Case study and social media disasters

1. Case study

I work at Suomen Nuortentalo. I wanted to do a case study about a social service company, because usually their use of social media differs from other kind of companies.

In my field of work there isn't much that we can post on the internet. We need to make sure that clients and residents don't appear on the photos and on the texts that we post. Social media is mainly a place to inform people about the diseases and difficulties our residents have. For example Suomen Nuortentalo has posted on Facebook articles about Asperger syndrome. In Facebook there are also information to the youngsters for example about camps and summer jobs.

The most important thing to remember is that we can't have our residents as our Facebook friends. We need to make sure that the residents understand that this our work, in our personal life is our own. If a residents mind is unstable, being friends on social media could also be dangerous.

We workers cannot use our Facebook page. Superiors are the only ones who can. I think that they should assign someone to be in charge of the social media, because now the page isn't updated too often. I think that Facebook would be a perfect place to "sell" our facilities and to tell people about the methods that we use.

So this was a bit different case study but I felt that I wanted to incorporate social services in this blog somehow!

2.Social media disasters

In November 2015, Australia's Victorian Taxi Association launched its #YourTaxis campaign to get customers' feedback about its service. It didn’t go quite as planned. The hashtag quickly became a repository for stories about drivers committing horrible violent and sexually abusive acts against customers. The campaign was launched at Monday and by Wednesday night the situation was so bad that the agency tried to make things better, only to make it worse. They used Remembrance Day hashtag on twitter to promote the campaign, a move which many social media users called-out as being disrespectful. The tweet read: “#RememberanceDay 600,000 taxi trips are taken by war Veterans and widows for treatment purposes. Lest We Forget. #yourtaxis.” All of this in just a few days. At the end, the agency behind the campaign was fired.  

In March 2015? SeaWorld opened itself up to complaints with an #AskSeaWorld hashtag. The company had

been on rough path ever since the movie “Blackfish” became popular on Netflix. The hashtag was then hijacked and became a trending topic on Twitter as pointed questions went viral. SeaWorld could have save the game by apologizing and changing its policies. But it didn’t.  Instead, after #AskSeaWorld, the brand has used Twitter to fight allegations stemming from Blackfish, gaining retweets along with angry comments. Not very smart move, but luckily for SeaWorld, people are starting to forget this disaster, and their follower growth has now been steady.

3. Social media in ten years

I think that social media will more and more in peoples’ lives year after year. Customer service will become more reliant by social media and internet. I a bit worried if our children will be so used to talk via social media that they communicate through screens more than with face to face. On the other hand social media connects people from all over the world and people with same interest find each other. 

Future of social media

1

I follow some bodybuilders at social media, and I would consider them as a brand, because somehow, they need to “sell their image” on social media. A famous bodybuilder that I have been following for a long time is Jeff Seid, He basically started making videos to YouTube about dieting and training.  After sometime he got famous, and because of it, at one of his videos, he said that he got many new job options as fitness model and new Sponsors, because of his high numbers of followers in social media. he also sell clothes and his website (www.seidwear.clothing).  In a nutshell he used the social media to grow his “brand” and also as able to reach people from other countries.

Initially, he mostly used YouTube and Facebook for videos. After some time, Instagram got more famous, so, he started using it more often. And currently, he is also using Snapchat, which is kind of the new trend. I would say that his strategy is to stay present in the most used types social media for entertainment (such as :Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and snapchat), so that he is able to reach more people from different social medias. His goal is to stay well known in bodybuilding and not be forgotten. Therefore, he need to  post often on his social medias. I would say that he measures his success by the number of followers that he has at his social medias, and his acceptance.

Many of those fitness models have other people helping them, to take care of their social media. I would say that the forbidden things that the staff should never to are: first, post something about dedicated topics such as religion and politics, I have notice that mostly of famous people avoid sharing their option on those topics. Which I consider the right decision, because it could bring more harm than good for the brand.

Second, the staff should never be rude with the users. Because social media enables users to post comments, sometimes the comments are quite rough on the brand but the company should never reply its public in a impolite manner, because it could damage the brand.

2.

I would say that the main goal for companies in social media is to create awareness for its services and products and also create a channel between the company and clients. I would say that a company fails in social media if the company has not been able to reach its potential customers. Therefore the company should evaluate the reasons for that this, it could be because the company is using the wrong social media or its contend is not good enough.

Companies should react immediately against false claims raised on the internet.  For instance, if someone makes an article claiming that Sara uses slave labour to manufacturing its clothes. Depending on the situation Sara should immediately disclaim those accusations, so that the brand is not damage by a false accusation.

3.

In my view, in ten years the mostly used social medias at the moment will be obsolete. People would be using more often social media, plus users will find new roles and ways to use social media. I also think that the social media in the future will improve even more, the way companies share information and communicate.

