How to avoid a social media disaster after a big blunder: The Volkswagen case

It will probably cost a lot of effort and money to Volkswagen to regain its position as leading and reliable top class automaker in the world markets. The diesel emissions manipulation scandal will probably forever be a dark page in the company’s history. But amid the doom and gloom, the resignations of top executives, the lawsuits, the recalls of millions of cars and the congress hearings Volkswagen has brilliantly managed to avoid a social media disaster: A “shitstorm” as they call in Germany a social media customer or public attack. Such public attacks have been quite common the last years and companies like P&G, Nike, Primarkt, McDonnalds, Uniter Ailines, Gap, IKEA, Nestle’, Cryptonite and many others have experienced firsthand how powerful the new consumer is, armed with the social media. All these companies were attacked by blog swarms or negative posts in social media for all kinds of reasons.

While bad publicity is nothing new in the world, businesses in the past could contain reputation problems using PR in combination with mass publicity in various media channels under their control. But with social media customer attacks things are different, not only because of the fast dispersion of such attacks, sometimes in global scale and the ferocity of such attacks but because of the fact that containment is notoriously difficult.

While in the past companies have suffered serious reputation damage trying to deal with social media attacks the old fashion way, things seem to rapidly  change. Social media customer attacks have forced many businesses to develop contingency plans for online reputation damage and professionalize their community management methods. Reputation or Community Manager, a management function that did not even exist five years ago is today a common place in most large and medium size businesses. Volkswagen must have very good social media damage control plans or reputation managers if we look to the facts: The business disaster of emission level manipulation di not become a social media disaster, something very obvious if we look to the picture above illustrating the volume and the sentiment of the social media posts around the case (data based on COOSTO data monitoring). A sharp increase in posts and high negative sentiment in social media posts from the date the scandal was revealed (around 21 of September) followed by a sharp decrease after the US Volkwagen boss Michael Hom offered his public apologies without any efforts to hide or undermine the case and even admitting that Volkswagen “totally screwed up” while the VW chief executive Martin Winterkorn issued an apology saying he was "endlessly sorry" for the "manipulation". (http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34322668 ). With such statements VW removed all ammunition from customers who would take their frustrations to online comments that would probably have a snowball effect in the social space, causing a difficult to reverse reputation damage. Transparency and honest apologies help therefore more than old fashion professional publicity and denial of wrongdoing, something many of the earlier mentioned victims of customer attacks did. 

Customer motives as online co-creation partners: a research paper

The discussion about innovation engaging the customer as co-creator (often described by terms like co-innovation, crowdsourcing, peer production customer, crowd-based outsourcing etc) is not new to many of us. One of the new and interesting aspects of co-creation is engaging customers in co-creation process using online tools (and social media in particular) as interaction platforms. There are several issues to be addressed here, one of them is finding the best persons / customers and get them on board. Motivations of customers to engaged in such processes are of vital importance. This was the topic of our latest research paper (co-authored by Carlota Lorenzo-Romero and Leonine Brünink) titled "Customer Motives and Benefits for Participating in Online Co-Creation Activities". The article that was accepted and will be published soon in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and advertising  attempts to give an answer to this issue. Based on a survey conducted among 239 young Internet users in Holland and Germany the factors described in the Uses and Gratifications Theory (and tested earlier by Nambisan, S., & Baron, R. A. (2009) for "traditional co-creation). We tested whether the benefits described int the Uses and Gratifications Theory (i.e. Personal Integrative Benefits, Hedonic Benefits, Social Integrative Benefits and Learning Benefits) are motivators for online co-creation and this seems to be the case. We  found out that about 28% of the participants have taken part in co-creation activities with businesses online, something in line with findings of our previous research.  We also identified two profiles of online co-innovators and found that males and Dutch are in general more motivated than females and Germans to participate in such activities. The differences based on ethnicity might have to do with the fact (and this is a personal observation) that in the Netherlands there are more opportunities for online co-creation activities than in Germany. With some caution for generalizations due to the sampling method we think that this study provides some
For those interested the abstract of the paper below:

Abstract

The widespread adoption of Web 2.0 applications, commonly known as Social Media, has brought about a new generation of empowered customers. Empowered customers are well-informed, knowledgeable and certain about their specific product and service needs; they are often willing to share their experiences, product knowledge and innovative ideas with producers, providing input for new product designs and enhancements. Such customer attitudes often labelled as co-creation, are forcing many companies to step away from the traditional firm-centric view of innovation and take a more customer-centric view by actively integrating customers’ ideas and knowledge in their new product and service development processes. Co-creation presents businesses with an interesting challenge: how to identify and recruit the innovative customers who willing to cooperate and share their knowledge as the basis for successful online co-creation activities.

