Social Media | jonathan nguyen

always the critic

February 7, 2010 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

first up, happy new year! it was a much needed break but i’ve had to hit the ground running it’s been one helluva start with work extremely busy.

over my break i consumed a lot of media but didn’t do much contribution. i did a lot of thinking and introspection and have come to a resolution: spend less time commenting on other people’s campaigns.

i noticed that this particular industry is particularly fond of critiquing and sledging other people’s work, campaigns, and sometimes it even gets personal. i’ve been guilty of doing it on more than one occasion. i don’t know what drives it, whether it’s competitiveness, insecurity or schadenfreude but it’s rife through the industry. anyway, it’s going to stop coming from me.

social media and marketing campaigns are difficult. unlike my old profession, there are often no right or wrong answers. especially now when we’re all still trying to work it out what works and what doesn’t. i’ve worked on a lot of social media campaigns and it’s damn hard to get right.

so no more critiquing from me. i think teddy roosevelt said it best:

It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

Filed Under: column j Tagged With: commentary, social media

issues and crisis management in social media

November 20, 2009 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

a tale of two craigs

craig badings and craig pearce colleague and ex-colleague here at ogilvy were discussing issues and crisis management over on mr pearce’s blog. given that they were talking about a conversation we’d had i thought i throw in my two cents worth.

let me preface this by saying the gentlemen mentioned are seasoned pros with years of this stuff under their belt and it was an honour to be included in the conversation. definitely one of the perks working for ogilvy.

mr bading’s and i had the opportunity to work together on a high profile brand crisis and throughout the crisis we evaluated our actions and evaluated against best practices. as social media is just another type of channel, most of the same rules applied. there were however a number of key differences which i will outline in a series of posts. i’ll start with this one.

handling a crisis

the basic rules, are:

communicate openly and honestly
correct factual inaccuries
communicate regularly

this is an over simplification, but they’re the basics.

respond or not to respond?

mr badings points out that in the traditional media world you want the whole thing to blow over. don’t inflame the situation if you can avoid it. there is no point in creating a longer than necessary news cycle. which can sometimes mean you don’t go back and correct factual inaccuracies if it looks like the news cycle is ending anyway. whether the client has done anything wrong or not, constant discussion about it the crisis will associate the brand with that crisis which is generally not a good thing. once it all blew over, people forgot and no one ever hears about it again.

this worked. it worked quite well. but news back then was contained to a local area and researching old news involved sifting through rolls and rolls of microfilm. if a crisis erupted for a brand in new york, it would not be a major deal for the brand in sydney. you couldn’t simply google a brand.

not so today

news today is not contained. it is not temporary. so it’s not possible to just bury it. the technology has changed, we need to reconsider if and how we respond.

the challenge now is, if you google a brand, you get all the bad stuff, as well as the good and people can go back even before the internet began. every subsequent generation around the world will see the situation and analyse it and it becomes associated with your brand, like it or not.

so the question is, do risk inflaming a situation by responding, even to correct inaccuracies at the risk of making it worse? it’s a case of making a decision that may hurt in the short term, but leave a better internet memory.

by responding, in the short term, you extend the news cycle and more people see it and associate it with your brand. in the long term, if you don’t those future generations will continue to see only the factual inaccuracies.

these things are never cut and dried though. unlike other commentators i don’t prescribe one path over another because it’s a ‘commandment of social media’. ‘thou shalt engage’, ‘though shalt be transparent’ etc… baloney.

what’s problematic about making a decision that may hurt in the short term is that it could be so painful it kills the organisation. it won’t be internet memory that you have to worry about but internet memoriam.

consider this next time you or a client is in crisis mode. there are no simple answers, anyone offering one is a quack. each situation is different but do consider this when you think about acting on the old adage of letting the story die a natural death. is not necessarily the right thing to do anymore.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: crisis management, issues management, public relations, social media

dear rupert

September 17, 2009 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

dear rupert

it has been a long time since we have spoken, i dare say it’s close to never now, but it has not stopped me from observing your farming business from afar. it appears you’re in a spot of bother and felt it would be remiss of me not to at least offer a different point of view. we are distant relatives after all, even though our relationship goes back to the origin of our species.

