Brandjack News

The problem with the social web is that cringeworthy misjudgements that used to just entertain a few of your friends and colleagues can now leave you exposed to the amusement of half the world.

Take this example (h/t @Sheldrake) from Bank of America.

I don’t rule out the possibility that in an internal company conference this might have gone down reasonably well, with at least part of the audience. I will even concede that the man can sing, and does a passable impression of Bono. But singing about a bank with such loving tones would have seemed absurd to most people even in 2007, and is positively offensive to more than a few today.

Outside of their context performances like this are ludicrous, embarrassing, and hilarious. They go viral on YouTube and Twitter in a very short space of time. And it is going to keep on happening. Talking to students, I long ago concluded that gen Y simply doesn’t have the same expectations of privacy that previous generations do. And it is older generations who are going to have to adjust.
While older generations argue about the civil liberties implications of speed cameras and security cameras in shopping centres, gen Y knows that if you are in a public place there is always a chance that someone is filming you. In any crowd there are hundreds of internet connected video cameras, and the chance that one of them will point at you if you do something embarrassing is pretty high. Losing your temper, getting drunk, flirting while married, all have dramatically different implications to just a few years ago.
In the UK, the courts are struggling to construct a privacy law based on the Human Rights Act. And technology is making it irrelevant.

The worst result in the Blagojevich trial for Barack Obama is one that leads to another trial – and that is the result that has come to pass.  It is not as if the verdict leaves any doubt as to the former governor’s guilt, since he was convicted on one count and left with a hung jury on the other 24 counts.  If rumours that the jury was 11-1 in favour of convicting Blago are anywhere close to correct,  the story will continue to run through the mid-term elections in November.

Of course, this is embarrassing for the President, but it is entirely survivable.  There has been no serious suggestion that Obama himself did anything wrong.  The story cuts close to him.  Blagojevich was accused of trying to sell Obama’s former Senate seat, and White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel is a close political ally of the disgraced governor.  But close is not the same as suggesting that the President himself is in any way corrupt.  Blagojevich was caught on tape cursing the White House for refusing to bribe him over filling the Senate vacancy.

Social media coverage of the trial is – as you would imagine – overwhelmingly hostile to Blagojevich.  One Tweet even suggests that all twelve jurors have been appointed to the Senate.  Even so, a search for ‘obama’ turns up almost no coverage of the trial.  So far, at least, the deeply damaged Blagojevich brand is not infecting Obama’s brand.  There are some pretty solid reasons for this.  For one thing Obama genuinely seems to have done nothing wrong.  His team may have been less than forthcoming about Blagojevich’s corruption, but nonetheless seem to have declined to participate.  Secondly, other stories about Obama seem to be swamping references to Blagojevich.

In part, Obama is continuing to benefit from his success in reaching out to the social media universe.  There remains, despite his declining poll numbers, a strong body of support for him.  And, of course, the Presidency tends in the ordinary course of things to produce a lot of news.

Do the strong channels that Obama has into social media protect him from negative stories?  Undoubtedly his level of preparedness and engagement has been an advantage.  But it cannot immunise him against real news.  If this story cut any closer to Rahm Emanuel than seems to be the case, the White House would certainly find itself in the firing line.

By Quentin Langley

While Jet Blue loses control of its message to a silly season story, the airline industry in the UK is roaring back to the seventies with a season of Autumn strikes. This follows, of course, the Spring strikes. The difference between the strikes earlier in the year and those still planned is that the first were strikes organised by Unite against BA and the second are strikes organised by Unite against BAA. BA is the former British Airways and BAA is the former British Airports Authority. BAA’s principal airport, London Heathrow, is BA’s major hub.

While there is much to be said for BA’s forthright use of the courts to prevent strikes it only goes some way to dealing with the issue. The threat of strikes is hugely damaging to both businesses. Many people book their flights weeks or months in advance, and those people will actively avoid airlines and airports which they feel may be threatened with strikes, even if the strikes do not ultimately take place.

Continue reading this story

By Quentin Langley

While Jet Blue loses control of its message to a silly season story, the airline industry in the UK is roaring back to the seventies with a season of Autumn strikes.  This follows, of course, the Spring strikes.  The difference between the strikes earlier in the year and those still planned is that the first were strikes organised by Unite against BA and the second are strikes organised by Unite against BAA.  BA is the former British Airways and BAA is the former British Airports Authority.  BAA’s principal airport, London Heathrow, is BA’s major hub.

While there is much to be said for BA’s forthright use of the courts to prevent strikes it only goes some way to dealing with the issue.  The threat of strikes is hugely damaging to both businesses.  Many people book their flights weeks or months in advance, and those people will actively avoid airlines and airports which they feel may be threatened with strikes, even if the strikes do not ultimately take place.

Air travel is a business with astonishingly low brand loyalty.  Large numbers of passengers choose their airlines and even their destinations by a mixture of price and convenience.  Only the most regular fliers are willing to pay extra to build up their loyalty points.  People feel even less loyalty to airport brands, though some people are stuck with a very limited choice of convenient airports.

This makes both airlines and airports vulnerable to strikes and the threat of strikes, and should empower the unions.  This is probably why most airline employees enjoy generous salaries and perks for a lifestyle that many people envy and which it is never hard to fill.  But in reputation terms, things are very different.

When BP faces off against Greenpeace, the default position of most of the public and the media is to assume the environmental group is right, or at the very least well-motivated.  Unions command no such automatic support.

While environmental groups have proved masters of brandjacking, there is little evidence of unions doing the same.  The battle with Greenpeace is asymmetric warfare – pitching a corporate army against lightly armed guerillas.  The battle with unions remains, as it was in the seventies, one between big battalions on either side.  Corporations and unions both seem tied to the old way of looking at PR and, as such, neither can gain the decisive advantage in the battle for reputation and brand.

How long before one side masters brandjacking?  

By Quentin Langley

If you were to pick a company likely to be brandjacked, it would not have been Jet Blue. While low cost airlines in Europe often have a bad reputation for customer service – and Ryan Air seems to revel in this – Jet Blue is not only known for high calibre customer service, but also a light-hearted attitude and being fully engaged in social media.

Of course, one rogue member of staff can ruin things for anyone. But the bizarre behaviour of flight attendant, Steven Slater, doesn’t seem to be what is damaging Jet Blue’s brand. Rather, it is the company’s stiff response to the mass of social media coverage. Slater has become something of a folk hero, with thousands joining a fan page on Facebook and the Twitterverse christening his decision to swear at a customer, pick up a bottle of beer, and leave the aircraft via the evacuation slide ‘the best way to resign’ ever.

Continue reading this story

By Quentin Langley

If you were to pick a company likely to be brandjacked, it would not have been Jet Blue.  While low cost airlines in Europe often have a bad reputation for customer service – and Ryan Air seems to revel in this – Jet Blue is not only known for high calibre customer service, but also a light-hearted attitude and being fully engaged in social media.

Of course, one rogue member of staff can ruin things for anyone.  But the bizarre behaviour of flight attendant, Steven Slater, doesn’t seem to be what is damaging Jet Blue’s brand.  Rather, it is the company’s stiff response to the mass of social media coverage.  Slater has become something of a folk hero, with thousands joining a fan page on Facebook and the Twitterverse christening his decision to swear at a customer, pick up a bottle of beer, and leave the aircraft via the evacuation slide ‘the best way to resign’ ever.  

The events are very current, and that’s why Google turns up several matches for this story on a search for ‘jet blue’ and the first page on Twitter for the same search is almost exclusively on this story.  It is not clear that this story is going to keep running, and it certainly doesn’t have the ongoing potential of Deepwater Horizon.  But Jet Blue’s refusal to engage with a story which is a silly season classic, is still something of a worry for the company.  It reflects one of the worst errors a company can make in a crisis.  They are treating a reputation problem as a legal problem.

Obviously, there are legal implications to the story.  They might find themselves in a legal dispute with the customer or the employee.  But the liability in either case would be relatively small.  But the story is so newsworthy that in reputation terms it is huge.  This is clearly a case when Jet Blue should be listening to its PR people and not its lawyers.

Lawyers always like silence.  Yet there is huge evidence that saying sorry and engaging in a friendly way dramatically reduces the chances that you will be sued.  Jet Blue should be willing to laugh about this story, at least a bit.  That is what everyone else is doing. 

By Quentin Langley

How can an organisation in crisis demonstrate its commitment to openness and transparency? Toyota, bedevilled by recalls in late 2009 and early 2010, opted to engage via Digg Dialogg.

Digg Dialogg is a remarkable venture in crowd sourced journalism. The Digg community votes questions up or down and the most popular questions are then put to the interviewee. This is way Digg works. It is a social news website, in which members of the community vote stories up or down (digg or bury) and the most popular stories then appear on the front page. Digg Dialogg extends this process to making, and not just sharing, news.

Jim Lentz, Toyota’s COO for North America, was interviewed on Digg Dialogg on 08 February 2010. This was the height of the media coverage about the recalls, and the venture was so successful, both for Digg and Toyota, that Toyota’s VP for quality returned on 22 June for a follow up interview.

http://revision3.com/player-v4689

Click here to continue reading this article

By Quentin Langley

How can an organisation in crisis demonstrate its commitment to openness and transparency? Toyota, bedevilled by recalls in late 2009 and early 2010, opted to engage via Digg Dialogg.

Digg Dialogg is a remarkable venture in crowd sourced journalism. The Digg community votes questions up or down and the most popular questions are then put to the interviewee. This is way Digg works. It is a social news website, in which members of the community vote stories up or down (digg or bury) and the most popular stories then appear on the front page. Digg Dialogg extends this process to making, and not just sharing, news.

Jim Lentz, Toyota’s COO for North America, was interviewed on Digg Dialogg on 08 February 2010. This was the height of the media coverage about the recalls, and the venture was so successful, both for Digg and Toyota, that Toyota’s VP for quality returned on 22 June for a follow up interview.

http://revision3.com/player-v4689

When you are in the midst of a crisis it is easy to assume that everyone else is obsessed by the same things which obsess your organisation. But of the over 1400 questions submitted to Jim Lentz, 60% were not about the recall. The most popular question was “what do you drive?”. The question allowed Lentz to talk about his commitment to hybrid cars, about the fact that his family all drive the cars that had been criticised for their safety record, and about the fact that he regularly drives all Toyota’s models, and cars from competitors, as part of his own learning process.

Of course, the fact that not everyone was focussed on the recalls did not mean they were not focussed on core issues. There were questions about gas-free cars, and someone wanted to know if Toyota would ever produce a hybrid that is not “as ugly as sin”.

Digg Dialogg is open to the criticism that it is softball journalism. After all, the guest is as capable as anyone else of logging on to see what questions are popular. The guest can be extremely well-prepared. But real journalism should not be a game of ‘gotcha’. The point is not merely to challenge and catch out the interviewee. There are plenty of journalists in the MSM willing to play that game. At least part of the point, surely, is to ask questions so that the audience or readership can actually learn the answers? From that point of view, interviewing someone who is prepared and briefed is very valuable.

Toyota has been so impressed with the value of crowd sourcing that it has been starting to ask if, one day, a community could design a car.