This study identifies the various motivators for customers to participate in online co-creation. Based on the uses and gratification approach a pilot questionnaire is employed and its practical applicability is tested. The results indicate that customer participation in co-creation projects is motivated by four distinct types of benefits and  that co-creators differ in their motivational level. Finally, recommendations on how to adapt the questionnaire for future research and suggestions for further research issues are provided. 

References

Nambisan, S., & Baron, R. A. (2009). Virtual customer environments: Testing a model of voluntary participation in value co-creation activities, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 26(4), 388–406.

Constantinides E., Brünink L., Lorenzo-Romero C., 2014, Customers Motives and Benefits for Participating in Online Co-Creation Activities, International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising (forthcoming).

Is it time for a Stupidity Filter help preventing Social Media blunders and dramas?

This week two airlines got again involved in social media related controversies, the latest in an endless series of social media issues/dissasters related to customer attacks, blunders and human stupidity:
The US Airways attached an "inappropriate" (see pornographic) picture to a tweet written by its customer service department as answer to a customer tweet. The damage control is difficult in such cases since the picture was more than half hour online, enough time to create a cloud of jokes, irony and angry reactions (search for example with the term "US Airways Tweet" to get an idea). The airline was quick to apologise but some reputation damage has already happened. The sad thing is that the airline (or every other business for that matter) has nothing to do with this which again was an action of an individual; we do not know yet what the motives or reasons for such a thing are but there are a lot of explanations from self-proclaimed psychologists in Twitter posts.
The second case was the twitter post of a 14-year old girl in Rotterdam with a threat to American Airlines. Again the action of an irresponsible (who expect so much responsibility from a 14-years old?) in combination with stupidity. The airline was of course not amused with the (irresponsible) joke and contacted the FBI; this resulted in the arrest of the girl by the police.

I wonder if it is time for a "Stupidity Filter" for Twitter or other Social Media where irresponsible or anti-social persons are exposing their stupidity and complexes to the whole world putting even themselves in danger. No new technology is necessary for such a filter, we have already text analysis software available; algorithms detecting sentiment are getting better and better and it is not a big deal to check words used against a list of "sensitive" terms and block the text. In the case of pictures there are also solutions, the other days I came across picture analysis software that can be used to identify our behavior on the basis of pictures we publish in our social networks.
How such a "stupidity filter"should work? Blocking content is of course against the free (online) speech and expression but in analogy to the physical word, which we tend to forget in such ethical discussions, people can do things online that bring them in troubles as you see in an old example of such a case involving Dominos Pizza. I think a simple solution id the filter observes something "inappropriate" that is about to be posted in social Media a pop-up with a warning can appear and inform the user that the content he intends to post will bring him/her maybe in troubles.
The idea is simple yet not easy to implement because of several ethical and free speech aspects: such filters would be also interesting for various dictators or leaders allergic to ideas different than their own, eager to block the voices of their people exposing their crimes or illegal actions. So such filters must be exclusively under the control of the social media operator (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc) and beyond the reach of the varous modern sensors.
We must come back to this some time, for the time being good luck to all trying to repair reputation damages.

 

Forecasting innovation success and the O(ther) Information

I came across a recent article of professor Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen titled “Market research can no longer predict what consumers will like”. 

An interesting remark in the article, not unfamiliar to many of us who follow the developments in the increasingly “social” marketplace: The changing consumer behavior and the increasing complexity of the decision making process due to the influence of Social Media content on consumers have changed dramatically the marketing landscape. This is something I keep repeating to my students and everyone else who follows my lectures on social media Marketing.  I usually explain the new situation in this domain using a well known and simple buyer's decision making model, something we find in every standard marketing textbook.   

