Lionhead respond to the account?

However subversive the tweets may have been, most of the followers must have been gamers to have even understood the satire and few would believe it was the real Mr Molyneux spouting such concepts. Last Thursday, the account was closed by Twitter following a direct complaint from Lionhead.

It’s surprising that big companies like Lionhead still manage to make such glaring mistakes in the social media realm, and the company has not fared well since making the decision to contact Twitter.

Tweets mentioning Lionhead in the wake of Molydeux’s suspension

This graph generated on Friday morning by Brandwatch shows the volume of mentions on Twitter specifically regarding Lionhead, the game developer headed up by Molyneux.

While fairly low in number of instances, this chart is useful as a representative in the type of pattern that could be amplified if the severity/influence of the event was increased. Interestingly the peak in positive mentions on the 14th and 15th are as a result of the @Molydeux posting of a humorous survival horror bowling game video.

More importantly, the news that the @Molydeux account had been suspended spread on the 23rd, resulting in a giant leap in negative mentions about Lionhead in general.

The @Molydeux profile holder was apparently never contacted by Lionhead to remove or modify his content, and it is surprising that Lionhead would be even interested in closing the account at all, considering the overwhelming positive sentiment generated from the Tweets.

Should companies be clamping down on this type of unsanctioned publicity?

A small amount of research can provide companies with the necessary data to come to such a decision. It is important to determine whether the tweets or comments are impacting the company in a meaningful way.

There’s a very realistic chance that even if an unsolicited blog appears to make fun of a company or person, that that sentiment is not necessarily reflected by its readers, yet can do a lot in increasing the brand’s visibility. Indeed, many such brands rely on this unusual Twitter visibility to foster huge, active fanbases: super popular Harry Potter personas and this typically British parody of the Queen provide good examples of unauthorised yet playful accounts actually boosting the popularity of a topic.

If the unofficial publicity generator is not having a positive effect upon the public perception of the brand, then it still may well be harmless. The cost of shutting down a well-received account can be more costly than allowing it to continue, as is the case with the @Molydeux saga.

@Slackerninja, Twitter User “*throws away Fable games* RT @deantak: Peter Molyneux parody account ‘Molydeux’ suspended by Twitter”

@Headfirst_Dom, Director at Head First Advertising “Too often, brands still want to push a message rather than just chew the fat with folk. Social isn’t broadcast. “

@Michael_French,  Michael French, editor of Develop magazine via Twitter: “So it was Lionhead who stepped in originally. Dumb, dumb move…. Thinking that brands can be more powerful than people; trying to clamp down on something popular and not seeing why it is popular”

In this case, Lionhead paid a small price for not properly investigating the effect of the account’s existence and for not acting in reasonable way by failing to contact the holder. Future cases could be significantly worse if the account is more influential; some band or TV character parodies’ followers can number in the millions.

If anything is to be learned from Lionhead’s dealings with @Molydeux, then it’s that a little bit of thought and research can go a long way into determining the best course of action when dealing with these online phenomena.

Behind every prominent public figure there is normally a Public Relations team managing and massaging public opinion about their client. These PR teams have access to a big box of clever tricks to achieve this.

PR people’s carefully-crafted press releases and bulging contacts book can make sure the message of the person they work for gets out there and gets across.

They can even use social media monitoring tools like the one offered by Brandwatch to assess the position of their brand/client in the market place – finding out what people are saying about their famous employee on the internet and acting accordingly.

And then their client goes and spoils it all by doing something stupid like writing what’s on their mind on Twitter!

The stars mentioned in this article might have (or had) lots of followers on Twitter but it is best not to follow the example shown by some of their micro-blogging behaviour.

Naïve/Politically-incorrect Tweeters: Ricky Gervais

Remember the time when the character Andy Millman in the TV comedy series Extras inadvertently offends the mother of a Down’s syndrome teenager in a restaurant causing mass (fictional) media hysteria? Well in October 2011, it was a case of life imitating art as Ricky Gervais, the actor who played Millman, found himself in a similar situation.

Gervais had taken to using the word ‘mong’ in tweets; examples included “Good monging everyone” and “two mongs don’t make a right”.

However, disability groups soon pointed out that ‘mong’ is a derogatory word; referring Gervais to the Oxford English Dictionary definition which states: “Mongol: A person with Down’s syndrome. Now generally regarded as offensive.”

The comic insisted that ‘mong’ now means ‘div’ and that this supposed semantic shift made the word acceptable. “Words change. Get over it” he tweeted on 16th October.

It took a polite word in his ear from Nicola Clark, a mother of two disabled girls, who contacted Gervais on Twitter, to change his mind, five days of defensive tweeting later.

