pr-media-blog.co.uk

While the banks, collectively, may be short of friends right now, one bank is stashing away praise for its foray into social media.

First Direct - pioneers of the UK’s first telephone bank - launched its “live” site  a month ago to resounding welcomes in online places such as here and here.

So, I think we can agree that a bank providing a forum for both good and bad comments from its customers is a bold move and one to be applauded.

But another interesting dimension to this is raised in First Direct CEO, Matt Colebrook’s customer message a month on from the launch.

While he describes the social media initiative (or is it a culture change?) as “a new voice for customers”, “the right thing to do” and “overwhelming” in the response it’s generated, he’s careful to qualify this with “Clearly we can’t be all things to all people” and “we won’t be able to offer everything that’s been suggested”.

And that’s fair enough. What social media gives customers is the chance to be heard and taken, perhaps, more seriously than before as their views are not kept behind closed doors or on a private phone call but in the visible, searchable online arena. But, for businesses, there will always be a limit, as Colebrook suggests, on what’s possible and customers have the choice to live within those limits, or not.

And maybe it’s this dilemma that causes social media anxiety for some organisations: “If we engage openly in an online forum with customers, will they criticise us or ask for things we can’t possibly provide, so disappointing them and harming our brand?”

Well, if they’re unhappy, they’ll talk about your brand whether you choose to engage with them or not. So, opting for the conversation provides an opportunity to turn the detractor around. And, to paraphrase Colebrook again, you won’t please all of the people all of the time. But if can demonstrate that you’ve listened and are taking the time to explain, publicly, what you can and can’t deliver, it places you ahead of the brand that says: “This is what we sell, are you havin’ it or what?”

So well done to First Direct and let other businesses take heart: social media shouldn’t be seen as the “lynch mob online”, but an ongoing discussion between company and customer that could even - gasp - be a win-win.

Congratulations or, should I say, “thank you”, to Co-operative Financial Services for doing something simple that works so well in social media.

This video, delivered with endearing amateurism, was done to mark the company’s success in being chosen as Which’s “Financial Service Provider”.

What’s so effective about this, seemingly, throw-away piece of film?

1. Real people being themselves.

2. A thoroughly likeable and memorable way of delivering a simple message that would be difficult to do any other way.

3. It’s fun for a sector not renowed for having a sense of humour (or being allowed to have a sense of humour).

4. It’s daring for a financial services brand to be so frivolous, at a time when financial services are not top of anyone’s Christmas list.

5. It’s neither slick nor corporate, but invites but human interaction, which is the essence of social media after all.

For anyone with marketing or communications in their job title, in a sector whose usual messages might be considered “dry”, this is something to take note of.

Most people who read a newspaper will have picked up on the story of Mathew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report into teenage consumption of the media which broke surface a little over a week ago. At first glance this smacked of a well executed PR stunt after the story made a huge splash in the nationals and had significant penetration online.

However, upon reading the report in its entirety – rather than reading what other people have said about the report, which is where most conversations have derived from – it is actually surprisingly simplistic, logical, and to someone who was not a teenager all that long ago, far less than groundbreaking than you might imagine. Everything contained in the report, well, it just seemed rather self-evident.

For instance, one of the key points that the media picked up on is that teenagers don’t Twitter. Of course they don’t. You actually have to invest some time in Twitter to get anything out of it. It takes months, if not years, to actually build up enough followers for one to feel their tweets are actually reaching an audience which could be, in any way, defined as significant. And even once you do, there is little content other than the oh so boring medium of text.

Compare this to the Facebook experience where you can jump into a ready made group, lured by a diversity of visually stimulating and engaging content, such as pictures, applications and games. It’s all rather Scrabulous.

Many of the other observations are fairly straightforward, claiming, for example that most teenagers don’t read newspapers or watch the news…is this news? Were you interested in global geo-politics or the lack of transparency within the political system when you were 14? No, thought not. Funnily enough, kids aren’t now either.

Most kids have mobiles on pay-as-you-go because they can’t afford contracts…hold the front bleedin’ page…the FT did.

So ok, this isn’t a PR stunt, but it does demonstrate a few things. Firstly, that if you want a report into the habits of media consumption – or anything for that matter – to have penetration, keep it simply and write it in language that is not impenetrable to the man in the street. Secondly, if you want to know how teenagers consume the media or anything else, just ask them. Thirdly, a story really does not have to be groundbreaking to get blanket coverage; it just has to be insightful, informative and PR’d within an inch of its life.

The report in its entirety can be viewed here.

