It is my guess that KFC did not have a reputation management plan in place before last weeks YouTube video of rats in their restaurant hit the Internet. Before you could say “rats” the video had gone viral and KFC had a huge public relations problem on their hands.
Unlike PR crisis in the past, where the duration of the crisis was limited to people’s memories, location and new cycles, the Internet means that the rat issue in Greenwich Village is not just a local NYC story. Suddenly it is a national story that has a lot of negative implications for KFC.
Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdbl has an interesting posting titled 7 Opportunities for “New School” SEO. Todd’s suggestions might say SEO, but four of them are very applicable to anyone interested in SMO.
1. Social media marketing
SMM is NOT social media manipulation - it is learning what social communities online are looking for and giving it to them… (…so hard that they BLEED)
To often SEO’s think that SMO is simply manipulation of social sites like Digg and MySpace. It is not that simple. The social netwoeking sites are all different, and to be successful with social media marketing you need to know the difference between MySapce and Bebo.
A couple of big Wikipedia stories last week. One was from Hitwise which showed that Google is now responsible for 50% of the traffic to Wikipedia. In fact, 70% of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from the search engines:
Hitwise data showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines, with 50% from Google alone. Google’s share of Wikipedia’s upstream traffic from Google has increased by 19% over the past year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06), at the same time that Wikipedia’s market share of US visits increased by 143%.
Neil Patel from ACS is teaming up with search guru Danny Sullivan to put on a social media conference in NYC later this year.
According to the web site the two day event will cover:
SMX Social Media is a two-day show covering the social media revolution. It will cover how social media sites Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Netscape and others are serving a new and growing audience that wants to discover information based on community interests, voting and sharing.
The resignation of two bloggers who had been blogging on behalf of the John Edwards campaign last week because they “offended” the campaign and wrote off message brought back memories of the social media blunders of Wal-Mart, GM and Virgin.
If you are a business and you want to be successful operating within the social networks, then you need to understand when you elect to participate in social networks that you are engaging in a two way conversation.
Earlier this year Borders announced it was teaming up with Gather.com to develop an online community for book lovers.
My initial reaction to the story was not positive as Gathers.com is not a top tier social network and I thought that Borders could have picked a better partner.
So I read with interest a press release today about the partnership. The release included a long quote from Rob Gruen, executive vice president, Merchandising and Marketing for Borders:
Interesting article in Internet Retailer recently about how companies were using user-generated content, in this case reviews, to generate sales.
On of the selling points of the social shopping engines, is that shopping is a social event. The Yahoo/Harris Interactive poll late last year showed that “60% of U.S. adults who plan to shop on the Web viewed recommendations from friends and family as the top factor when choosing a small online retailer for holiday gift buying”.
Most of the coverage about social search engines has been written from the social point of view, and not from the retailer’s point. So the question has always been, does user-generate content and customer reviews translate into more sales?
With Barack Obama’s formal announcement that he was running for the President came the unveiling of his new web site. The web site is a homage to social networking.
As the Biving Report put it:
This site is all about social networking. I mean all about it. “This Campaign is About You.” The Obama campaign wants you to create a profile and then start connecting with other supporters, writing blog entries, attending events and raising money
A couple of features of the site that caught my attention are:
Esnips’ Eran Arkin has put together a good list of all the “movers and shakers” in the social networking and Web 2.0 world. Kudos to Andy for the heads-up on this.
Eran uses Alexa data, which is notoriously unreliable, to rank the web sites. Does Fotolog really get more traffic than Flickr? And what happened to Photobucket? Still it is interesting to look at see how the sites compare with each other.
If you are looking for a list of only social networking sites then Wikipedia has a good list here. With the Esnips and Wikipedia lists, I think that all of the major social networking sites are covered.
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Been busy trying to prove that Jason Calacanis is wrong and that SMO is not a temporary phase:)
Being busy does not mean that I have not being keeping up with my blog reading, and there has been some great articles written recently.
Rohit blogged about how Mahindra is using a blog to compete with John Deere and sell tractors. This is a great case study for how to run a successful blogging campaign. The writer is authentic, the blog is not hard selling a product and the blog allows people to connect with the Mahindra brand.