Mrs Clark asked whether he realised that mong is an offensive word. Gervais’s response is posted below.

Gervais went on to thank Mrs Clark for her “kind, rational and understanding words in private” and admit that he was “naïve” to use the word.

As we’ll see, it’s unusual that there is such a happy, and educational, ending to incidents like this. But those who are worried that the apology means that Gervais’s playground humour will be blunted in future can sleep easily; he has now taken to referring to his followers as ‘twonks’ on Twitter.

Twitter Goaders: Piers Morgan

When it comes to getting into feuds on Twitter, former newspaper editor Piers Morgan could write the book – that is if he wasn’t so busy baiting other public figures with provocative tweets.

Morgan’s latest spat involves Gavin & Stacey star Mat Horne who, Morgan alleges, refused to appear on a television show looking at the life and career of Horne’s former co-star James Corden.

Earlier this month (November 2011), Morgan, questioning Horne’s motive for his non-appearance, tweeted: “Stop telling fibs@mfhorne.” Horne soon responded by tweeting: “Piers Morgan is a f***king dick.”

No-one tends to emerge from such public spats with much credit. Morgan has definite ‘previous’ form regarding Twitter arguments. At least his Twitter battle of wits with footballer Rio Ferdinand contained some humourous (albeit vicious) barbs.

When Morgan goaded the England star about being injured he was met with the response: “Any more jip+I’ll call Jeremy Clarkson to spark u again.”

A cheap Ferdinand shot about Morgan’s “moobs” elicited the riposte “If I wanted a lesson on physical appearance I’d go to @evalongoria not Shrek’s ugly brother”.

And when Morgan tackled the subject of Ferdinand’s grammar, the Manchester United man let fly with: “If I wanted a grammar lesson I’d have gone to @stephenfry not a SACKED editor.”

Ferdinand is not the only footballer to have fallen foul of polite Twitter etiquette…

Twitter Footballers: Joey Barton

Stick a microphone under a footballer’s nose after a match and they won’t say anything interesting. But give them a smartphone and access to their Twitter account after a match and controversy often ensues.

Such was the case with Queens Park Rangers player Joey Barton in September 2011 when he took to Twitter after his side beat Wolves in a league game. Basking in the glow of victory, the magnanimous Barton called Wolves defender Karl Henry “a Sunday league player”.

Turning his attention to Wolves manager Mick McCarthy’s claim that he would have turned down the chance to sign Barton, the QPR player added: “I don’t know what Mick’s been smoking.”

Such outspoken comments risks incurring fines from the football authorities, something that former Liverpool winger Ryan Babel knows only too well. In January 2011 Babel posted an image on Twitter of referee Howard Webb in a Manchester United shirt after Liverpool’s 1-0 defeat at the hands of their arch-rivals; he was charged with improper conduct and fined £10,000.

Twitter Quitters: Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry – the host of QI is a serial quitter of Twitter. In 2009, he left the micro-blogging site after a follower had the temerity to label his tweets as “boring”. After a sunshine break in Los Angeles he admitted that his withdrawal from Twitter had been a “mood thing” and signed up again.

But in November 2010 he was at it again, using his Twitter account to vent his fury at Attitude magazine which, he alleges, misquoted him on the subject of whether women liked sex as much as men.

Fry tweeted: “So some f***ing paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave and now I’m the Antichrist.” A subtitle entry reader ‘No longer in service’ followed quickly.

Fry has since returned to Twitter and his status is such that he can leave and re-join without disillusioning his followers. But other celebs might not be so lucky – repeated account closures could make followers think ‘Why should I follow you if you keep leaving?’

Twitter ‘Users’: John Mayer

Twitter is a great way of instantly connecting to what’s most important to you. I know so because it says so on their website. But if “what’s most important to you” is building up a following to promote your latest book/album/handy kitchenware appliance then leaving when the campaign is over then your followers have a right to feel a little used.

Blues singer and guitarist John Mayer has to be a prime example of a Twitter ‘user’. In 2010 Mayer set up an account and built up a following numbering 3.7 million followers.

But by September of that year he had left Twitter and fallen into the arms of Tumblr. Mashable reported that his flirtation with Twitter was merely a ruse to promote that year’s tour. This left a sour taste in the mouth for those Twitter fans who were looking for a more meaningful relationship with their idol.

Mayer later told Rolling Stone magazine: “Twitter started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

Twitter Leakers: Ryan Seacrest

We’ve had WikiLeaks and now perhaps it’s time for a TwitterLeaks website. Ryan Seacrest would definitely be eligible to be an honorary member of such a website. In 2010, the American Idol presenter revealed that his radio show was going to feature an interview with “tonight’s voted-off idol Lacey Brown”.

