You may have heard last week that a Seaworld killer whale killed its trainer. You can find some commentary here and here. This woman was well trained and knew the risks of her job. Yet her death isn’t without controversy. Animal lovers have come to the defense of Shamu and animals everywhere. And Seaworld has responded appropriately.

The @shamu Twitter account sent out this tweet last Thursday:

Seaworld has responded via its blog, with a message from the president, a tribute to the trainer, a statement from the family, and more.

And, most importantly, Seaworld keeps its Facebook fan page open to a lively debate – only shutting it down momentarily last week because of “inappropriate photos and videos.” Comments on the page include angry vitriol, reasoned criticisms and defense, and condolences for the trainer’s family.

The truth is, many of those with the sharpest criticisms were probably never fans of Seaworld or any other animal park. Having a platform for their remarks, at Seaworld’s fan page and blog, may show that the company is listening. More likely, it helps contain some of the nasty comments that would otherwise be circulating the rest of the social web – and be searchable later.

I think animal parks can serve important educational purposes, though I’m not a big fan of small concrete pools and training animals to do tricks.

Still, Seaworld responds appropriately – really, the only way it can, once it’s embraced a two-way conversation with customers.

These results follow from their USA Gross National Happiness Index, published in October 2009. Facebook data scientists have put together a sentiment engine which analyzes word choice in status updates. The idea, generally accepted by social psychologists, is that what we write provides a window into our “emotional and cognitive worlds.”

According to Facebook, positive words include “happy”, “yay” and “awesome,” while negative words include “sad,” “doubt” and “tragic.”  Read more about how words are collected and rated by LIWC, or the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.  This tool was adopted by Facebook in its own research.

[If you hadn't read the report last year, It's no surprise that the happiest days fall on holidays, with Thanksgiving ranking at the top. The saddest day was January 22, 2008 - the day of the Asian stock market crash and Heath Ledger's death (really?). The second saddest was Michael Jackson's death.]

I plugged in all my Facebook status updates from November 1, 2009 to today and came up with the following analysis via LIWC:

And for good measure, here is an analysis of my tweets:

Nothing earth shattering here, but keep in mind this is one tool and I’m using the free version. (How I’m equally personable and arrogant/distant beats me!) Plus, you can’t deny the significance of this kind of data across 400 million Facebook users worldwide. Instead of knowing what people are searching for (per Google), Facebook tells us what people are thinking. This kind of information is valuable to everyone from social psychologists, to cultural anthropologists, to politicians, to marketers.

Companies should already be monitoring sentiment around their brands wherever people are talking. Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Comments. Buzz? I’m not sure what tools exist to do this well – so if you’re using one to monitor sentiment around your brand, please let me know.

Facebook currently hoards its social analytics, but you can bet that a sentiment engine will be on the market in the future.

Oh, and if you’re interested in reading more: This NY Times article discusses how a happiness index might be a better measure of “national self-worth” than economic indices.

On Saturday, filmmaker Kevin Smith took a standby flight on Southwest Airlines, on his way back from MacWorld in SF. Essentially, Kevin got booted for not fitting into a single seat. He was rightfully upset (read the details in the links posted here) and tweeted about it. With over 1.6 million followers (as of 2 days after the incident, anyway), a small firestorm erupted between @ThatKevinSmith, Southwest Airlines, and his most ardent fans.

Here are some of Kevin’s initial tweets. There are many, many more. Read them, they’re fun.

Here’s Southwest Airlines response:

The next day, Southwest addressed the issue via its blog. Unfortunately, it took a good idea and executed badly. It offered the half-a$$ed apology:

“You’ve read about these situations before. Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago. The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling. This policy is not unique to Southwest Airlines and it is not a revenue generator.”

Customers took notice, with comments like this: “A heartfelt apology is not usually followed by justification of the action. Pathetic” and “Apparently your mother never taught you how to apologize.”

So the conversation continued on the Twittersphere and on Southwest’s blog.

Finally, Southwest offered this post the next day, expressing a bit more contrition: “The communication among our Employees was not as sharp as it should have been and, it’s apparent that Southwest could have handled this situation differently.”

Okay, so what does this all mean – how much does it really hurt Southwest?

Apologies were made within 48 hours. Kevin Smith even says he’s done talking about it. Southwest has long-standing goodwill with customers, low fares, and an unbeatable refund policy.

Really, it’ll probably just be a minor bump as far as PR crises go. Though things might be different had Southwest handled this more poorly.

