Here’s a great example of how a seemingly noble social media donation campaign can go awry: Microsoft tweeted two hours ago on the Bing search engine’s Twitter account that it would donate up to $100,000 to help victims of Japan’s earthquake — but only if Twitter users retweeted its original post to broadcast it to their followers, at $1 per retweet.
While many Twitter users are retweeting without complaint, others are pointing out that this campaign seems like a crass marketing opportunity for Bing.
Comedian Michael Ian Black, who has nearly 1.6 million Twitter followers, graphically responded to the campaign with this tweet: “Hey @bing, stop using a tragedy as a fucking marketing opportunity.” Searching for “@Bing” on Twitter at the time of this post reveals plenty of other users who aren’t taking too kindly to Microsoft’s campaign.
This backlash shows us that as useful as social media is for inspiring activism, it must be carefully deployed so as not to seem like a craven publicity stunt. Most recently, we saw a similar backlash to Kenneth Cole’s tweet about Cairo amid Egypt’s recent protests, in which the fashion label plugged its spring collection.
I can’t imagine how Microsoft didn’t see this coming. It would have received plenty of good will by simply donating $100,000 to help out quake victims. This campaign, on the other hand, seems like a forced attempt to get people talking about Bing, and ultimately to get it trending on Twitter. Now people are indeed talking about Bing, but Microsoft likely won’t appreciate what they’re saying.
In the scheme of things, social media marketing is still incredibly new, and what I find fascinating is the new trend of strategies that companies employ to create a following in social media. New tricks get old very, very fast as consumers wise up, or simply get bored.
What’s becoming evident is that gaining a Like, follow or check-in is becoming almost a game in itself, as companies try newer ways to get the all important trade from their consumers. I believe this is largely a result of the fact that as people become more comfortable with following brands online, we realise that we can only realistically follow so many, before they take up a large portion of our newsfeeds. So your Likes or follows become even more valuable both to you and the brand. The solution that many companies are looking at now, is what you can offer users that makes the action of Liking, a game or challenge in itself, beyond the content you actually offer them in the long run that would draw them to you.
Rewarding Likes
Porsche were there early with their stunt to reward Facebook Likes by pledging to engrave its fans’ name on a custom car. All you had to do to get your name on the car was Like the page. Then Heineken followed by celebrating 1 million Likes with 1 million hugs. Heinz has explored this most recently, when it decided to release a brand new flavour of Ketchup, only available through its Facebook page, which you had to Like first in order to purchase.
From a user point of view, this adds completely to the experience of following a brand. You’re not just following to get updates, you get your name on a car, a hug, and the chance to buy a bottle of ketchup. What’s interesting among these campaigns is that it’s not about rewarding fans through anything monetary, it’s about adding to the social experience. They can get something that no-one else can, and this is how hard brands now need to work, to get that all important Like.
Points for Check-Ins
What’s interesting is that this concept of rewarding a virtual ‘follow’ is now very much extending into the real-world, when it’s no longer about what shop you walk into, but which shop is going to reward you when you check in. This is evident through Foursquare’s recently launched version 3.0 . They’ve learned very quickly that it’s not necessarily about sharing location with your friends, but the points and rewards you get from organisations in return for this. They’ve revamped their points system to open up the opportunities for businesses to reward customers, extending from just mayors to include groups, swarms or pretty much anyone. While Foursquare may no longer be the dominant player in location, the fact that the way deals or specials operate is such an important part of their update, shows the interest between both customers and businesses, for rewarding checkins beyond the social element.
It’s clear why a Like, checkin or follow means so much to brands : because of the entire community that comes with just one person joining your page. Heinz made the decision it did not only because it was a new marketing gimmick, but because of the huge potential social reach in return for taking the action on their page. Not just 3,000 bottles, but 3,000 bottles seen by 390,000 people. That’s serious numbers for a lot of brands, and it’s easy to see why the tactics to reach Likes or follows would be so extreme. There has always been competition between brands through social media, but lately it seems to be reaching new levels. Constantly more inventive ways to celebrate Likes or reach a goal, but what happens when you reach that goal?
The worrying thing of course, is that it all becomes too much of a game to get people to simply Like you, without that really meaning anything to a brand. There is a big difference between someone joining your page because they’re engaged with your brand at a meaningful level, and joining your page to get their name engraved on a car. The long-term effect of that, for many brands, will be painful. The quality of conversation, and value you get out of the page may be negligible. The long-term effect this really has on brand loyalty remains to be seen.
Saad Khan is a hacktivist and Partner at CMEA Capital. He’s a seed and early stage investor in companies like Blekko, Pixazza, Jobvite, and Evolution Robotics. He blogs at SaadWired and conversates on Twitter @saadventures. If you’re a hacktivist, reach out to him — he wants to connect with you.
A young hacker is holed up alone in his apartment. His face is lit by a laptop screen, monitor split between a live video stream and a text editor filled with code. Fueled by Ramen Noodles and caffeine, he codes away through the night, monitoring the latest hashtags on Twitter, never a few seconds behind the newest exploding meme, instantly transmitting the latest news to others in his social graph.
This is a scene that is played out in the rooms of countless hackers and their “lean startups” around the world. Only for the past few weeks, it could have just as easily described an entirely new, organic, philanthropic phenomenon: Hacktivism.
Hacktivism is the use of hacking and the startup mentality to tackle and support social good causes. Here’s a look at some of the minds behind hacktivism and ways that it is helping charities worldwide.
Welcome to the Hacktivism Era
I was invited to Washington, D.C. for the Tech@State: Open Source event hosted by the Office of e-Diplomacy at the State Department. Rather than besuited C-SPANers, geeks from around the world had descended on D.C. to intermingle with practitioners of statecraft. It was also unusual for another reason — a hemisphere away, a million Egyptians had descended on a main square in Egypt and demanded of their government and the world that their voices be heard. A couple of hours into that Friday morning, they got just that when Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down after 30 years.
In a cosmic coincidence (the event had been planned for weeks), I was on a panel two hours later discussing the political implications of new media with people like Habib Haddad, one of the many volunteers involved with the AliveInEgypt initiative and recently vindicated friend of Wael Ghaneim (the Google employee who had, until very recently, been incarcerated). The panel also included Katherine Maher, ICT program officer at the National Democratic Institute, and Mark Toner, deputy spokesperson for the State Department.
Consider the propagation of organic efforts like AliveInEgypt. When Internet activity had been shut down in Egypt, volunteers from Google and Twitter launched international lines that one could call to leave voicemails that would then be tweeted out with location hashtags. The creators of AliveInEgypt set up a crowdsourced translation service to take those mostly Arabic voicemails and convert them to text in as many languages as possible in the Twittersphere. Loosely organized, geographically dispersed, and entirely volunteer-driven, hundreds of people contributed.
This Visualization of the Egyptian Twitter Sphere helps put into context the various efforts. Its designer, Kovas Boguta, called me a few days before I went to D.C. saying he wanted to do something useful for the Egyptian cause. We discussed what was possible over the phone, and three days later I was showcasing his #Egypt visualization on a big screen at the State Department.
Another interesting example is the OpenMesh project. It’s a virtual collaboration with the objective of developing a communication solution for when Internet and/or mobile communications are shut down as they were in Egypt recently. Among the many options being explored are ad hoc mesh networking solutions that enable peer-to-peer communications.
These are just a few examples of how entrepreneurial creativity has been unlocked over the past few weeks to respond to a higher cause. Others are creating Gov 2.0 apps. I suspect countless ideas and plans are hatching in cubicles everywhere.
A New Kind of Activism
The events of the last few weeks have clearly galvanized a new kind of lean entrepreneurial activism. It’s enabled by the same drivers as lean startups: Free software, pay-as-you-go data centers and social distribution channels. But these entrepreneurs aren’t trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. What drives them is the desire to effect change, a sense of digital empowerment and an intuition that we are at a unique moment in history, one where generational transfers of leadership are at stake and increasingly possible.
Underlying much of this energy is an unprecedented global solidarity among people traditionally separated by thousands of miles of physical space and cultural artifacts. It’s forged by a very visceral empathy that comes with directly shared images and personal connections that today’s technology enables. Tens of thousands of people followed the unfolding saga of Ghonim’s capture and redemption on Twitter and Facebook. They saw what he saw and read what he was thinking. They watch. They connect. And then they want to do something about it.
Make no mistake, these people are entrepreneurs. They are agitators, opportunists, and catalysts for change. They measure success one follower at a time. I for one, think it’s time to get behind them. Let’s start activist hackathons, organize StartupWeekend “.gov Edition,” and engineer for a higher cause. We just might start a new kind of revolution.
At best, errant tweeting can leave you embarassed. At worst, it can leave you unemployed.
This week, a social media professional accidentally tweeted inappropriately from the Chrysler account he managed, lost his job, and now his agency has lost the account.
But this isn't an isolated incident. Last month, a Red Cross employee accidentally tweeted about a night of drinking; she didn't lose her job after the misfire. And there were plenty of similar cases before that one.
All of these faux pas were honest mistakes, but they show how disasterous inattentive tweeting can be. Realizing that most of these errors occurred while using a phone-based application, we at Luckie decided it was time to put serious thought into a policy to address this issue.
We put our heads together during an all-day, non-billable think tank and came up with an extensive crisis-aversion plan. And now we'll share our ingenious idea with you:
Use separate applications for professional and personal accounts.
Frighteningly simple fix, right? There are dozens and dozens of Twitter applications, and you're probably very fond of your choice application. But simply find a comfortable second option. I'll be using Twitterific and Twitter for iPhone. My colleague David Griner will be using Echofon as his backup to Twitter for iPhone.
Share your favorite applications in the comments, and if you've topped our brilliant resolution to this problem, please share that as well.
Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.
New research suggests that most Americans are well aware of Twitter … they’re just not using it. According to an Edison Research/Arbitron study, Twitter awareness in the U.S. among people 12 years old and older is at 92% — that’s up from 87% a year ago. But adoption is a different…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Here’s a great example of how a seemingly noble social media donation campaign can go awry: Microsoft tweeted two hours ago on the Bing search engine’s Twitter account that it would donate up to $100,000 to help victims of Japan’s earthquake — but only if Twitter users retweeted its original post to broadcast it to their followers, at $1 per retweet.
Interested in more Social Good resources? Check out