Nothing wrong with that you would think – except viewers on the west coast of America had not seen the episode in which it was decided that Lacey Brown would be voted off.

Twitter ‘leaks’ are also common on this side of the pond. Last year it was reported that, Stephen Fry – yes, that man again – had to remove behind-the-scenes photos of the final Harry Potter film which he had uploaded from his camera to this Twitter account.

One of the photos apparently showed Hogwarts in ruins after a battle between the teen wizard and his nemesis Voldemort – spoiler alert apologies to fans of the franchise who haven’t seen the film yet!

Twitter Exhibitionists: Anthony Weiner

Paparazzi photographers who scramble up trees to try and pap public figures’ private parts could soon be out of a job – a lot of celebs seem to be doing a good job of ‘papping’ their own parts.

Take, for instance, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of rock band Paramore. Ms Williams uploaded a topless picture of herself on to her Twitter account. She later claimed it was an accident.

In June 2011, the unfortunately-named US politician Anthony Weiner went a stage further. Weiner was ‘exposed’ by the press for sending a link to a sexually-suggestive photograph of himself via his public Twitter account. It was reported that you could see the Congress member’s member in the snap.

Weiner adamantly denied the allegation. Then he admitted it. His resignation followed.

Twitter Moaners: Scott Baio

Twitter is a great place to let off steam right? Well, yes and no. It’s one thing expressing a political opinion at the water cooler with a close friend who shares/tolerates your views but would you be comfortable repeating these views to a cross-section of society from a loudhailer at Hyde Park speakers’ corner?

If the answer is no then you should think twice about broadcasting your thoughts on Twitter.

It’s a dilemma US actor Scott Baio, famous for playing Bugsy Malone as a child actor and Chachi on the sitcom Happy Days, is now aware of. In April 2010, Baio ended up with custard pie on his face after tweeting: “Taxes are DONE… That should feed, house and provide medical [welfare] for a few lazy non-working people at my expense. Have a great Monday!”

A blog called Jezebel picked up on the tweet and when they publicised the story, the backlash ensured that Baio’s Monday swiftly became more taxing.

Public outrage, and an invitation to speak at the Hollywood Congress of Republicans conference, followed.

Conclusion

Twitter only allows you 140 characters to get things off your chest – but that’s more than enough space for celebrities to make a fool of themselves, attract controversy, land in hot water or display poor social media etiquette.

Think twice before you tweet!

 Sources:

http://twitter.com/#!/rickygervais

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Baio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/03/19/to-spoil-or-not-to-spoil-delving-into-the-ryan-seacresttwitter-dilemma/

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/218687/Mat-Horne-blast-for-Piers/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8449506/Top-five-most-notorious-Twitter-rows.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Babel

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jan/10/ryan-babel-fa-charge

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/queens-park-rangers/8771369/QPR-captain-Joey-Barton-faces-FA-probe-over-Twitter-attack-on-Wolvess-Mick-McCarthy-and-Karl-Henry.html

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/john-mayer-reveals-why-he-quit-twitter-20110713

http://www.metro.co.uk/film/845776-stephen-fry-rapped-for-leaking-harry-potter-photos-on-twitter

http://mashable.com/2010/09/14/john-mayer-quits-twitter/

From Anti-Social to Influential

That kind of attitude was more prevalent a few years back – now of course, things are a bit different. In fact in a sense we have gone the other way; people with thousands of followers on Twitter are hailed as the influential elite and, as they tweet several hundred times a week, continue to develop their social status.

Certainly, there is typically much less distinction between sociability online and offline nowadays. To be anecdotal for a moment, some of the people in my Facebook friends who have the highest number of friends I would indeed describe as being particularly sociable offline.

However, there are also plenty of people in my Facebook friends list who I would say are particularly sociable offline but have a perfectly average number of Facebook friends.

And, equally, I know of plenty of very sociable and vocal people who have signed up to Twitter and, whilst tweeting occasionally, are only followed by a handful of people.

So, the question arises, are these people less important to a brand monitoring social media?

Offline Influence

Well, consider an unhappy customer berating a brand on Twitter. He’s still testing the water with Twitter and only has a few followers, so that particular message will only be seen by those people at the most, and many of them will likely miss it. So, seeing as the brand management team gets hundreds of mentions on Twitter a day, it makes sense to focus on the ones that will be seen by the most people? Or, better still, the ones who are most influential, according to the various complex metrics out there.

