Everybody has one, some of us multiple…of course what I am talking about is that annoying friend on Facebook. The one who posts self congratulatory posts, boasting of minuscule achievements and complaining about daily events.

The only reason we still keep these people in our circles is that they are a friend or we have some sort of attachment, think of the aunt you have to call every month so your parents will be happy. Regardless of why they are around they still cause a great deal of annoyance, everyday you look for that “final straw” where you can finally delete them guilt free.

Now think, what if this was a company rather than a friend. Are any of us deeply attached to a company in the same way that if they begin to annoy us we will still hang around? Probably not, companies need to be much more self aware of their posted content; it is crucial that they don’t begin to spam their followers and create useless conversations.

This makes a strong argument for displaying user generated content, the content will seem less self congratulatory and therefore can be sent in higher volumes than company made content.

The attached article lists the 7 ways to be Insufferable on Facebook, conversely it lists ways to be “un-insufferable”; most noteworthy for me was “be interesting”. You may ask yourself , how could a household products company be interesting on social media? Well, that in particular is up to the company itself, but in my opinion a good strategy to have would be to challenge your audience, not sitting in complacency and not underestimating the intelligence or involvement of your customers.

M

Article Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wait-but-why/annoying-facebook-behavior_b_4081038.html

This past week Roger Wireless got some…well bad publicity lets say. Huge portions of their Canadian wireless services went down across the country in major cities. Rogers customers were not very happy, to put it in a uniquely Canadian politeness. However, once these “polite” Canadians took to social media and specifically Twitter to air their grievances they instantaneously took up a sailors vocabulary.

Now this sounds like a fairly cut and dry store, Rogers poorly handles a major outage and customers get upset, however there is another layer to this story. You see people tweeted their anger towards @Rogers, problem is the twitter handle belongs to an Australian entrepreneur living in Brooklyn.

Thousands of angry Canadians berated the Brooklyn Aussie, who took it comically and stated that this was in fact not the first time something of this nature had happened before. This story perfectly highlights the need for companies to create a clear and succinct social media plan, which has easy access points for its members to follow and join in. For example, the thousands of people who tweeted @Rogers, i’m sure have not found the proper twitter handle for Rogers wireless and therefore cannot access content or receive important updates.

Funny enough, the man has been asked by Rogers to donate the handle to the multibillion dollar communications company. Understandably he turned down the offer, hopefully he is waiting for a slight increase. In another similar case, CNN paid a twitter user for the handle @CNNbrk, which was used for breaking news updates.

article link:  http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Brooklyn+with+Rogers+Twitter+handle+becomes+focus+Canadian+rage+wireless+network+goes+down/9022753/story.html

link for a good weekend listen; Happy Thanksgiving Y’all

Ron Burgundy has partnered up with Dodge!

Ron Burgundy (aka Will Ferrell) has partnered up with the car manufacturer Dodge in series of new commercials to promote the new Dodge Durango. Although most of the ads will be played on television, they have already received a huge audience online. The most popular ad has received just under 700,000 YouTube views in four days.  This is a good example of leveraging earned media with paid media, the ads have been circulating the web the past few days and will allow for them to be shared to a varied and broad community that may have otherwise missed them on television.

In addition these ads are an effective example of cross-promotion as they also are promoting the upcoming Anchorman 2, which is picking up steam heading towards it Christmas 2013 release date. Dodge effectively leverages the popularity of Will Ferrell and the Anchorman movie to favorably show their new product.  The ads produced in part by Ferrell’s YouTube style website “Funny or Die” will no doubt receive promotion from the site, which specializes in funny sketches. As well the site definitely skews to a younger demographic that will help with overall promotion.

All in all this is destined to be  a very successful campaign and the commercials are destined to greatness…and repeat viewings. By the way you owe it to yourself to watch all of the commercials here: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/ron-burgundys-hilariously-stupid-dodge-durango-campaign-destined-greatness-152968

In October 2012, Cisco, the networking equipment giant launched a Social Media Listening Centre at its headquarters in San Jose, California. The company, which has 67,000 employees and annual revenue of $48.6 billion, launched the centre in efforts to gain better knowledge of their large customer base. This means that they have to monitor all of their 5000 daily social media mentions across 70 company related Facebook pages, 100 Twitter accounts and a slew of other including Linkedin, Youtube, and company run blogs and forums.

According the research conducted on the listening centre by Nucleus Research, Cisco had a 281% return on investment over a 5 month period which resulted in an annual cost benefit of $1.5 billion. Among it benefits, Cisco had increased staff productivity, meaning that they were able to process and answer customer queries quicker. In addition they note that social media as a whole is a very effective tool to broadcast a message to a large group effectively and in a timely matter.

Personally I believe that this is an incredibly genius idea on the part of Cisco, being as large a company they are and as diverse they are it would be a challenge to satisfy it entire customer base. However with this in place they can effective pay adequate to all of their markets and customer bases. It would be a great irony if a company whose product is networking equipment could not effectively communicate with its customers, luckily for Cisco they can.