A bit of indulgence from me here. One of my clients is a corporate lawyer, advising the tech community, both investors and companies looking for funding. His name is Richard Eaton and he works for Orrick.

He’s started a discussion on the Long Room, the FT’s discussion forum for City-types, re the prospects for tech companies seeking investment to start-up or continue in 2009.

The Long Room is a closed forum i.e. you have to be a member to contribute, so I thought I’d post here to offer an open forum for the new media community to view and/or comment.

RIP Good Times - VC is dead, long live VC

Posted by reaton (The lawyer to the technology community) on Feb 13 16:13.

It seems that Sequoia’s words of warning last autumn are staring to be echoed over here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b6426bf0-f87d-11dd-aae8-000077b07658.html

But does it matter if some of the less successful companies go to the wall now?  We keep being told that failed companies are a badge of honour for entrepreneurs, so now is the time for many to earn their merit badges.  The technology, if it is good, and, crucially, if it is capable of making a profit, will not die, but lots of it will be recycled.  The entrepreneurs will start again. 

The fact is that there are three key elements to the success of any growth company: the technology, the management and the market - what is the point in having technology so bleeding edge cool that is incapable of making money, or is backed by management that would not have looked out of place running a bank?  But companies with good technology, that have good management that is capable of adapting to a changing world will survive: Google was born out of the dot.com crash.  Ten years later it is a mature company.  In this country, Autonomy continues to be one  of the most attractive stocks in the FTSE100, because it has the basics in spades. 

What does this mean for VC funding?  Well without doubt, the market for funding is extremely poor.  Poorer than any of us can remember.  Expect to see VCs pull in their horns, drip feed money to their best companies, merge their ok companies and cut loose the rest.  Yes there will be new funding, but on terms, and at the rates, that hark back to 2002.  In ten years time, the best run companies with the best money making technology will be bigger and stronger.  Will £1bn of government money help?  To secure people’s jobs, it might do.  To build great technology companies, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Who would’ve thought it? A micro-blogging site with no apparent use beyond the inane ramblings of an early-adopting minority getting the full analytical treatment in the Daily Telegraph.

Well, Twitter has certainly come of age in the UK; now the seventh most popular social networking site and an online destination more popular than holiday shop, Expedia and personal finance comparison website, Money Supermarket.

But those dismissing Twitter as nothing more than a virtual location for verbally incontinent gasbags and, more recently, popularity-craving celebrities, should think again.

It is also a powerful tool for the world’s consumers to make their voices heard - either evangelising or denigrating a company, product or brand - and finding camaraderie with other Twitterfolk in doing so. It’s old fashioned “word of mouth” working its magic; something that lives beyond the controlling tentacles of marketing and communications departments, yet something they’d like to harness.

Companies across the globe are getting it in the neck from people on Twitter, from a disgruntled United Airlines passenger “tweeting” in real time about a rude flight attendant to a car buying customer in Aberdeen, sounding off about bad customer service at the hands of Skoda.

And the problem is, as Rebecca Lieb at Econsultancy succinctly points out, companies quick to broadcast on social media are not necessarily “listening”.

Yesterday, Staniforth client, Norwich Union, was itself on the receiving end of Twitter ire. The difference is, someone was listening. When we picked up the disgruntled customer’s Twitter posts, he was clearly furious and frustrated at being unable to resolve his query with the insurance company. The fact he was also a journalist just added another potentially damaging dimension to the story.

But making contact with him via Twitter, getting a blow by blow account of his case, getting it passed through to the right people at the company who sorted it out within hours, turned a customer on the warpath to someone sharing the pipe of peace, and letting the wider world know about it - again via Twitter.

Leaving aside the details, this was simply the case of a person, with a problem, wanting to be heard and understood. As with any company whose customers are numbered in the millions, mistakes happen. The way the mistakes are handled distinguishes those who keep or lose their customers. And with social media, it’s being conducted out in the open, whether brands like it or not.

Update: The New York Times does a good introduction to Twitter

Amid global financial meltdown, there’s hope!

At least that’s what Albert Maruggi says in his latest blog posting. I like Maruggi’s boundless optimism (listen to his Marketing Edge podcast and you can actually hear it, in spades!) and wry take on the shame seeping out of Wall Street right now in his Twittering.

But he’s got a good point. The financial services industry could do far worse (and it has done) than taking on some of the principles of social media - openness and transparency.

But while corporate America is still, as Maruggi suggests, in the early adopter stage of using social media, where does that leave the rest of us? Maybe it’s time we started to lead the States instead of taking the lead from them.