you have been grazing cattle on the same lands now for some time now but those cattle have stopped coming. i don’t know if it has something to do with this dreaded Global Warming i keep hearing the young kids talk about. i’m no enviro-mentalist rupert, but i do know a drought when i see one. you are a wise landowner rupert, so i don’t mean to second guess your response to this drought. so can you explain it to me? perhaps if i paraphrase in my own words you can clarify if i interpret you correctly:

the cattle have stopped coming to your pastures to graze, so the farmers have stopped paying you
your response is to now fence off your grazing lands, and charge not just the farmers, but also each head of cattle who comes through the door.

forgive me if I am wrong rupert, but i don’t know if this bovine music festival approach will work.

may i offer you a suggestion? instead of charging cattle, why don’t you buy the grazing lands that the cattle are grazing? with your vast resources surely this is a better approach. then perhaps the farmers will start paying you again because you own the lands on which their cows want to graze?

i hear that landowner arrington has a great property he calls “techcrunch” and landowner huffington has a property she calls “huffington post”. If the will cattle graze, the farmers will pay.

i beg your forgiveness rupert if i have been impertinent, but i write this letter with only the sincerest of intentions. you have been very good at tending to your old lands, but some say, wiser men than i, our best products will be our downfall in the end. words to that effect anyway, i think the fellow’s name was clayton m. christiansen, went to a fancy school.

anyway, i wish you all the best. that’s all the free advice i have, you know where to find me, my contract rates are reasonable.

humbly yours

jonathan nguyen

Filed Under: column j Tagged With: advertising, media, news corporation, newscorp, rupert murdoch, social media

don’t believe the social media jihadists

November 23, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

i have been thinking alot lately about the development and evolution of social media. i have also been tuning into alot of twitter conversations and reading alot of blogs. what is becoming apparent is that there are many social media jihadists out there that think social media is the only form of media for the future.

to a certain extent, i think we need the extreme viewpoints because it’s the extremists the fuel the discussion. you don’t get the moderate middle without the extremists on both sides. like religious extremists though, i am quite ready to listen to their viewpoint but i certainly would not counsel anyone to act on their diatribe.

the problem with social media jihadists is that they make social media the point of the conversation, rather than the media that facilitates the conversation.

social media is irrelevant. whatever. i couldn’t care less.

what is relevant and what is important, is the contents of your message, the people you need to hear your message and choosing the right medium to talk to those people.

there are people out there who would have you believe that everyone needs to get onto twitter now, and that friendfeed is the the bee’s knee’s of all social networks. rubbish.

if your customers, friends or family are not on the these networks, you need to ask yourself the: “why?” question.

in ten years time, it won’t be “social media” it will just be media. it is media because it is simply a medium of communication. the general public doesn’t care whether it’s social media or web 1.0, or web 2.0. to them it’s just the internet. the important part is they get the information they need.

when the phone rings, do you care that it’s a cell, landline, voip, copper line, cordless, or the line uses 8 kHz using 8 bit ulaw coding? i don’t. i care about what the person on the other end is saying though.

as practitioners sometimes we get carried away with our subject matter because we’re immersed in it every day. we also have to defend our views on social media everyday, thereby enforcing them. it is important though that for our clients – who pay us good money to help them communicate better with their publics – that we advise them objectively and not get carried away with the medium.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: advertising, facebook, friendfeed, pr, social media, twitter

social media 101: help! i need to get into this social media thing

November 19, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

when i was in i.t. (and even now) i was fielding technical support questions for friends and family. now that my day job has changed, the questions have changed a little. people now ask me about the social media. the most common question i get asked goes along these lines: “i’ve heard about this social media, should i start a blog, start twittering or create a facebook page?”

they generally want a nice short answer which i can’t give them. i want to take some time to answer the question here.

the single most important question i want them to answer is “why?”

why do they want to engage in social media?
do they view it as a medium to drive revenue?
is it because someone told them they should?
is it because everyone is doing it?

“why?” is a question that had to be answered on every project i’ve ever worked on and particularly in business it should always be a question that is asked.

i have never been able to justify an infrastructure upgrade, software development or deployment to the cio/cto with “we just should”. i need to know why and what benefit or return i hope to achieve and be able to articulate it in a business case.

once you answer the “why?” then we can start talking about the “what?“:

what should we do?
what tools should we use?
what are the success metrics?

treat a social media project as you would any project. you are spending your company’s (or your own) money for an expected benefit. now what you do need to be careful about is, like other business projects it may be difficult to prove the r.o.i. as a tangible on your balance sheet. in that respect, you may liken a social media project to be like a c.r.m. project. nobody disputes that having good customer satisfaction is essential to a successful business, but it’s difficult to use customer satisfaction in a business case.