This seems intuitive, and in many ways it does make sense. But let’s remember something crucial here: this person is expressing his negative experience online, so the chances are he is expressing it offline too.

And, unfortunately, it just so happens that this particular person is, shall we say, a bit of a man about town. He’s captain of his golf club, a member of his daughter’s school’s PTA, a Sales Director managing a total of 400 people, a keen host of dinner parties (one of which being where he was told he should “get on Twitter”), a season ticket holder at his local football club and generally an outgoing individual who constantly interacts with lots of people from various different circles.

What happens if his tweet is left unanswered when a simple reply would have eased his frustration? He is going to continue telling people about his experience and negatively influencing people’s opinions about that brand – at the bar in the clubhouse, at PTA meetings, in the kitchen of the office, at dinner parties, during half time at the football…who knows where else?

Word of mouth may now have a digital counterpart, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still alive and well in the traditional sense. And, whilst social media monitoring might not help us directly with listening to offline word of mouth, examples like this illustrate where it might help us manage elements of it.

Different Ways to Prioritise

So let’s not get too carried away with online influence metrics. The counterargument here might be – “well we can’t measure offline influence like we can with online, so we can only use what we’ve got”. Well, while influence metrics are useful and certainly have their place, it is sometimes worth considering other ways of prioritising and categorising brand mentions to see if these make more sense.

They may well depend on the nature of the company and the objectives of the monitoring activity, but here are some examples of measurements you could use to priortise mentions for action. Here we are assuming the monitoring process is a customer service operation:

• Ease of resolution (is it a complaint or request that can be easily sorted?): If it’s easily solved, it makes sense to address this rather than leave it drifting.
• Severity (is it particularly negative?):The more severe the more urgent it’s likely to be that you deal with it.
• Specificity (is it a general complaint or targeting a specific experience?): If it’s clear who needs to deal with it, it should be passed on to them ASAP.

In addition to these there may be many other ways of determining who should be responded to most urgently and who should be left alone.

Whatever they might be, we should be careful of focusing solely on those most “influential” because, the reality is, not everybody interacting on social media has the interest, disposition or time in their daily routine to build online influence, but this doesn’t mean they don’t carry influence offline.

John Lewis, a UK brand with a particularly positive customer service reputation, seems to be executing this very philosophy particularly well. In our Customer Service Index, we observed that they constantly responded to tweets about them regardless of how many followers the tweeter had.

This reminded me of a part of our sentiment analysis that is sometimes not made fully clear.

Not a new concept…

We are very aware of the importance of industry-specific language here at Brandwatch and we do our best to offer language analysis that specialises in industries as much as possible.

We constantly refine our language systems by adding newly trained classifiers (a classifier is the particular system used to detect and analyse the language of a query’s matches – which classifier should be used is determined upon query creation).

We have over 500 classifiers for different industries across the 17 languages we cover.

Educating sentiment machines

The larger and more specific the corpus is that the classifiers are trained on (we use machine learning to train them – see this article), the more accurate they will be at determining sentiment and automatically extracting interesting, relevant topics.

In this sense machines really function just like humans; for certain subjects there is a degree of knowledge required to make judgments about conversations and mentions. To demonstrate, here’s an excerpt from another article by our head of NLP Research, Dr. Taras Zagibalov:

“It has grown by 10%”

A final example to illustrate the perspective-dependent nature of any sentiment analysis – the above may be good news for those interested in buying the product, but shareholders of the company selling it will be less pleased about the implications of the statement.

The fact that the machines may lack this knowledge is a deficiency in preparation not in the technique itself.

Tools built purposefully for one industry

With the linguistic challenges in mind, is it unrealistic for one tool to cover multiple, contrasting industries?

Well, whilst a tool that specialises in one specific industry may well offer stronger language analysis, competing on other key attributes that benefit from economies of scale will be difficult:

• The quality and performance of user interface
• Development of new features
• Customer service
• System speeds
• General understanding of the market and consumer demand

Cruvee’s success does signpost the importance for monitoring tools to recognise the discrepancies between industries and the language found in them.

But, if users continue to demand more bespoke services for their specific industry, perhaps a better direction will be for the established, premium monitoring tools to partner with smaller companies offering industry-specific expertise and work to tailor the product so that the benefits of both can be combined and exploited.

The Waitrose delivery company were promoting an offer through Crowdity, the group-buying website (similar to Groupon etc), where first-time customers could claim £40 of shopping for just £20.

However, a few days after the deal had launched, Crowdity users received an email apologising on behalf of Ocado that the offer would have to be suspended due to an overwhelming volume of take up.