My additions to the standard textbook model (see figure) are the elements C and D representing two new market information inputs that affect the customer decision: The information from the “broadcasting” web i.e. information about products, services or businesses poster in corporate web sites and the information from the “interactive” i.e. user generated content (UGC) in social media. What I underline always is the importance of this last element and its impact on customer decision making today. By all means this is a major influence factor of this process today. 

The article of Simonson and Rosen touches on a very important point that seems to confirm the view that the customer feedback in the form of social media voice is the most important part of this equation. They write the following trying to find an explanation for the inability of market research to predict the success (or failure) of an innovation like the iPhone when it was about to be launched:

“It’s easy to blame the market research firm for this, but this is not our point. We are trying to explain the inherent difficulties in assessing consumers’ reaction in this new era. First, more decisions today are impacted by what we call O sources of information—“Other” information sources, such as user reviews, friend and expert opinions, price comparison tools, and emerging technologies or sources—whereas market research measures P sources—“Prior” preferences, beliefs and experiences”.

The O sources are therefore a factor bringing instability and disrupts a well-grounded  method of producing information  needing in decision making namely the traditional market research.

What now? All hope is gone? I wouldn't say that, it is simply a question of adopting a new thinking and approaches to the marketing research issue. Together with my colleagues in the University of Twente and other colleagues abroad we are for some time now brainstorming on this specific issue: What is the way to create or predict successful innovations today. We set out to searching for other sources of customer information and sources of behavioral clues that can provide  much better input for predictions and guidelines for innovation than the traditional market research.  You can guess that we consider the social media as a major source of such information but this is not the only source we look to.  Since this discussion and our research design is still in progress I will not expand on this at the moment but I will keep you informed as our research progresses.

How to deal with the empowered customers when they misuse their power

I usually start my talks on Social Media marketing with showing to the audience a list of questions marketing practitioners have on the impact of technology on their business, markets and marketing practice.
One question of my list is "How to deal with the empowered consumer". I am especially interested for this question because customer empowerment is one of the most important (side-) effects of the internet and social media boom, a phenomenon that will shape the marketing thought and practice in the coming years: as academics and practitioners already realize the market power migration will change not only the rules of the marketing (from pushing to collaborating, from broadcasting to engaging, from talking to listening to name some important ones) but also the focus of it. One of the new focus areas will be reputation management and preventing customer  attacks. If you want to know more about this I suggest the book of Gillin and Gianforte "Attack of the Customers".
During my talk last week in the E-Travel Summit I had again the opportunity to talk about such issues. After the speech I was approached by the management group of a hotel who wanted to have my opinion on how to deal with customers who make a (discounted) non-refundable booking in the hotel and do not show up or cancel the booking and ask their money back because there was a "serious" reason that they cancelled their booking.
While some of these customers are persuaded by talking that what they ask is not possible some insist to have their money back otherwise they will wreck  the reputation of the hotel in the social media.
Of course no business that has invest to good service and reputation is happy about such a possibility; the people I spoke were really concerned about the  issue and eager to have some advice.
What is the right strategy in such cases? Should the business give up to threats to protect its reputation or keep a firm position and face the possibility of a reputation damage?

I told them that there are different levels where one should deal with such practices in this particular case.
The first level is during the booking process: In this stage it is important to be absolutely open and transparent with the customer.
How can you do that? Be sure for example that the customers before pressing the button for closing the deal see a last screen or pop-up reminding  them that they buy a non-refundable ticket and mentioning their options: To accept that there is no possibility to have the booking refunded for any reason, to buy a travel insurance covering refund in case of unexpected events or buy a refundable booking. If the customer clicks that he is aware of these facts and still prefers the non-refundable option, be sure to inform them with a confirmation email about their option again and possibly offer the possibility to change the booking within 24 hours to a refundable one.
Such an open yet water-proof attitude and deprives customers from much ammunition when they change their mind.
But what should you do with customers who despite such clear and binding agreements still threaten with reputation damage? The next step is to engage in a direct discussion with the customer outside the social media space: by phone, email or personally if necessary. Most customers will give up in this stage if you show that you are interested and take the customers seriously but also remind them their own commitments.
For the few that despite all this will insist and threaten I have another piece of advice: Ignore them if they are irrelevant or invisible in the social media: you do not need to worry about someone without any presence at all in the social media or someone with 20 Facebook followers. If the person has a serious social media presence then you have two options: either try to make him/her forget the issue by offering something as compensations (like a discount in the following booking) or follow closely their posts on the social media and respond professionally, being prepared at the same time to spend some time on the case. I do not think that giving up to threats is an option, maybe another option is to scrap the discounted non-refundable options altogether.
Is there, despite all these measures, any guarantee of avoiding such problems completely? I am afraid  the answer is no. Consumers are now aware of their power and some of them will be eager to misuse it. We must not be surprised by this, this is in human nature and businesses have done this often in the past (and still do it in some cases). The issue is that reputation management will be a topic in the next years, not only for large multinationals but also for any business big or small.