to work out the why’s you might want to think in terms of who you intend to reach, or the “who?“. in p.r. we call these groups your intended audience or your target public:

clients
suppliers
employees
the general public
regulators
shareholders

the list goes on. the reason you ask this is because if you don’t know this you can’t really decide what to do can you? it would be akin to telling senator conroy we don’t want his broadband censorship plan wouldn’t it? it would fall on deaf ears.

the second thing to remember is, social media is not a one-way street. it is very clearly two-way. you can’t just advertise at people. so if you want to drive a quick buck, social media will generally not work for you (there are exceptions, but they’re rare so forget about it). the thing about social media is, it’s about getting feedback. this is why i like to compare it to a c.r.m. project. it’s about listening as well.

so if you are able to answer the “why?” and the “who?” you’re off to a good start and stay tuned for the next 101.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: business case, intended audience, justify, pr, public, public relations, purpose, social media, social media 101, target, who, why

social media case study: drupal.org-part i

October 15, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

few posts ago i wrote about my experiences tweeting about drupal and then having the drupal redesign guys start to follow my tweets.

well, i was immensely impressed with the proactiveness of this approach and i reached out to the team to find out more about the project.

for those of you who don’t already know, drupal.org is an open source content management engine. in some respects it is in competition to wordpress but the feeling i get is that it really is in a slightly different market. drupal boasts some impressive community users including the people behind the internet, icann.

as an open-source project it is community driven and does not leverage funding in a commercial sense. so i was curious as to how they staffed this social media project.

i reached out to @drupalredesign on twitter and asked to interview them. i got a response the next day.

after a few emails i was able to get a clearer picture on how the they are running their communications efforts.

i have included the q & a below.

the interview

do you guys have commercial backing?
from twitter? no, we are simply using the search function to view all tweets that include the word ‘drupal’.

where did the idea come from to leverage twitter as an ideas feed?
this was leisa’s idea. leisa is a ux researcher and ia strategist who has joined us for the duration of the project. leisa also regularly speaks and writes on twitter and ambient intimacy

do you run scripts to monitor for keywords?
we haven’t automated the process at all (except for automatically adding people back who join our twitter group). we use search.twitter.com to monitor mentions of drupal

has the campaign been effective for you?

i suppose the answer to that depends on what context you monitor effectiveness. In terms of raising awareness of the redesign project, then yes, most definitely it has been effective … a good example is the fact that you asked us for an interview.

it also means that we can reach out to a large pool of drupal users all at once, pointing them to the blogs where they can leave detailed comments if they so wish.

how many hours a day does it take to monitor the feedback?

i keep the search window open all day in the background. then i dip in and out of it throughout the day and follow anyone who’s comment about drupal interests me. it’s a process that you could spend all day looking at, refreshing the tweets and following people etc … i chose to dip in and out so some days i hardly get chance to monitor the feedback and another day i may spend up to an hour or more sifting through it.

as well as the search window, i also log into twitter as the drupal redesign group, look at our followers and follow them back if we aren’t already.

do you approach people who have said negative things to get better information?
definitely! if we didn’t then the comments/feedback would be too one sided. there is no hard and fast rule for who to follow. sometimes it is comments that have interested me, sometimes it is a random choice. an example is a tweeter who said they couldn’t understand drupal and didnt like it, so i followed them as we may be able to get more detailed info off them further down the line regarding why they dont like drupal etc.

do people respond well?

absolutely! Many users have directly messaged us saying they were glad we were following them and they were looking forward to getting involved. clearly you were impressed with it too so it seems to be pleasing people rather than annoying them. We have 398 followers as i type this and that number is increasing daily . in order to ensure we don’t annoy/offend people, we have decided not to follow everyone who includes ‘drupal’ in their tweet. a bit of selection is needed. the people we follow have mentioned drupal in their tweets so its fair to assume that they are engaged with it somewhat and therefore would be interested in the redesign process.

how many people monitor the stream?

myself and leisa.

finally, what’s your role on the team?

i work for mark boulton design as a project manager, so my core duties are to oversee the project and do all that I can to ensure it comes in on time and on budget.

what are the learnings?

you’ll have to wait for the next post for that!

Filed Under: case studies Tagged With: blogging, blogs, case study, drupal, pictures, random, redesign, responsive, social media, twitter

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