As Marlon Brando from The Godfather would say in his raspy tone, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” But, had he been alive today, he would have to alter it into—“Revenge is a dish best served online”

The single:

United breaks guitars is a tryst with destiny for Dave Carroll (vocalist) of a lesser-known band called Sons of Maxwell. Apparently he witnessed the mishandling of his luggage (You guessed it—-a guitar) at the hands of the ground staff of United Airlines. He ended up with a 3500$ guitar with a broken neck and when his claims for reparation or compensation fell on deaf ears, he vowed to take vengeance by releasing 3 songs for the world to witness the injustice.

One year down the line and with over 11 million views for the first single on YouTube, Dave could not have asked for more. Here’s the video of the song.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

United Breaks Guitar

Video logy:

• The screenplay is a quirky and satirical take of the aforementioned incident.
• In spite of being amateurish, the lyrics and the video invoke laughter with its dark humour which has been the soul of its popularity.
• The indie rock band The Arctic Monkeys owe their rise MySpace and this could pave a similar route for the well-toured country band-Sons of Maxwell.

Bottom-line:

• A dip in the stock-rates of United Airlines coupled with a sudden surge in the popularity of the band illustrates the power of video-sharing websites.
• The video also compelled United to release official statement apologizing for the incident. As for Dave—He got offers for public-speaking on Customer Services.

End Chorus:

The guitar may never be fixed but one thing has been fixedàif you have the will, you can maximize the utilization of your resources and exploit the social networks for your benefit. So, whether you are a band hungry for attention or just a revenge-seeker, the Internet is your friend forever, what say Mr. Brando?

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On social media platforms, it is all about ‘engagement’.  If a brand fails to come up with creative ways of marketing, they will lose out on the interactions on the page and eventually they will end of losing the fans. Today, we will show you a classic example of what we like to call, a creative and thoroughly engaging campaign.

Cadbury Bournville Facebook Page and play Escape the Incans Game. C’mon ya’ll, help the Ghanians escape the Incan guards by collecting all the Cocoa Beans. Who knows, one of these Cocoa Beans may reach Ghana and be a Bournville someday. Also go to Cadbury Bournville on Twitter and follow them. They are doing some cool stuff there too.

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They are now updating ‘People Talking About Your Brand’

You can thus at any point in time see how many people are talking about your brand on the Facebook platform at that instance.

“People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed:

• liking your Page
• posting to your Page’s Wall
• liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums)
• answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events
• mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page
• liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

A key disadvantage of this approach is that it does not ‘actually’ count people talking about your brand in their status updates for example unless the user tags the brand.

eg. if i just type i like FoxyMoron without tagging the page I will not be counted as a person talking about the brand.

Another metric that Facebook will be putting increased emphasis on is Friends of Friends and ‘Total Brand Reach’. eg. If one of your fans posts or interacts with your page, Facebook will also be able to calculate how many of his or her friends actually saw this interaction and also be able to do this ACROSS your fans hence giving you a figure of a weekly total reach.

Below is  a screenshot of the same (New insights platform that Facebook will be releasing shortly)

If your brand is also running sponsored stories or ads on Facebook the combined reach of those ads + the combined reach of your page should give you an accurate understanding of your total reach on Facebook.

Ofcourse this too can be fine tuned in the sense that brands may also want to know how many of these reached people are actually keyed into the brand i.e. spent more than 10 seconds looking at the message or other such information. For that too, we’ll see a lot of apps developed as Facebook has just launched its API for insights which allows developers to visualize and make sense of the data they have in many different ways.

This should reflect in your reports in the coming weeks.

If you have any further comments on this or questions do let us know.

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It allows users to actually see everything that transpired in a match from ever pass to every host, block, formation change etc.

The theory is “the more you know about the game, the better you are at the game”

I think its an interesting application and football geeks (can i call them that?) will love it!

Im not sure how the technology is developed – if you think you do let me know!

I think another feature that can be added is a ‘future mode’ section where users can forsee the future of their teams by putting in what they think the result of every game will be. In a sense then, a fantasy predictor game can be tied in too.

Good innovation. Neat execution. Nike owns the mindspace of  ’im a football fanatic’ because of its viral hit ‘Write the Future‘ (which is turning out to be a bit of a joke looking at how the World Cup has transpired) – here is Adidas taking big steps. I don’t think its one of these things that generations will talk about though.

They also have http://www.facebook.com/adidasfootball just like Nike has http://www.facebook.com/nikefootball?ref=ts&v=wall

Puma is also doing something similar – http://www.facebook.com/PUMAfootball – i like their communication “Make Football in Public” and “Love = Football” – their scale is lacking though.

I see these brands doing it for Cricket too. If im not mistaken Nike already is. I see us helping them do some of it.

Another Screen Grab from the Match Tracker

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Some other brands may get affiliated with the wrong kind of partners who do can go into practices such as spamming or engage in mere eye wash where the brand does not go beyond the personal network of the social media practitioner (in many cases a power social media user – a lot of the people initially attached to social media are guilty of the same, yours truly included. One really has to question people when they float group of 500 members for a mass brand and then boast about ‘engagement’ on it) – an example is one Titan Fast Track community i saw on Facebook managed by an agency who is spearheaded by a popular blogger.

The most important thing that brand managers need to be careful about is the handover process when the change social media agencies. I heard of a recent case in the handover of the Royal Challengers Bangalore account where the existing agency refused to hand over the Facebook Fan Page admin rights to the new agency. Maybe the handover process can be a part of paper work.

I also think that it will be increasingly important for brand managers to be a part of the admin process/ be the creators of the pages/social media accounts and thus the effective owners or else it leaves too much power in the hands of the social media agency who in India especially have been behaving in an extremely unprofessional manner.

Ofcourse the whole idea of gearing your organization for social media goes way beyond just creation of social media properties – that’s something that anyone can do. The real power of social strategy is leveraged when employee, partner, consumer, supplier are all connected socially to create fluidity and understanding and help accentuate the overall business process. In terms of a marketing perspective, idea led social media campaigns that have touchpoints of intake and promotion at multiple media outlets are likely to succeed. Having said that, there is some importance in social media properties and it seems like brand managers are not as aware/ not bothered about ownership issues at this point of time.

As social media agencies, closure consulting also becomes an important part of the process of activating companies on social mediums. Closure consulting would typically involve:

i) Handover procedures of social media properties built to another agency/ to the brand manager.

ii) Creating processes of automation of content generation if another agency has not been appointed.

iii) Deliberation on demolition of social media properties built if they are just going to be left aside.

Closure consulting should also include a brand audit in the online space.

For example Virgin Mobile India(smooth criminal) has 2 Twitter accounts. They don’t talk to each other. Both have been managed by different agencies and showcase a confused brand voice online.

As a final step, closure by social media agencies should include solidification and consolidation of all properties built on social media.

This largely includes binding activities together.

If the brand owns a website then the database transfer is another element. If the website is moving from a ’social media’ led website to another form (simple brochure/ beyond Web 2.0) then also, the transition needs to be put in place in the right fashion.

This is something brand managers can consider and social media agencies can follow. Is there anything else one would add for the steps to be taken by agencies during the closure  of accounts?

Cross posted on my personal blog

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