Departure to Athens For Eurotrip 2013: Free Wifi in the airport

Just arrived in the departure terminal of Schiphol Airport for the trip to Athens. Our Eurotrip 2013 students are already there and seem to have (at least some of them) a nice view to Acropolis from their rooms.
The Wifi in the area I sit is overloaded at the moment but fortunately I can use my smartphone as station; you can get 1 hour internet connection for free in the airport so it seems that everyone is using this possibility at the moment. I must say that more and more businesses in the hospitality sector realize now how important is free internet access for their customers. This is something different than even 5-6 years ago when such free online access was very limited in public spaces and you had to pay 10 Euro per day in the hotel to get a slow internet connection through a cable.

The overload system at this moment here in Schiphol indicates that some extra capacity is needed in busy areas but I am sure the airport will listen to some complaints about it and react. I will send a tweet also soon.
For the rest nice weather here, in Athens seems to be a nice weather too, only much warmer!

Co-Innovation: The customer as innovation motor White Paper

INNOVATION IS A WAY OF FULFILLING changing customer needs by developing new and better solutions; it is also one of the most extensively discussed issues in the academic literature and field practice. Innovation has been identified as a necessary condition for survival and growth in an ever changing global world. Many corporations have based their market success on a continuous and consistent market leadership based on their innovative power and potential: IBM, Apple, Intel, Amazon and Google are well known pioneers in their markets. Under increasing competition and market pressure the innovation process has been subject to important transformation during the last 30 years; from being traditionally a “closed’, internal process, based on internal organizational expertise and structures (R&D, New Product Department, New product Management etc.) the innovation process is increasingly becoming externally oriented. Chesbrough (2003) popularized the trend of externalizing the innovation process by engaging innovation partners in what he called the Open Innovation model...  Read the rest in my new White Paper by downloading it in the SOMERE.nl web site or clicking to the New Publications--->

Marketing in crisis: what's the way out?

In his 2004 book Marketing As Strategy Nirmalya Kumar expressed his views on how the marketing profession can escape from the destructive route it is riding the last years and transform to a business activity that will regain the respect of the public and CEOs. If we believe the latest findings of the study conducted by the of the Fournaise Marketing group in 2011 not much has changed since: Marketers are still not seen by the majority of CEOs as a a real asset: "73% of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility: They can't prove they generate business growth".
This is a worrying fact and a red flag that field marketers and academics should take seriously. We academics must realize that there seems to be a gap between what we teach our students in college, what they will be asked to do when they enter the field and what their CEOs expect from them. Field marketers on the other hand must understand the big change in the marketplace called customer empowerment. One of the symptoms of this change is the fact that the public is mistrusting marketers, mainly those insisting on monologues, one way communication and those who still think that they know better than their customers what they need and want.
One of the interesting issues highlighted in the report is the perception of  the majority of CEOs that "They (Marketers) are focused too much on the latest trends such as social media, because they believe they represent the new marketing frontiers - but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help generate more business for the company".
Interesting remark but it should not surprise us, there are very few marketing activities that can really and clearly demonstrate how they help generate more business for the company, so in fact we do not talk about a new problem here.
To my opinion the whole issue is simple, many marketers never learned to be critical of themselves and were also never critical of trends and hypes. In a number of earlier posts in this blog I highlighted the Social Media "experts" explosion threatening to derail the social media marketing. The social media is indeed an important marketing landmark as well as an important social phenomenon; it is also a major challenge to marketers who have to learn new ways of dealing with the new customer. This simply means listening to the customer's (social) voice, engage customers and stop broadcasting; the customer is now the powerful party and the sooner marketers realize this the better.
Douglas McGregor wrote in 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise where on the basis of the X - Y theory he urged organizations to pursue their objectives by engaging their personnel rather than managing it. That means to look for ways to develop and use the potential of their employees rather than trying to manage them by means of control and punishment. Marketers should in analogy look for ways to help their customers to meet their objectives and needs by listening to them, getting them involved in their business processes and becoming their advocates. This will be The Human Side of Marketing that the empowered customers expect to experience today.

So if we talk about a way out of the crisis in Marketing theory and practice the best course to follow is to get back to the basics: Listen to the customer voice and try to understand who the new customer is. This will help us marketers to transform our picture based on the mass marketing era and device ways to communicate with the customer on personal, individual level. A basic requirement here is to understand that we are not the powerful party any more and that our brand is not our property any more either. Successful business of the future will be those finding ways to engage the customer successfully, address the individual customer needs and use the customer intelligence as a source of innovation.

The impact of Social Media on top brands in The Netherlands

The Dutch Magazine of Marketing (Tijdschrift van Marketing) publishes in the April edition the results of a study conducted among the top 100 brands in The Netherlands based on their advertising budget. The study conducted by Greenberry analysed more than 1.8 million messages during a period of 3 months.As sources were used channels like Twitter, Facebook, Hyves (a popular Dutch social networking site) YouTube and various weblogs.
The results are quite interesting for a number of reasons; this is one of the few studies in the area to begin with. Furthermore (and maybe surprisingly) the well known 80/20 rule of thumb seems to apply also here : The 25 bigger brands are good for 80% of the total message volume. The top 25 brands had on the average 627 messages about them in the social media per day. Another finding is that the most "Social" brand is the Dutch Rail with 274.000 messages in 3 months (almost 3.000 per day) followed by the telecom KPN. The supermarket chain Alber Heijn is nr. 3 followed by the bank ING. Interestingly in the top 10 are included two more telecoms: T-Mobile (nr 5) and Vodafone (nr 7).
The picture is a bit different if we look to the reach of the messages: The average reach for the top 10 brands was 41 million users in the period of 3 months with the Dutch Railways (NS) on the top with 121 million. Interestingly the KPN who is nr 2 in the number of total messages is surpassed by T-Mobile as to the reach.
The sentiment of the messages was also analysed and here I think some of the toppers in the list of social activity and reach were less happy about the findings: The NS, Vodafone, KPN and T-Mobile are among the top 10 as to the negative sentiment of the messages! Being a social brand is therefore not the silver bullet. It seems that some of the most online social brands in Holland are social for the wrong reasons! The customer is talking about brands online but it seems that most of the talk is negative.

Time for a new definition of the term MARKETING?

The latest definition of the term Marketing by the American Marketing Association (AMA) dates from 2007. Marketing is defined as " the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large".
In a post of this blog in 2008 I commented on the fact that this definition replaced another one, just 3 years after its introduction in 2004. The 2004 definition was obviously heavily criticised for its myopic view on marketing.
While many traditional marketers (and other stakeholders) were obviously pleased with the 2007 AMA definition of Marketing - it is found today in almost all marketing textbooks - I think that this definition is again at the end of its life cycle; most young people entering today the marketing domain as professional would have problems to accept it.
This because a few things have dramatically changed since 2007, most important one being the staggering growth of the social media domain and the subsequent customer empowerment as a result of it. While the 2007 AMA definition is underlining the role of marketing for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings it completely ignores the customer domination of the marketplace and a number of other facts that the social media explosion has introduced to the marketing reality.
There are two main drawbacks in this definition: The first is that it is still based on the one-way, broadcasting type of thinking that still dominates the thinking of older marketers. In a customer-dominated market the broadcasting attitude must be replaced by an interactive one based on listening and engagement.
The second issue here is that two basic elements of the definition have been transformed today in something completely different than what they used to be: the creation and the communication.

• "creation" is rapidly replaced by "co-creation". Businesses failing to tap the customer creativity in developing new products, services and communication concepts will be the laggards of the future.   
• Old fashion "Communication" by means of mass media is rapidly losing ground and influence. Looking to a billboard this morning on the way to the office I suddenly realised that the only function of the ad displayed there was to inform me about a product and nothing else! My customer journey will actually start behind my laptop, iPad or smartphone where I would go searching about the product I saw by reading reviews and opinions of those who already bought it. The message is not anymore the  medium: The Customer is the medium (and the message).

These simple realities make the latest Marketing definition obsolete. I could fill pages explaining this further but I think the bottom line is that Marketing academics must bend again over the drawing board and redefine the term marketing. We are already late with this: our students and the field are waiting.

Bloggers Beware: Consumers’ Trust Is on the Wane

"Consumer trust in bloggers remained low in 2011, with only 26 percent indicating that they trusted the advice and opinions found in blogs. Additionally, 86 percent of consumers question the truthfulness of a post written by a blogger who has received a free sample in exchange for writing a review. Although consumers continue to rely heavily on the Internet to inform purchasing decisions, bloggers are struggling to achieve the credibility of other online sources. We ponder whether a credible third party can provide the level of authority previously reserved for journalists in traditional media. Credible bloggers clearly exist, as indicated by the massive following some of them enjoy. However, the sheer number of bloggers online highlights the need for a way to differentiate and portray credibility."
Source: Understanding the Role of the Internet in the lives of consumers, 2012 Digital Influence Index, Annual Global Study, Fleishman -  Hillard http://fleishmanhillard.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/2012-DII-White-Paper.pdf

A post that attracted my attention yesterday. Are we bloggers facing a credibility crisis? Only 26% of the online public is trusting our opinions and advice? Has blogging become too mainstream? Or is much nonsense posted? Interesting questions and maybe time for some research here.

One prediction about the future of the Social Media and one promise

The question I have the most problems to answer (usually asked by someone in the audience after a talk about Social Media) is to tell what my predictions are for the future of Social Media. The difficulty to answer has to do with several factors, the most important being the unpredictable character of people (who are the main factor behind the social media phenomenon) and the ever changing technological context (including the developments of innovative Social Media apps). If you want to give a sound answer to this question you need to make some concrete assumptions and develop different scenarios. This is something that I do not dare to attempt in a 3 minute answer and mostly I disappoint my audience saying just this.

The truth is that most people have no problem with this question at all. This morning I googled "predictions" AND "Social" AND "Media" AND "2012" and received 147 mil results!!! It seems that by now almost everyone has become an expert in Social Media and many of these experts have also developed the charisma of prognosticator!
Looking randomly to some of these predictions you can find everything you can imagine: from copying of predictions of others to some serious attempts to say something, some logical predictions, a lot of trivia, much wishful thinking or even pure crap. It would be interesting to repeat this Google query replacing "2012" with "2010" and write an article about the sense and nonsense of the 2010 predictions. Or rather write a book for that matter.

But seriously, I feel embarrassed that I do not want to predict the future because some people really expect me to do that. So for the first time I will do one prediction for the future of Social Media and a promise:
The prediction is that the Social Media is not a bubble (not much of a prediction I am afraid but it is mu opinion to a fundamental question) and that we are already on the way to Social Media 2.0. What is Social Media 2.0 I cannot say yet with certainty. With my colleagues and our students in SOMERE we will try to figure this out and hopefully soon come with a white paper about this subject.

Facebook never forgets you

Regular followers of this blog can maybe remember that in May 2010 I gave up my Facebook account and till today very proud to belong to the minority without an account to THE Social Network. However from the social media marketing researcher's perspective this proved to be not very handy! I occasionally am refused to look to marketing actions of known and less known brands in their Facebook pages because I have no account in it. So today I took the big decision to open a new account but strictly for scientific purposes! That means no friends and contacts online and a name that would conceal my identity. I gave the right gender and date of birth but no other information whatsoever. To avoid the flux of invitations for Facebook" friendships" I made the content of my page invisible to everyone except myself. You can imagine my surprise when in a few milliseconds after the account was made my screen was full with pictures and names of people all known to me inviting me to become friends!!! The system knew exactly who I was despite the new name and the lack of any information about me.

So what's the snag? Nothing more than "browser fingerprinting" I read about some time ago in combination I think with information stored in the Facebook data mines from my previous account (closed in 2010 as I mentioned earlier). It must be a piece of cake for the Facebook algorithms to recognize me and find instantly about one hundred potential "friends" and "likes".

Conclusion: once in Facebook forever in Facebook. Despite all talk and legislation protecting our privacy the simple truth is that there is no way to erase personal information once it is stored in the memory boards of Facebook's (and for sure many other social networks). The other question of course here is how much personal information is stored there and what exactly happens with it. If you want to find out you must follow the example of the Austrian law student Max Scherms

Are Top Managers the (Top) Laggards of Social Media?

A white paper published by the Dutch education and strategy consulting firm MarketingMonday reveals that CEOs and CFOs of the biggest Dutch companies (50 corporations from the AEX and AMX  and American companies (first 100 in the Fortune500 list) are to their great majority no users of Social Media. The study was focused on the active use of Facebook, Hyves (the most popular Dutch social networking site), LinkedIn and Twitter in Holland and of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the US.

The most important findings: biggest corporations top managers' participation in Social Media

Dutch CEOs / CFOs                                                    US CEOs
LinkedIn                         26%                                      LinkedIn                 8%
Facebook                         6%                                      Facebook               7%
Twitter                              1%                                      Twitter                    2%
Hyves                               1%

It is interesting that the penetration of social media is higher among Dutch top managers than their American counterparts. The study also looked to the use of social media by the CEOs of the 100 fastest growing US businesses according to the CNNMoney.com. Surprisingly the percentages are exactly the same as the US 100 biggest corporations!

US CEOs of 100 fastest growing corporations
LinkedIn 8%

Facebook 7%

Twitter 2%


The MarketingMonday report attributes the low adoption rates of social media to eight reasons: Age, Income and Education level, Knowledge, Time, Regulations, Fear, Cultur and Lack of Transparency. They also strongly recommend to CEOs to use social media indeed, mentioning several advantages for them and their company.

I think that age and lack of time are the main reasons for the low adoption of social media by top managers. On the other hand I have serious doubt that a CEO Facebook page will add much to the image of a big corporation. The names of CEOs are largely unknown to the public and few consumers will become friends of them. Those who would possibly be interested to become their friends are other CEOs and top managers who for all intents and purposes are also no users of social media.

Twitter Spam: new headache for the social nedia user?

I don't know about you but my Junk email file has been substantially smaller the last months. Busting some mafia email spam networks seems to be the reason for this but I suspect that the email spam aficionados realize that email spam finds itself in the decline stage of its life cycle. A new form of spam seems to be emerging though. Counting on the increasing popularity of the social media the spammers try now to use these as spam platforms. Twitter spam seems to be the new emerging headache for Twitter users; this takes sometimes very subtle and sophisticated forms. Do we now need a Twitter spam filter? An interesting post in WIRED

The tragedy of the (Social Media) gurus

In this blog I raised a number of times the red flag about the well-known phenomenon of "experts" or "gurus" etc. who mushroom when management hypes erupt. The Social Media hype could not be an exception so with a lot of interest I read the post in the blog of Stephan ten Kate titled (in Dutch*) " The public ends the deception of Social media experts". 
One thing some Social Media experts seem to ignore is that today there are no secrets, the public has the means and the will to scrutinize everything; treating the customer with respect is now the rule. In the good old days we would say that one unhappy customer might talk about the bad experiences to 10-12 others. Today an unhappy customer can reach thousands or even millions with his/her bad experience. The Social Media have made today the Word Of Mouth potential advantage but also a substantial risk factor for those making unsubstantiated and bases product (or service) claims. The post of Stephan shows clearly what the power of the Social Media is; he talks also about this in his reflection.
*For non-Dutch speakers a Google translation could help at least for the text!

The myth of the Generation Einstein

Conventional wisdom suggests that Generation Y, also known as Millenials and widely known in Holland as Generation Einstein following the book of Boschma and Groen, are among other things Media Smart: “Since they were babies, they have been confronted with the media – they understand advertising and have become the ultimate experts. They only need to see the advertisement to know what the marketing strategy of the company is” (http://www.generationeinstein.com/).
I do not know where such ideas are founded on but my impression is that they are based more on fiction than on facts. For sure the millenials have grown in a media-dominated society but they media smartness is limited since they are heavily exposed to one medium only, namely the Internet: they watch much less TV, read almost nothing on paper (except maybe their school text books) including newspapers and they listen much less to the radio than their parents. This one-sided exposure can never make them experts in advertising as the above quote claims. In fact on this point I would rather argue the contrary: Their almost blind faith to everything published online as the absolute truth makes it sometimes impossible to make a distinction between reality and commercial messages. I do not have any hard evidence to support this argument, maybe some research on this would be useful. However there is some evidence already that the Millenials despite their reputation as Media Smart do in fact very superficial and limited use of even the Internet and more specifically of the Social Media: A recent study of my M&G colleagues van Velzen, Bondarouk and Klerks indicates that most of the Generation Y online users are passive information consumers. A recent study we conducted among VWO 5 and 6 children confirms this findings, pointing also to the fact that the vast majority of this segment is using the Social Media for entertainment rather than anything else. The percentage of these children who are actively creating and contribute content online is negligible.
My conclusion is that often the reality can be different than the perception. Again I would argue for more research in this area and a consistent follow-up of the trends here in a longitudinal study. As about the term Generation Einstein we should use Einstein’s name more carefully!

Is Social Media Marketing interesting for B2B?

This is a standard question I get every time I talk about Social Media Marketing to audiences including people from the B2B domain. For many social media is strongly associated with B2C marketing while industrial marketers seem to be quite enthusiastic about it. A recent post in BtoB Magazine gives some nice examples of B2B applications of Social Media; for those interested in some stats I suggest to look to the E-Marketer  and this post of Brian Solis. An older report of Marketing Sherpa also indicates that B2B marketers are enthousiastic about social media as part of their marketing strategy. (see table below)

Conclusion is that there is enough talk and evidence about B2B and social media marketing and it seems that industrial marketers are equally (if not more) excited about it than their B2C counterparts. Let's wait for the first scientific evidence on this, I will keep you up-to-date here.

Forgot your laptop in the train? No problem, Twitter is here

From personal experience (but without the means to actually verify the story): On 15 February I saw in my Twitter feed a request to retweet a post about a laptop found in the train between Groningen and Leeuwarden (see below)

I retweeted the post without paying much attention but somehow I the case cme back to my mind a few days later. Curious for the outcome of the action I asked the person who posted the request whether the owner was found. The answer was (guess what) Yes!! Amazed I sent a second question asking how long it took this to happen and the answer was even more amazing: the owner of the laptop was found in 30 minutes! (for those who do not believe this the posts are available )

Incredible and scary at the same time. I can think of hundreds of examples that such effects can be useful as well as many others that the effects can be undesirable or even dangerous. One thing is sure, our world is now dominated by social media, almost nothing is any more impossible and there are no more secrets. If this is a good or bad thing, depends I guess from the perspective you look to it. For example for the former and current Middle East dictators the Social Media is the worst nightmare they ever had. For the other side of the coin I suggest reading The Cult of the Amateur of Andrew Keen.

Real Time Marketing ADIDAS adiVerse: A new shopping experience based on POS Mass Customization

Adidas in cooperation with Intel created adiVerse, a 3D touch-screen, interactive display that increases substantially the assortment of retailers: 8.000 sport shoes can be displayed and customers can search for them, examine them from different angles and order. The system recognizes the shopper’s gender and displays the proper product selection. Adidas, like many other producers of sport articles has quite an extensive experience in online mass customization.

The display developed by Intel as part of their Connected Store vision aims at offering personalized and customized products in a traditional retailing environment, offering in other words traditional shoppers an advantage that so far only online shopping could offer.

The High Street strikes back? Let's wait for the official launch of the service during the London Olympics next year.
ps. an interesting and relevant to Real Time Marketing / mass customization article of ACCENTURE just relesed