The best customer complaint in years.

And customer power at work on the web.

After over 4 million downloads, United compensated them.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Some numbers that show just pervasive the web has become and how much it is now a part of our life.

( Hat tip to mashable)

And the original ad…

The Media140 conference’s debate on Why Twitter can be important for brands was chaired by Kieron Matthews, the marketing director of IAB.

Robin Grant, managing director of We Are Social, suggested: “With the new media, there is a paradigm shift. It means, that consumers and people have all the power now. Brands need to realise that. It means as well, what you do has to come from the heart, because otherwise they will rip you apart. If you work with social media you have to acknowledge that.”

Scott Seaborn, head of mobile of the Ogilvy Group UK said: “Reach in the new paradigm is a very interesting point. We have to explain that to our clients. However, the idea of customer service is gold. Searching Twitter, listening to your customers and then start working out the problems. First listen, then engage. That is gold.

“Working with mobile media has another interesting perspective. Consumers are really hard to reach, for example. Especially pull media like mobile services can be turned into a gift here, if it is a utility and can be of some fun.”

Nuria Garrido, digital marketing innovations manager of British Airways said: “It might not be the direct revenue, it might be more important to establish communication with your customer, who was out of your league before.

Mel Exon, managing partner of BBHLabs said: “If an agency can’t put together platforms and programs they are not going to be here for much longer. Fundamentally, I rather like to talk about social ideas than social media. Whether you are Nike, easyJet or British Airways, it is a huge investment, emotionally and in case of time.”

Nuria Garrido agrees: “Your customers expect a long-term relationship and not a short interaction, so social media is a long-term commitment. Within British Airways a lot of people understand that digital is important. At British Airways we are not scared to test – and the recession had something to do with this. Social media is relevant, because it is about building a relationship with your customer. If you communicate with them and they feel good about the brand and are taken seriously, they choose British Airways for flying.”

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/advertising/rss
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As Twitter and social media get more and more important for brands, beware of some painful pitfalls

Homewares firm Habitat this summer provoked Twitter outrage when it used the #iranelection hashtag – which would normally alert users of the micro-blogging site to a message about the elections in Iran – to try to drum up interest in its wares.

After apologising for the ruse, the company blamed it on an “over-enthusiatic intern”. But how should brands use Twitter? And why is it so hard for them to understand the new medium?

George Nimah, managing director of marketing firm Iris Digital, said: “Twitter is challenging for brands, because it is made for talks and chats, and their public relation language is very different. If they want to use Twitter, they have to learn to act different and sound human.

“There are some, who just use a popular hashtag and fire their message, and brands have to learn that this doesn’t work. So the do is, be nice and talk to people like they are human beings. The don’t, don’t be an asshole.”

Steve Barton, a founding member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association UK, said: “The do is be honest and transparent. Don’t lie and don’t fake it. Make it, for example, transparent by whom your Twitter feed is managed on a certain day.”

Lloyd Davis, the founder of The Tuttle Club, a “social media cafe”, said: “The problem with Twitter is, if you make a mistake, you are fucked. Outrage happens overnight.”

Daren Forsyth, founder of community soclia media advisors 140 Characters, said: “Twitter is a place where amazing things happen. But companies just pump their tweets out there, most of them don’t engage. But you have to engage to build up trust – and trust is really important.”

Daljit Bhurji, the managing director of PR firm Diffusion, said: “PR traditionally acted as the voice of clients. Now PR is a content generator. I think the Reuters rules for journalists are a good orientation to understand how you behave on social media.”

Ciaran Norris, the head of social media marketing at global media network Mindshare, said: “The growth in Twitter has been exponential. It is a media zone. Twitter turns the ladder sideways – it made it so much easier to communicate with each other and with brands and to spread news.

“To understand what is going on, search is really important. In fact, the Google homepage is the homepage of your brand, because people use Google as a browser, now.”

There are some tools to help you learn what people are saying about your brand:

• Cymfony is very good to search what people say about your brand.
• ViralTracker is for tracking the viral spreading of video.
• Delicious is good to find the tags of your brands.
• Tweetdeck allows you to have a quick view of what is going on in Twitter on an individual level.
• TweetFunnel allows multiple users to manage a simple Twitter account.
• Tweetmeme tracks the links that were spread around Twitter.
• Twitterfall is good to follow a certain topic. It is set up on the huge screen in the Daily Telegraph’s office now.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/advertising/rss
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What gives? It seems a little bit surprising at first glance, but I suppose it’s not entirely illogical. Quality customer care is often difficult to find, so there are no doubt many shoppers who would rather try to figure it out themselves than deal with an agent via email or phone. Additionally, thanks to the level of product detail many retailers are able to provide on their sites and the amount of product information and feedback available through customer reviews and online communities, shoppers can often get all the information they need with a quick search or two.

Beyond this, RightNow’s study also provided the following insights:

• Chat is popular with those who try it. Of the shoppers who use live online chat to interact with a customer care agent, 69% said they’d prefer chat over email and 64% said they’d prefer chat over phone assistance.
• Multichannel consistency is a big problem. Only 25% of the shoppers surveyed reported receiving consistent responses from agents across the various customer care channels.
• Selling is okay. Whether receiving help from an agent by phone, email or online chat, more than half of shoppers don’t mind receiving suggestions about relevant products during the interaction.

If the findings are accurate, the implications for online retailers are clear:

• If shoppers are going to help themselves, give them the tools they need to do so. From in-depth product details and product photos to customer reviews, the more information shoppers have access to, the more likely it is that they’ll be able to make a purchasing decision.
• It’s important to recognize how shoppers want to receive customer care. I wouldn’t write off email or the phone but if you have no idea how your customers prefer to interact with customer care agents, you had better find out.
• A real emphasis needs to be placed on providing a seamless customer care experience across channels. Ideally, all customer care agents should have the same training, access to information and authority regardless of channel.
• Customer care interactions provide an opportunity to sell. To seize this opportunity, however, agents must be trained on how to sell and focus in on building trust so that shoppers perceive their recommendations to be worth considering.

Photo credit: cod_gabriel via Flickr.

“Asked what they felt about personal data being stored on third-parties’ remote computers, 64% say they don’t want their data kept by a third party, according to the latest installment of ‘Unisys Security Index: United States.””

I wonder how much of this comes down to semantics. The vast majority of people I know have no problems storing their email in the cloud. And that’s probably the biggest cache of personal data most average users have.

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"However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that's meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google."

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Meanwhile, the median age of a Twitter user is now 31, and the media age for Facebook is now 33, up from 26 in May of last year.

Predictably, web surfers with a wireless mobile device are more likely to twitter. And those who own multiple mobile devices are even more likely to twitter.

But even more important than consumers’ updating frequency is their tolerance to listen to other people’s messages. Accordng to Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew
Internet & American Life Project and co-author of the report:

“It’s a pretty interesting finding, if someone is building an
audience online, to know that there are people who maybe never
respond but are lurking and learning by subscribing to the
feed.”

Marketers are finding social media to be an increasingly fertile ground to spread their brand messaging, and increasing usage of real-time updates is a good thing for brands. Twitter’s founders are clear on this issue.

Twitter is planning to launch paid accounts to businesses by the end of the year, and marketing is going to be a big part of how Twitter plans to make money down the line. CEO Evan Williams said Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference:

“The reason we like the prospects of Twitter is there’s a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there’s a lot of brand marketers on Twitter, and it works. A lot of that is theoretically monetizable.”

If Twitter usage continues on a steady incline, it will be good for both the microblogging service and marketers. Says Williams:

“If we’re driving that value for businesses, we’re not that worried about extracting value for ourselves.

Image: Pew Internet

After analyzing the highest and lowest performers from its database, Dynamic Logic found that simple messages with sustained brand messaging and persistent logos had the most impact for brands. They also found that “reveal” ads don’t work.

According to Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s senior
VP-custom solutions:

“Media people spend most time trying to optimize and measure campaigns,
because the creative quality is outside of their control. If they got
good ads to begin with, that would help.”

Well, duh. Good advertising depends on good creative. But that doesn’t meant that measurement and targeting stop mattering. The online environment allows for intense levels of measurement that old school ads aren’t equipped with. And often, those measurements aren’t helping brands bring in sales.

But simply improving creative won’t magically fix the problem of online advertising. A bigger issue t online, is the difficulty in scaling ad campaigns. Traditional advertising placements may be harder to measure, but they’re easier to deploy. Television and print ads have standard shapes and sizes that are easier to work around. The complexity of online channels contributes to the low quality of creative. Video, search and display ads online come in all shapes and sizes.

Mallon tells AdAge:

“It’s magazine-quality. If people think of the internet as a
well-targeted magazine and do their planning and creative development
around that, they tend to have very successful campaigns.”

Well, how do you treat the internet as a well-targeted magazine unless you focus on targeting and placement? Dynamic Logic’s initial findings show that all of that matters for brands.

AdAge says that brands should “stop obsessing over targeting and placements,” but there’s nothing in the nubers released so far proving those factors aren’t important. The question is how to deploy creative, and Dynamic Logic’s advice to use people, logos and persistent calls to action are not going to be a silver bullet for conversions.

Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer at digital agency AKQA tells AdAge the real problem:

“Agencies have to create so many of the
same thing. Thus the creative becomes somewhat generic, and standards
are all over the place.”

It’s unclear if the viewing experience will be an effective replication of magazine reading (many online efforts to replicate print content online have been clunky and annoying to read), but wth the advances that digital readers have made over the past year, it shouldn’t be expecting too much to assume Conde can figure out the details. Or improve upon them as it goes.

But as far as revenue streams go, this could be very useful for the publisher. Readers who have let their magazine subscriptions lapse due to paper fatigue aren’t likely to read an entire magazine online, but they could easily do so on a smartphone. (Or e-reader, or other device. Getting content onto the iPhone will pay the way for a more device agnostic marketplace later.)

Meanwhile, Conde can count iPhone subscriptions as part of its total subscriber base. And it can add more ad inventory for brands. Already, the company says that its print advertisers can add digital
links to the iPhone version for a premium. And Grey
Goose and Gillette are signed on as “premium sponsors” of the digital GQ issue.

Apple still controls the billing situation on the iPhone (and will ilkely take a 30% cut of all sales), but this could be a great way to get people — especially commuters — back in the magazine habit. For magazines that already stream all their content online, it might be a tough sell to start charging for that content in mobile. But if they add enough digital features, and make the viewing experience slick enough, it shouldn’t be too hard to win brand loyalists to the new platform. Getting new readers may be a different story, but an iPhone app can’t be expected to fix all publishing woes, can it?