The really important lesson from this is that if your company chooses to embrace social media, you’ve got to think about the kind of relationship you want with your customers (ahem, esp customers with 1.6 million followers) and what this means. In fact, even if your company doesn’t embrace social media, you should have a crises response plan if situations like this arise.

Southwest’s social strategy is mature relative to many others, yet according to its own admission:

“It is not our customary method of Customer Relations to be so public in how we work through these situations.”

Southwest may not have anticipated all the ways customer relations might look like with social media in the mix.

Bottom line:

There are going to be very public discussions about your brand amongst your customers, with and/or without you. At the very least, have a go-to response plan in place and provide the proper training to every customer-facing employee in your company.

Most have the requisite, run-of-the-mill guidelines, such as:

• “Respect confidential and propriety information about the company.”
• “Be transparent.”
• “Add value.”
• “If you’re blogging for yourself, include a disclaimer that these are your personal views and not those of Company XYZ.”

Here’s an example of one I liked best: Intel Social Media Guidelines. It’s concise and written in natural language (no legalese), meaning employees may actually read – and remember it. I’d tend towards an even shorter policy, under 1-page, if possible. Gartner has an 8-point policy, with one sentence summaries and expanded descriptions. Nice!

I found a few gems I thought particularly interesting and/or resonant:

From Coca-Cola (on the Digital Buzz Blog):

Coca Cola has a Social Media Certification Program! So, “all associates who wish to officially represent the Company online must complete the Social Media Certification Program prior to beginning or continuing these activities.”

Coca Cola also asks its employees to “Be a ’scout’ for compliments and criticism. Even if you are not an official online spokesperson for the Company, you are one of our most vital assets for monitoring the social media landscape. If you come across positive or negative remarks about the Company or its brands online that you believe are important, consider sharing them.”

Another gem from Coca-Cola, and important for a global brand: “Remember that your local posts can have global significance. The way that you answer an online question might be accurate in some parts of the world, but inaccurate (or even illegal) in others. Keep that ‘world view’ in mind when you are participating in online conversations.”

Edelman, a PR agency, reminds its communications professionals: “When it doubt, always take the long way; there are no short cuts in social media.”

Back to Gartner again: “Don’t ‘give away the farm’: Avoid posting the kind of information and advice for which clients pay Gartner.”

And finally, this one is probably a tough one to stomach for lots of corporate communications department, but Robert Scoble explains: “Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it — before the second or third site does — and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust.”

Got a good social media policy or guideline to share? Please do in the comments below!

photo credit: blue_j

On the drive home last night, I heard this Talk of the Nation story on NPR: How to Bounce Back from a PR Disaster. Obviously about Toyota if you’ve been following news for the past week. A good listen – and imho, the most reasonable assessment of the situation I’ve heard and read yet.

Take a look at the news and you see headlines like: Toyota’s Digital Disaster, Toyota broke cardinal rule of crisis management, and Toyota’s Recall Antics Spread Virally.

My take?  You can’t argue with decades of leadership in automotive reliability. It’ll take a lot more than this recall (which happen all the time and affect all companies) to diminish my trust in Toyota.

By the way, I just bought a new used car, and during the process only sought out Toyotas, Scions (Toyota brand), and Hondas. Reliability was my top criteria. While I ended up with a Honda, this recall and the so-called “PR disaster” wouldn’t have turned me a way from a Toyota if I were still looking for a car.

Though it does appear that I don’t represent the mainstream view, as public perception of the Toyota brand has dropped significantly.

So what’s Toyota to do?

A couple posts ago, I wrote about an HBR article concerning the customer-centric organization. In it, the authors presented their vision of the Chief Customer Officer.

Imagine if Toyota had a Chief Customer Officer.

As the public face of the company and most senior internal evangelist, a Toyota CCO would be the first to acknowledge the issue and offer a sincere apology to customers. A Toyota CCO would brief the executive team on how to handle the customer crisis from a customer-centric point of view. A Toyota CCO would engage dealerships, ensuring a positive experience for customers who bring in their Toyotas for repairs.

A Toyota CCO would work closely with corporate communications and customer support to disseminate this message to its customers, wherever they may be off- and online. A Toyota CCO would reach out to, seek feedback from, and rally customer advocates, who prior to the crisis were already engaged in a formalized customer advocacy program. A Toyota CCO would coordinate efforts to listen to customers – collecting customer sentiment/feedback and funneling it back to the company. A Toyota CCO would empower a team to respond to detractors (like this one) and redirect the message back to Toyota.

I don’t think Toyota’s botched the recall by any means (yet). In fact, I think they’re handling it as best as most companies would. But Toyota would be better served if it had a CCO, who could coordinate the customer-centric response and inject the customer point of view across all facets of the recall process.

What is social search? It’s search that relies on your social graph. Whereas, in a traditional search engine the challenge is to find the right link, in Aardvark it’s to find the right person. Their analogy: Google follows the “library paradigm of information retrieval,” Aardvark is like the “village paradigm.” In Google the algorithms determine authority (PageRank), in Aardvark the algorithms determine intimacy.

Aardvark works best when you ask questions of a highly contextualized or subjective nature – the average question on Aardvark is 18.6 words compared to 2.2-2.9 words on a web search. Questions and answers are received via IM, email, and SMS – modeling the real-world process of asking questions to friends.

Here’s a look at the type of questions asked on Aardvark:

Today, Aardvark blogged about a conference paper they submitted, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine. For inquiring users like myself, it was an incredible look at how a social search engine works.

How It Works (Roughly)

A crawler and indexer indexes “topics,” which are submitted by users or extracted from users’ Facebook page, Twitter messages, Facebook news feed items, or messages sent to other users.

Aardvark creates an index with scored lists of user IDs and topic IDs. When a user enters a question into their chat window, for example, a question is sent to Aardvark’s conversation manager, which sends the question to its question analyzer, which issues a routing suggestion request to the routing engine, which searches the index and social graph of suggested user IDs.

What’s Interesting

Users aren’t just ranked by topic knowledge, but also by the “degree of social connectedness and profile similarity.” Profile similarity is determined by demographic data and social graph overlap, and also by matching vocabulary, chattiness, speed, verbosity, and politeness (e.g. Thanks!). Aardvark has found that if users have friends in common or match demographically, for instance, the questioner is more likely to receive a good answer. Also, if a user has friends with expertise in the topic, than Aardvark will judge that user as having higher expertise.

I continue to be surprised by the quality of answers I get every time I use Aardvark. I once asked how to create a pivot table in Excel, only I didn’t know it was called a pivot table and had to explain in detail what I wanted to do. I received a step-by-step answer from a gentlemen in San Francisco (read the entire thread).

According to Aardvark, users answer questions from strangers because it’s a “very gratifying experience: they’ve been selected by Aardvark because of their expertise, they were able to help someone who had a need in the moment, and they are frequently thanked for their help by the asker.”

The Impact

As of October 2009, more than 90,000 users have created accounts on Aardvark from just 2000 users in March. Over half of its users have asked a question on Aardvark and the average volume of questions per day is 3,167.2. The numbers are not insignificant and indicate a need that hasn’t been satisfied very well up to this point.

Social search like Aardvark helps tease out information from the right people – people in our social graphs who have some degree of connectedness and profile similarity to us. It’s the recognition of intimacy as just as important, if not more, than authority.

This is what I tell all my friends who haven’t quite crossed the chasm yet.  Though most I know – and this seems to be true for the general public – aren’t comfortable having such public personas.  Most are willing to share and comment, but not yet produce and curate.

I’ve been thinking more about our online identities recently, especially in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments on evolving social norms. While Facebook has an obvious interest in reducing privacy and creating a more open platform, it’s true that high schoolers today are growing up in an age where most of what they consume and communicate is online. We’re true to ourselves (generally) when we interact with people in our physical world, and this is mimicked to an increasingly large extent in our digital world. Some of us are already comfortable being ourselves online. In fact, we seek that authenticity, those honest interactions, and real human-to-human relationships in our everyday online activities.

In real life we can craft different personas in different environments. At the very least, there’s the “work” Christine, the “home” Christine, the “social” Christine.

Online, there’s the “public” Christine – which to date includes articles I’ve written, my blog, my Twitter/Linkedin profile, and public information on my Facebook page. Then there’s the private Christine – the rest of the information on my Facebook.

And that’s how I like to keep it. Online, we need both our public and our private personas.

Meanwhile, it sounds as if Zuckerberg and Facebook are heading in a different direction: “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

While I agree that social norms are evolving, there’s always going to be a desire for people to keep some information private – that’s definitely the “home” Christine and to a large part the “social” Christine. This is why Facebook took off in the first place – it was a closed network of university students who felt safe sharing their personas with peers.

Recently I made my Facebook settings even more private. I also removed dozens of fan pages I had joined, recognizing that the affiliation was part of my public online identity. I’ve also stopped using Facebook Connect, despite its promise that users “take their Facebook identity, network, and privacy settings with them as they browse and interact with the rest of the Web.” Read their terms of service, as well as this earlier ReadWriteWeb article and this more recent CNET article to understand more.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to blog and send out Tweets – these are facets of my identity that I opted in to make public. I’ve already noticed sites using a “Twitter Connect,” and this is a feature I’ll gladly use (if only OpenID had taken off). And, it appears that we’ll be seeing a lot more of “Twitter Connect” in 2010.

This excerpt outlines what most of us already know, yet captures the sentiments really well so I wanted to include it:

“…Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use. To be sure, most companies use customer relationship management and other technologies to get a handle on customers, but no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers. To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships. And that means changing strategy and structure across the organization—and reinventing the marketing department altogether.”

Heard it before? It’s amazing how relevant the Cluetrain Manifesto is still, more than 10 years after it’s publication. The above sentiments also remind me of a number of essays by U of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad on customer “co-creation.”

But this lengthy article goes beyond describing the changing landscape of marketing. The authors continue in great detail, to lay out their vision for an organization that is restructured to respond to and embrace these changes. To move from a traditional company to a customer cultivating company.

Altimeter Group advises clients to shift their thinking from transactions towards relationships. Similarly, this article discusses the following shifts:

• Away from Product/Brand Manager-Driven towards Customer Manager-Driven
• Away from pushing products towards building long-term customer relationships
• Away from product profitability towards customer profitability
• Away from brand equity toward customer equity
• Away from a marketing department towards a “customer department”
• And most interestingly: Away from a CMO towards a CCO, or Chief Customer Officer. The authors note that there are more 300 CCOs worldwide today.

Get your hands on a copy of this article and read all the details in its entirely. A great read and highly recommended.

ShareThis are the makers of this ubiquitous button:

Last month, they released some interesting data about sharing, as a social engagement activity online. Here are some numbers:

• ShareThis saw a 200% increase in shares per page view across their 125,000 sites in 2009.
• Sharing is accounting for as much as one third of the traffic driven by traditional search.
• Sites in ShareThis’ network see 50% more engagement, or page views, from sharing over search.

Tim Schigel of ShareThis writes: “We believe your friends and family across all social networks should be your filter for the web, and influence isn’t just made by a few, it’s created by everyone who shares. What all this adds up to is a picture of sharing as a growing piece of the social Web.”

Read the entire blog post here: The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement.

While many of us are beginning to take sharing for granted, it’s a key online activity and behavior. Sharing is important to those who share (builds influence) and those who receive (benefits from social filter).

Altimeter Group’s Engagement Pyramid includes sharing as one of five key online behaviors. Later this month, we’ll be hosting a webinar focused on understanding “socialgraphics,” or how and where customers engage online, which includes a review of the Engagement Pyramid. For now, you can take a quick peak at the Pyramid here – see Slide 29. Details about the webinar will be announced soon on the Altimeter Group blog.

This article in Ad Week names Apple as the top social brand. Read here:

The key to brands coming out on top on the social Web is to have great products people want to talk about. It should come as no surprise then that Apple dominates a new list of the world’s most social brands.

via Apple Dominates Social Brand Ranking.

These rankings were conducted by social media management company, Vitrue. The announcement hasn’t been made on their blog yet, but here’s the methodology from last year’s Social Media Index rankings, which sounds to be the basis for this year’s Social Brand ranking:

The Vitrue SMI calculates scores about the brand’s social conversations. We apply a series of algorithms to reflect the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation. The result is a single numeric score for each brand: the Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI).

via The Virtue 100 – Top Social Brands of 2008

Product leadership and buzz are great, but it doesn’t make a brand social. In fact, Apple is arguably one of the most anti-social brands. I’ll give them credit for their annual MacWorld and a great in store experience, but Apple doesn’t undertake any social or community marketing efforts. While there are legions of adoring fans (me included) talking about Apple, Apple doesn’t really care to talk with us.

So, Apple isn’t a social brand – but not every brand needs to be social. Then again, not every brand continually delivers innovation and carves out whole new industries.

Update:

I wrote this post yesterday (Sunday), and Vitrue updated their blog with the official announcement today. You can read it here: The Vitrue 100 – Top Social Brands of 2009. Their methodology includes a daily analysis of online conversations taking place in these areas:

• Social Networking – general sharing
• Video Sharing – high engagement of viewing time and authenticity of dimension
• Status Updates – aka Micro-Blogs; key influencers who chatter and actively push content
• Photo Sharing – social meta data
• Blogs – general blogsphere, commentary mentions