The blog post we published about the topic received over 20 comments and a record number of pageviews.

Now, to compound the damage done to Ocado through their lack of understanding the very principle of group-buying, Tesco have swooped in on the deal. Displaying impressive agility and social media nous, they have also done Crowdity a lot of favours too:

Click for full image.

So well done to Tesco for being so sharp and opportunist and as for Ocado, there is a lot to learn…

Here’s the full PDF.

To keep in the spirit of the event and to bring the data to life, we came up with this visualisation:

Wimblewatch 2011

(It was built with Processing, because of course we like to be cutting edge…this means you’ll need Java installed to view it.)

What is it showing?

Most simply, the visualisation is showing two things – when the conversation happened about a certain topic (horizontal axis), and what score those conversations were given (vertical axis).

The score is based on a combination of the number of followers the author of the tweet had and whether the tweet was positive, negative or neutral in content (see below for more explanation).

Annotated screenshot:

Whare are the dots?

Each dot represents one or more instances of a tweet about a topic on a certain day which we gave a certain score. The bigger the dot, the more tweets we found of that topic on that day with the same score.

So, if you select Federer, for example, you see a huge dot on 29th June when he lost against Tsonga:

What does the positioning of the dots mean?

The horizontal positioning is the day those tweets were made, we show you data from the last 8 days.

The vertical positioning is as follows:

• If the dot is in the top half (0 to +5) then it means those tweets would have a positive effect for that player/topic because they were of positive content and the people who tweeted them had a high number of followers. The higher up the stronger that positive effect.
  
• (If you were a brand tracking tweets about you, these would be the ones you want most of!)
• If the dot is around the middle (0) then it can mean one of two things, either: the tweets were neutral in content and so have no positive/negative effect regardless of the number of followers the author had, or: the tweets were positive/neutral in content but the author has a low number of followers and so the tweet has minimal effect.
  
• (If you were a brand tracking tweets about you, these would be the ones you’re not too bothered about.)
• If the dot is in the bottom half (0 to -5) then it means those tweets would have a negative effect for that player/topic because they were of negative content and the people who tweeted them had a high number of followers. The higher up the stronger that positive effect. 
• (If you were a brand tracking tweets about you, these would be the ones you’re most worried about!)

We hope you enjoy it!

This is the first data visualisation we’ve made of this kind – if you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in the future or how we could improve it, we’re always happy to hear from you at labs@brandwatch.com.

Crowdity

The whole idea of group buying is based on a simple principle, described by Crowdity’s own CEO : “We bring people together to buy, meaning we can go to businesses and negotiate a large discount that you wouldn’t be able to get alone.”

Sounds great doesn’t it? Well that’s exactly what thousands of new customers thought when they came across Crowdity’s Ocado deal, offering £40 worth of grocery shopping for the price of £20. The offer, to be registered for on 22nd June and redeemed by 30th June, was part of Ocado’s current scheme to try and attract new business (the offer isn’t available to incumbent customers).

Too Successful?

Clearly Crowdity and Ocado weren’t prepared for the response their offer was to receive. Around midday today, Crowdity sent out this apology email on behalf of Ocado:

“Ocado Apology

‘Ocado were only able to offer a limited number of these vouchers. Due to the success of the offer and the widespread distribution of the offer on other forums, this number was exceeded on the first day, rather than on 30th June as originally anticipated. As such, no new redemptions of the voucher can be accepted after 23rd June. Other acquisition offers are available and will be available in the future. Sorry for any disappointment this may cause.’

Team Crowdity would also like to echo Ocados appology. We are all deeply upset about the whole situation and can’t explain to you how sorry we are.

Sincere Apologies

The Crowdity team”

Buy together! (But only some of you…)

So, a service that is entirely built around the very concept of consumers being able to obtain large discounts if they share the offer with enough of their peers, has been defeated by its own success.

The lesson? If you are going to take on the biggest social-buying service out there, don’t allow your suppliers to limit the quantity of redemptions and undermine the fundamental principle of your business.

We will of course be using Brandwatch to keep an eye out for any interesting reactions…

“The benefts are real and deep. First, there is the social interaction itself, which can provide direct value to the business through revenue from social commerce and cost savings when used for customer care or research, for example. Plus, social networking enables rapid, viral distribution of offers and content that may reach beyond what could be done in traditional channels – all with endorsement from connections people trust. But that is just the beginning.

Companies also can use social platforms to mine data for brand monitoring and valuable customer insights, which can spark innovations for improved services, products and customer experiences. In a constant cycle of listen-analyze-engage-evolve, organizations can optimize their social media programs to continually enhance their business.”

The full report: