Dominos feels the force of the social web

In case you have not read about this already (if you are on Twitter it is almost impossible not to have stumbled across the story), Dominos US President Patrick Doyle has taken the unprecedented step of releasing a YouTube video to tackle the growing malaise caused by Dominos employees filming themselves doing unspeakable things to food and then (allegedly) serving it to customers.

The employees in question released a video on YouTube of them, amongst other things, putting cheese up their nose and then putting it in sandwiches. Now that is not the smartest move; every naughty schoolboy knows that if you are going to misbehave, you don’t advertise it globally! Unsurprisingly various consumer groups and outraged online viewers escalated this issue until Dominos had no choice but to respond. Unfortunately the original video can't be accessed as the employees in question have had it suspended due to forthcoming legal action being taken against them by Dominos. Oh dear, bet they never though that would happen!

You can find the video response from Patrick Doyle here.

Now there is an explosion of commentary, debate and abuse floating around the web. Bloggers have gone crazy (yep I'm firmly on the bandwagon!) and there are comments galore. There are even discussion threads where people are laying in to each other over their responses to the incident. Crazy people out there. For an example of a blog on this subject check out New York News.

If you want further evidence of how much content this is spawning and how excited the online world has become so quickly, got to Twitterfall and type in "Dominos" as a custom search - watch the tweets rise & rise!

This is a great example of the power of the social web - once something becomes public domain, you have no control over what happens to it. The community decides whether they want to share, embrace, condone or vilify. It has a direct impact on brand reputation, so every contact with social networks must be well thought through, well intentioned and effectively monitored.

So what do you think? Was the response the right decision, was it too big brother? Did Dominos have any other choice given the potential brand damage of sitting on the fence? Do you think Dominos has come out of this with positive PR?

Please let me know your comments.

Keeping up with the Joneses....getting excited about engagement

It is amazing just how many people are on Twitter sharing links about social media, not just people extending their own brand reach but genuinely interested in all things social. I struggle to keep up with the updates but am learning to be a bit more ruthless with what I read and what I act on. Otherwise, I really will have no life!

I’ve been busy helping write a presentation that e-inbusiness is giving @ the Retail Week eCommerce Summit on Tuesday in London. The focus is on social buzz and how important it is to use engagement online to create a buzz for your brand. That may sounds oh so Web2.0 darling but we genuinely believe in this. Thankfully the web has moved beyond basic transactions to a more sophisticated community in which people are increasingly demanding high quality service and positive experiences. The high street has already gone through this (obvious) evolution – people have emotions, so it is only natural they want enjoyment in life and not just functional service (disclaimer – yes I know there are those of you who don’t care as long as you get the right thing at the right price).

So, this week I’ve been thinking about how retailers can leverage social tools to not only satisfy but delight and engage their customers. There is a requirement to go beyond basic shopkeeping. There needs to be something that attracts the customer to your brand beyond the purchase need. Why would I be loyal to Brand X simply because they sold me something? I am more likely to come back if they make me feel wanted. Or show me that their customers are loved. Or make me laugh. Basically, do something to engage me and give me value from paying attention. A colleague of mine, Steven Hampson, used a neat word to summarise Web3.0, or better still Consumer3.0 (yep the whole numbering thing is far too media speak but it is what people understand, so please forgive me!) – meCommerce. We’ve had eCommerce, we know about mCommerce but now we need to put the individual at the heart of our thinking. Here’s where the gaskets blow and people raise the flag of CRM. Yes, CRM gave traditional DM great propensity models, customer segments and improved personalisation. Yes, it is still hugely relevant. However, traditional CRM does not cover the social space online and look at how communication can be used to share information and build communities. It does not build direct 1-to-1 dialogue like microblogging and social networking can. meCommerce takes CRM to the next level.

Take a look at what Free People has been doing with its customer reviews. Free People pays real attention to their customer reviews, so much so that they invited their #1 reviewer to an extensive interview. They asked her about her favourite Free People clothes, her lifestyle, her interests. They collected photos of her wearing their clothes and featured them on their Flickr event set. Then they dedicated an entire blog post to the day to share what they learned with other customers. There is a good summary on the BazaarVoice blog page.

Why do I think this is a good example of “meCommerce”? I just love the attitude that drives this behaviour. Free People put in customer reviews for commercial reasons but also because they wanted to understand what their customers thought. They then wanted to go further and speak directly with their most prolific reviewer. Thinking more creatively, they wanted to share what they learned with the wider community and embraced blogging & Flicker. This shows commitment and passion. It also shows they have a handle on social media and how it can be applied to their customer base. This also shows a company willing to engage its customers and create content that is both interesting and relevant. Dialogue not monologue. Nurture and nature.

So what can other retailers learn? That engaging customers requires passion and creativity. You need to understand all the touch points for your business and work out how to knit them together. Most importantly, you need to give your customers a reason to get involved. Simply offering them somewhere to be is not reason enough.

Another week, another interesting indulgence in the world of social. There has been a lot of chatter about Obama’s impact on the world and the inauguration of the first ever black President of the United States. Quite an emotional and awe inspiring scene from the US and a genuine sense of optimism. I have followed with interest the role of the Internet and specifically social media in Obama’s rise and rise to office.

From the outset of the election trail and lengthy primaries, Team Obama has used persuasive engagement online to encourage more and more voters to engage with politics and embrace the Democratic candidate. The website also helped raise a record breaking amount to fund the election campaign and the financial impact of the online marketing was incredible.

What struck me was the engagement techniques that the Obama team used. If you check the official website you can see a link to the blog in the top nav bar. As well as regular updates, video has been embedded on this page and the ability to login in to the MyObama.com community site where you can interact with other voters to get active in the campaign trail. The MyObama.com page is personalised and acts like a social network. Here you can contact other voters, attend or organise local events, send and receive messages and link through to your Facebook account. Everywhere you go in the site, there are clear links to donate or buy Obama merchandise. The marketing and merchandising is effective but not intrusive.

Another neat touch is the “Obama Everywhere” panel that appears throughout the site. From here you can link direct into Obama’s profiles on the usual suspects, from Facebook (557,923 posts and over 4 million supporters) to Linked In, embracing the corporate and business market. There is a real intelligence to the targeting and relevance of all the profile links and the content you can find on each. Brilliant.

There is much more to this site in relation to use of social media, such as the links to the Barack Obama channel on YouTube (1,827 videos and 155,750 subscribers). Take a look around. I’m not saying it is the only way to do social media but the success of this engagement approach is proven and now much spoken of. The blogging world has embraced this event and there is a wealth of personal opinion being churned out. Despite my cynical view of politics, I genuinely enjoyed seeing Team Obama embrace online as a key channel to engage with and influence millions of voters. They are more in tune with the world and the younger generations than the Republicans. The rest is most definitely history.

What will 2009 bring for social retail in the UK?

I've been lazy and skipped a week in this blog but I had a good reason. I've been busy. First recovering from new year indulgence, second getting my thoughts together on where we are all going with social retail in the UK. I've been banging the drum at e-inbusiness for the last 12 months about the value of social media and how its application to retail is evolving quickly. Nurture and nature. Nurture from the brands and the social evangelists, nature from the communities it is engaging. 

So this week's blog is about the potential, not the application. My current horizons are limited on purpose to focus on key social sites: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, WAYN, Flickr, Technorati etc. This is the tip of the iceberg - there are so many social avenues online, it is like naming all the stars in the galaxy. Microsoft has now launched its Windows Live community....could this be the new Facebook? It is early days and the application is rather basic but Microsoft has the reach with its hotmail base and I’ve already seen invites from friends outside the UK to join up to their Live network. It will be interesting to see which social networks stand the test of time and which satisfy the typical shelf life of a fad.

So back to my point this week. 2009 is the time for retail to take social media more seriously. 2008 was a time for experimentation and some people got it spot on, others were lazy in their attempts to leverage the social vibe.

I think some brands took the sinful approach of banging up a profile on Facebook and thinking “job done”. There are also some companies whose employees have gone and set up their own groups with some seriously damaging content for the brand. Check out the Currys offering and read entry 9 in the news section. I’m not sure the Marketing Director would embrace it! There are currently 1,324 members, many of whom are disgruntled and have the claws out. My shining example of delivering a positive engagement via Facebook is Wiggly Wigglers and it was good to see them hailed in this month’s Catlaogue & e-Business magazine (pp18-19 if you have it).

Twitter continues to excite me and social buzz has to be a key element in a social model. I have frequently used the example of Starbucks (with over 30,000 followers) to highlight how brands can give short and sweet updates to their fans. Now I’ve been shown the perfect Twitter blog that contain a list of brands currently tweeting away, I highly recommend you check it out here. One of the interesting players is Delicious, so we have a social media site using a buzz channel to spread the message. Tidy.

So how do retailers need to sharpen up to get social in the right way? The key word is community. A community is not built overnight and is not created in one place. A community is far reaching, has diverse members and a will of its own. A community also needs leadership and the belief that what is wants and says is important to those leaders.

Brands need to think big and join the dots. Set-up a commanding profile on a site like Facebook, have a Twitter feed, post videos to YouTube, photos to Flickr, get busy on Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, start your blog, link it to sites like Technorati, find your brand ambassadors and reward them for spreading the love. Make sure all of these elements work to a shared vision and the content is co-ordinated. Most of all, don’t launch and then sit back. Social media demands daily attention, it needs to be prioritised and should be driven by someone who is passionate about it. If you don’t live it, you can’t love it. I was recently sent a blog by Kevin Gibbons that gives an example of a brand doing it the right way.

Building a community starts with a vision and a message. You must know what you want to say and what value you can provide. Then you need to give your prospective members the tools they need to interact with you on their terms. You need nurture and nature. Nurture to encourage, to participate and share information, to answer questions and make people feel involved. Nature to give people the free will to contribute, to post content and receive content where they want, when they want.

Perhaps this is a form of social regeneration, building ties between people to feel a sense of belonging. Perhaps this can help break down cultural barriers. You may laugh and think I’ve gone overboard but why not? More and more people interact online, from the furthest corners of the world. Why shouldn’t social media be a means to bring people closer together?

Danger for the brand that treats its community like a traditional marketing channel.

2009 will see social media hit the mainstream for UK retail

If 2008 saw the UK tentatively engage with social media tools, 2009 will see us embrace with open arms. The early adopters have ducked in, experimented and put in place creative, compelling social media strategies that have engaged their customers and created a lot of noise in the online maelstrom. There have been a few learning curves to boot and the occasional backlash. Social media is not a passing fad, the concept of enabling your customers to engage with your brand on their terms is one way to start building an online buzz. Some individual tools may be short lived but the concept is not. The experience online is becoming increasingly important and as the world descends into discount fever, those brands that compete on more than just price will benefit.

Take a look at what the more enlightened companies are doing in the social media space. Firstly, let’s look at Facebook. Very much maligned yet undeniably has had a huge impact on how people interact. There are 8.4m UK users alone and 67m active users worldwide. Wiggly Wigglers has taken the ethos of Facebook to heart and developed a branded page that offers excellent content and value to members, interacting with them at both the personal and company level. What it has done well is to post regular content that informs customers as well as posts that are light hearted, humorous and engaging. This has resulted in 1,063 members of the group who are all sharing information with each other, much of which is related back to Wiggly Wigglers products and service. The company has recently won the Global Dell Small Business Excellence Award. An interesting move saw Amazon acquire Shelfari (a network site dedicated to book lovers) in October 2008. This was a commercially cute way of developing its social media presence whilst giving direct access to a highly targeted audience who can buy books direct from Amazon.

You Tube is another interesting prospect for customer engagement. Hitwise data shows that UK traffic to online video websites has roughly tripled in the last year and You Tube accounts for 70% of that traffic. The number of branded video channels is increasing, with major retailers like Diesel embracing this channel for brand engagement. Diesel has 516 subscribers and 17,968 channel views (as of November 24^th). If creating a channel is not your bag, then it is easy to load videos to the site to showcase your company. Acquired by Google, You Tube also displays Google Adwords adverts on search results…. A nice way for them to get more click revenue!

One of the more intriguing sites is Twitter. This dispenses with the bells and whistles and simply enables you to give a status update (max 140 characters, aka microblogging) and to follow other members and be followed too. You have a basic update list to tell you what you and your followers are up to. Many companies are now monitoring the twittersphere [go with it….]for reference of their brand and then engaging with the twitterati where relevant. JetBlue in the US is a great example and their actions have spawned blogs on the subject. At the same time, these companies are tweeting [Twitterspeak for posting updates] to their heart’s content. Even the UK Government has muscled in with the kids, creating a twitter feed for No.10 Downing Street with 6,056 followers. If you’re feeling voyeuristic, check out twittervision where you can view the latest tweets on a global map! I really should get out more….

Similar to tweeting is the global phenomenon of blogging. In the blogosphere [detect a theme?] content is being generated rapidly by both individuals and companies. In the last 3 years, UK traffic to blogs has increased by 208%. With pingback and trackback functionality, blogging is increasingly linking people together and having a significant SEO effect. Is this relevant to your brand? Definitely. Take a look at what Ikea is embracing with the Ikea Fans site. I’m also a fan of the Topshop style blog; simple and effective and you can also sign-up to the RSS feed. The secret to a successful blog is….. well, I’m not going to give that away for free am I!

I’ve saved the peak of my enthusiasm for the subject of Customer Reviews. There has been increased uptake of the major UK providers Feefo, Bazaarvoice and Reevo and some retailers are also implementing bespoke solutions on-site. A good example of how to do reviews is Boden. If you really aren’t convinced about the power of reviews, take a peek at some of the stats. People inherently trust independent feedback more than your own product information. Providing customer reviews not only adds validity (and SEO friendly content) but has also been proven to increase order values and conversion. I don’t think customer reviews is a competitive advantage so much as a necessity.

So, social is the new black. I’ve not even touched on the more gimmicky but nevertheless popular aspects such as widgets, wikis and applications. For examples of e-inbusiness Clients going forth into social waters, take a look at New Look’s My Look community forum, and the Facebook presence of both New Look and Radley.

The eCommerce industry is itself using blogs, forums and reviews daily on sites like Chinwag and eConsultancy, so why have so few committed to social media for their customers?

I think we will see more exciting uses of social media in 2009 and we hope to help you become one of the converted! I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, so to embrace the social media theme I’ve started this blog which is also linked to Technorati. The blog starts with this article, so please tell me what you think. Are you excited by the social media potential for your brand? Do you have a SMO strategy? Or are you finding it hard to work out how your brand can be relevant in social spheres? Or can you share new information to increase my socialsphere? All comments will be welcome. 

Thanks

James