TED.COM AS A CASE STUDY AND THINGS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA

TED started in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment, and Design converged, and from then on, it has built up a reputation as the best channel for spreading ideas to large and general-interest audience (Heimans and Timms, 2014; TED.com). Its talks cover various topics from science to businesses to global issues, and especially in more than 100 languages (TED.com).

In June 2006, TED posted first videos on ITunes, and in July of the same year, videos were posted on YouTube (Zhao, 2013). Within two months it had gained an incredible result - one million views, but that result did not stop at that moment. In 2011, It was estimated that there were 225 million views of TED talks (Zhao, 2013). With such a great strategy and creative topics, I believe that TED is continually expanding its scope and strengthening its influence to worldwide communities. 

Figure 1: TED Talks views from 2006 to 2011 (Zhao, 2013)

So, how has TED created that miracle? June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media pointed out that a well-written and creative content was essential, but it was not enough to prompt people to share (Cicero, 2012). There is a need to have a strategy and a patience to do so. The first attempt of TED to draw the crowd attention is to empower the communities, who are willing to translate talks into different languages (Cicero, 2012). Until now, most of TED Talks have been translated into 86 languages thanks to the contributions of volunteers around the world through “Open Translation Project” (Cicero, 2012; TED.com). The second attempt is to promote sharing by reducing barriers between the ideas and their intended audience (Cicero, 2012). The huge amount of mobile users is a challenge for TED Talks, so enhancing the quality of videos to be suitable for watching on phones is important. Capturing the trend of modern society, it has adjusted all videos for small screen, cut long intros and started the videos strong; therefore, the audience can receive videos with high quality, even clear emotions of speakers, and hear perfectly as they were there in the auditorium (Cicero, 2012). One of the core value of marketing is to satisfy your customers’ needs and wants, so many companies have put a lot of investment in research and development to identify their customers’ needs and wants. For TED, it considers consulting its viewers as the best source of generating many creative subjects and gets closer to what its audience want (Cicero, 2012). 

The audience can follow TED.com on the following social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and TED Blog. Generally, there are four channels of TED.com in social media - TED, TED-Ed, TED Fellows, and TEDx. The contents for each program of each social media channel are designed differently to be suitable for different target groups. TED is the official page for TED.com and home of Ideas Worth Spreading, and in there, the audience can find daily TED Talks, news from TED, conversations, photo and more. Different from TED, “TEDx is a global movement devoted to bringing Ideas Worth Spreading to communities around the globe through independently-organized TED-like events. The TEDx Facebook page and others are run by TEDx staff. They share outstanding TEDxTalks, jaw-dropping images from TEDx events, TEDx event news and exciting stories from TEDx communities around the world. The TED Fellows program share news, awards and upcoming events pertaining to the 390+ trailblazing TED Fellows. The TED Fellows program helps world-changing innovators from around the globe become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities. TED-Ed is TED's education initiative. Their mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators and students around the world.” (Facebook.com)

Well-written contents, good strategies to get the attention of viewers, and good management of social media are a cornerstone for its expansion in today’s world.  

References

Cicero, N. (2012). How TED used social media to evolve from a single event into a global media brand. [online] Social Fresh. Available at: https://www.socialfresh.com/ted-social-media/ [Accessed 10 Aug. 2016].

Heimans, J. and Timms, H. (2014). TED’s Shift from Old to New Power. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2014/12/teds-shift-from-old-to-new-power [Accessed 10 Aug. 2016].

TED, (n.d.). Our organization. [online] Ted.com. Available at: https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization [Accessed 10 Aug. 2016].

Zhao, Y. (2013). TED Case Study. [online] prezi.com. Available at: https://prezi.com/duazhgh3wdbz/ted-case-study/ [Accessed 10 Aug. 2016].

2) Sometimes the organisation or company doesn't succeed in social media. There are risks and in critical situations the company has to react immediately. Answers to customers can be terribly wrong and the negative effect accumulates. Or the company might have chosen wrong media for communication. Find two examples and tell what went wrong and why. Could the social media "disaster" have been avoided?

In an attempt of advertising the offers of flights to Ghana’s capital, Accra, Delta Air Lines did make a terrible mistake on Twitter (Schenker, 2015). In World Cup 2014 championship, Team U.S.A won Ghana 2-1 (Schenker, 2015). At that moment, Delta congratulated the Team U.S.A with a tweet and a nice picture, but the attached picture seemed not alright as you can see below (Schenker, 2015).  

The problem, here, is that there are no giraffes in Ghana, and instead of solving that error, Delta did another hilarious mistake, when referring that tweet as its “precious” tweet instead of its “previous” tweet (Schenker, 2015). It was a big matter for Delta and affected its image seriously. Delta’s business is to attract passengers to Ghana; however, the tweet revealed its lack of knowledge about the country’s culture and basic unique things.

The second company which makes a mistake in social media is American Apparel. In a promotion campaign, the company ran a promotion of “offering 20% off to anyone living in states that were affected by Hurricane Sandy” (Costill, 2014). The reactions of customers towards the company were angry because it should not use a devastating natural disaster as an opportunity to run a promotion (Costill, 2014).

3) What do you think will happen in the next ten years in social media? How will it change our working life and communication? How do you see the future of social media?

Technology is unpredictable, and of course the same to social media. It can be sure that the position of social media in working life and communication is not changing due to its advantages and conveniences. However, its difficulty and complexity will evolve to another level which requires us to update continually.

Case Study and Outlook On Future Media

I interviewed a co-founder, Joona Kotilainen of a company, Tovari by sending list of questions to him through email. Here is his opinion about the kind of social media strategy his company has.

1/What kind of social media is being used / not used? Why? The objectives? Consider three aspects in working life communication: communication inside the company, management and marketing and customer care. How do the company evaluate the results?

At Tovari business we have company profiles in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Out of these four, only Facebook and Instagram are in active use. Twitter and LinkedIn are not in any use at the moment.

Facebook allows great story telling, videos, photos, long texts and links. We use it to tell about our work, provide information to our followers and promote our training sessions. Instagram is more like “behind the scenes” of the company. We take photos and videos from interesting situations we end up in.

We do our company internal communication in Slack, WhatsApp and via telephone.

The entrepreneurs of the company use WhatsApp with key customers to communicate tasks, requests and more in detail information.

We have not established any KPIs for social media usage, we are not doing it at the moment with a heavy strategy in mind.

2/The strategy usually includes rules for the staff. What is expected from the staff? What is forbidden? What kind of roles they have in social media? How should the staff act in social media as representatives of the organisation?

The social media marketing in the company is done only by the entrepreneurs. The staff is not using Tovari social media at the moment. The staff have their own social media accounts and they use them as they wish. We do not impose any limitation on how and what to talk there.

If we were to let staff use social media accounts of the company, we would design a content strategy on what to share, how often and how to reply to the people reacting to our posts.

There are two examples I can show out about social media "disaster". First, I would like to talk about Ronald McDonald failed on Twitter.

Back in April, McDonald’s made an announcement: Their newly made-over mascot, Ronald McDonald, was going to start tweeting, under the hashtag #RonaldMcDonald. At first blush, that sounded like an idea with some fun potential. But it didn’t work out that way. What happened instead spotlights how difficult it is for big brands to pull off successful social-media campaigns.The big problem: Not everyone likes Ronald McDonald, or the company he represents.

The second example I want to mention is Starbucks. 

Starbucks ambitiously launched #RaceTogether in March, following the killings of unarmed teenagers Michael Brown and Eric Garner by the police and subsequent rioting. Spearheaded by CEO Howard Schultz, the campaign aimed to spark a national dialogue about race both in-store and on social media, which unknowingly catalysed a negative Twitterstorm.

Unsurprisingly, the white billionaire CEO of Starbucks naively thrusting the brand into the emotionally charged issue of racial inequality was considered superficial by most consumers, and so the campaign ended a week later.
Networked Insights found that most of the social media conversations that ensued about #RaceTogether were either not about race, or were negative reactions to the campaign and brand.

More than one-third of social conversation was categorised as “hate” directed at the brand, the Race Together campaign, or Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and nearly 60% of all conversation from the public contained some specific negative emotion.

Social Media has been a powerful tool in our busy world, especially in working and studying environment. It will continue to develop further in the future in the next 10 years. At that time, people will stick to social media and cannot live without them. They consider it communication tool to keep in touch with everybody. Companies have more chance to connect with their customers and so do their customers. At present, everything is done online in the brisk way. Therefore, social media is popular. I think social media will be useful in our world as information technology is dominating our daily life.

Customer participation and virtual worlds

 To companies it is important to get customers to participate in marketing. Because of the internet it is easy to find reviews about products and companies. Social media enables customers to help branding. Customers can post product pictures and tell others their experiences about the product/company. For example different travelling sites, such as Trip Advisor and Hotels.com are based on customer reviews about the hotels, restaurants etc.

I have no experience about virtual worlds. When I was a kid, about 11 or 12 years old or something, I did use Habbohotel with my friends, but that's it. I tried to log in Second Life, but it didn't work for some reason. The idea sounds interesting but I'm pretty sure I would never use it. I prefer to use Skype if I have to attend to a meeting virtually. Although it would be interesting to try out one or two education courses.

I'm really sorry that this post is so short and uninformative but I've been so busy with my personal life :(

Case study: TK congregation union

Congregation unit’s objectives for social media communication are to create positive mental image about church, make church more easily approachable, being active, being responsible and being straightforward. They also want to keep up with the constantly changing society.

Communication unit has the main responsibility about managing the social media and they have a special schedule for it. They make most of the updates, handle the customer care and are responsible about marketing. They also take care of inside the company communication which mainly happens through e-mail and intranet.

In each congregation there is a selected “communication priest”. Each of these priests are expected to use social media (Facebook and Instagram) and make updates from their congregation’s perspective. They also need to notify communication unit if they want more visibility in social media for some current event. This also makes the communication inside the company more flawless.

Updates are expected to be appropriate, short, well put together and visually pleasing. Staff is encouraged to be more active on social media so there isn’t much don’t dos. Still all the bigger announcements and updates go through communication unit. Communication unit is expected to update social media regularly, on average twice a day. They are also expected to answer all the comments on social media.

Social media channels

Unit’s social media channels are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. The unit is most active on Facebook and Instagram, but all the social media channels are updated regularly. Facebook is the most important social media channel they have, so their Facebook-page is embedded on their website. When there is some sort of bigger event they usually put together own social media channels for it.

Facebook is the most important social media for them as it reaches most of the congregants. The Facebook updates are mainly about different events congregations organizes and news that concern church. This is the most important marketing and customer care channel. Union has 780 followers on Facebook.

Instagram is also updated regularly but the objective is a bit different than Facebook’s. Communication unit and also other congregations’ workers update the union’s Instagram-page with a theme: “my church”. There is supposed to be pictures from behind the scenes and pictures of regular workdays. Instagram updates aren’t as serious as Facebook updates and it’s supposed to appeal on younger audience. Union has 545 followers on Instagram.

YouTube and Twitter channels aren’t updated as regularly and I personally think that they aren’t used very effectively. Even though they have 740 followers on twitter (almost the same as on Facebook) they don’t get much likes or shares. The content is mainly same as on Facebook. YouTube on the other hand works as a channel to store videos and audio files so that they can be easily shared on other channels and websites.

Evaluation of the results happens mainly with Facebooks own evaluation tools. Otherwise evaluation happens mainly through feedback and by observing shares and likes. Also it’s easy to evaluate if marketing of an event was effective by counting how many people showed up and asking if they came because they saw the update on social media. I personally think that evaluation could be done more precisely so there would be more data on it. With this data union’s social media could be developed.

 1-

Customers have an important participation in the marketing of product/services. Because, Every time a customer is using a product and the other people see, It is a type of marketing. Plus every time that a customer recommend or talk about one service , it is also a type of marketing and creates awareness for the product.

Customers are the essential part of the development of products, because companies design services/products with the consumer always in mind. And the way companies get the customers opinions are through feedback and marketing research. Some example:

Zara

Amancio Ortega is one of the richest man in the world and co-founder of Zara. An interesting feature of Zara is that, when clients ask for a product that does not exist in the store, the seller write it down. So, if the same type of product is required several times, Zara tries to obtain and starting selling that product also, Once they know that there is a demand for that product. In a nutshell, Zara is actively listening to their clients and gathering feedback, in order to sell what clients are requiring, therefore customers are developing the company service/product.

Open source website/application

Those type of websites/application normally enable the users to suggest  changes and modification within the website or application. For instance, Google translate enable users to suggest better translations for a sentence/word. Therefore, customers are actively helping with the development of those applications as well.

2-

In my view, it is valid to use Twitter for communication and marketing propose, but the companies  have to check whether it is a tool which reaches its potential clients or not. Because at least, my friends and I never use twitter. Therefore, that marketing would not reach us.

ESPN Sport Twitter

I have been following their twitter account for one week. Most of the ESPN twitters aim to create awareness for their articles and videos, which are at their website. I have watched and read some of their videos and articles, the contend was quite interesting and polish. However, even if I had a twitter account, I would not follow them, because ESPN sends too many twitters every day, they twitter around 22 twitter every day. I feel that it is way too much for me.

However even though, I would not follow their account. There are 29 million people following their twitter account at the moment, plus ESPN is the thirtieth most followed twitter account in the world. Therefore, ESPN is able to reach a huge amount of people with their twitter.

3

SL

Virtual meeting is a quite great option for companies and Universities. Because it enables people to save time and money with travelling. However, for more important meeting I think is best to have a face-to-face meeting.

I have learned quite many things at the internet. It can make the studying more flexible and save some time for the students. Virtual courses work really well with theoretical courses, but some other courses require face-to-face interaction with other students and teacher. I really like the possibility of studying online, especially because, it gives a wider variate of option for courses and teachers from other cities and countries.

Online ZOO(http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/webcams/lion-outside.cfm)

Some ZOOs integrated the online world to the zoo. Through a website is possible to watch some animals live. It is an interesting way to create awareness for the ZOO, and make people want to go there to see the animals which they were watching online, perhaps.