Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: social media

  • Losing the hospitality battle

    Losing the hospitality battle

    Travel review site Tripadvisor released its 2012 Industry Index examining the 25,000 responses from hotels around the world and 1,000 Australian hospitality businesses who took part in the survey.

    The index covers a wide range of areas of how the hospitality industry is dealing with connected customers, the web and how hotels are dealing with the relative performances of markets in Europe, North America and Asia.

    A disturbing part of the survey was how many smaller businesses are falling behind their bigger competitors with less than half of Australian Bed & Breakfasts agreeing the statement that an “ability to book via my property’s website on a mobile device is ‘very important,” while 70% of hotels agreed.

    The failure of smaller properties to engage online is borne out anecdotally as well, at a recent business breakfast a B&B owner – whose main business was furniture retailing – moaned about the negative TripAdvisor reviews his place had.

    When it was suggested he might want to engage with the unhappy customers, the proprietor threw his hands up and said “our solicitor told us that it was too expensive to sue.” He wouldn’t accept that the dissatisfied guests might have a legitimate complaint that should be addressed.

    At the same time larger hotel chains have full time teams monitoring comments on Tripadvisor, Facebook and other online forums, fixing problems that are being mentioned and then telling the world they have resolved the issue.

    There’s a good reason for this. Ask someone planning a major holiday and you’ll find almost all of them are reading reviews on sites like Tripadvisor, Fodors or Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree before booking accommodation or flights.

    While many of the hotel management responses are boilerplate – repeated replies like “Thank you for your review and we appreciate you taking the time to share with us your experience as we are always pleased to receive feedback from our valued guests” is not what social media or customer service is – at least there is a perception that senior management is listening.

    At many establishments senior management really is listening, a country manager of one of the world’s biggest chains describes how his three person team sends him a report each day of any complaints being listed online. These are checked out and any systemic problems they find such as surly front of house staff, poor housekeeping or incorrect billings are addressed immediately.

    Having a direct line to happy or dissatisfied customers is one of the major benefits social media offers businesses. That smaller hotels aren’t doing this while their multinational competitors indicates the independent sectors of the hospitality industry are falling behind the majors.

    The furniture shop owner with a B&B investment illustrated the problem, not only was he not engaging with dissatisfied customers on TripAdvisor, he had no idea whether his businesses were listed on Google Places, Facebook or any other online listing service – “my wife does that” was his dismissive answer.

    Possibly the most overused quote in modern business is ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Those smaller hospitality businesses not taking the mobile web, review sites or social media seriously aren’t even in the skating rink in today’s game.

    There’s a lot more interesting ideas in the TripAdvisor report that should have any hospitality thinking about how customer service and marketing are evolving in a connected society. It’s worth a read.

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  • Chasing away the astroturfers

    Chasing away the astroturfers

    Yesterday we heard the collective gnashing of teeth as social media experts, lawyers and business owners complained about the Australian Advertising Standards Board’s ruling that companies are responsible for comments on their Facebook pages.

    The ASB ruling (PDF file) was a response to complaints that comments on Diageo’s Smirnoff Vodka page breached various industry codes of conducts and encouraged under age drinking.

    While the board found the complaints weren’t justified – something that most of the hysterical commentators overlooked – the ruling contained one paragraph that upset the social media experts and delighted the lawyers.

    The Board considered that the Facebook site of an advertiser is a marketing communication tool over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control and could be considered to draw the attention of a segment of the public to a product in a manner calculated to promote or oppose directly or indirectly that product. The Board determined that the provisions of the Code apply to an advertiser’s Facebook page. As a Facebook page can be used to engage with customers, the Board further considered that the Code applies to the content generated by the advertisers as well as material or comments posted by users or friends.

    The key phrase in that paragraph is “over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control”. Obviously someone posting on Twitter, their blog or someone else’s website is beyond the control of the advertiser.

    With Facebook comments, the onus is on businesses to make sure there is nothing illegal appearing on their streams and any misconceptions or false statements are answered.

    In many ways, this is common sense. Do you, as a manager or business owner, want your brands tarnished by idiots posting offensive or illegal content? Sensible businesses have already been dealing with this by deleting the really obnoxious stuff and politely replying to the more outrageous claims by Facebook friends.

    What’s more important with both the ASB ruling and the Allergy Pathways case the ruling relies upon make it clear that ‘astroturfing’ on social media sites won’t be tolerated.

    Astroturfing is the PR practice of creating fake groups that appear to support a cause or product. A group paid for by an interested party appears to grow naturally out of community interest or concern – a fake grassroots group so to speak and hence the word ‘Astroturf’ which is a brand of artificial grass.

    Organisations like property developers and mining companies have been setting up Facebook pages and websites that appear to be community groups supporting their projects and many smaller business have been inducing friends, relatives or contractors to post false testimonials. In the run up to major elections in 2012 and 13 we’re seeing many of these fake groups setup to push various political agendas.

    For a few consulting groups, astroturfing has become a nice line of business and those of us on the fringe of the social media community have been watching the development of ‘online advocacy services’ with interest.

    While no-one has claimed Allergy Pathways or Diageo were posting fake testimonials on their own Facebook pages, the rulings in both cases are a warning that the courts and regulators are prepared to deal with those getting clever with social media.

    For honest businesses this ruling is a non-issue, it’s timely reminder though that web and social media site are not ‘set and forget’ but need to be regularly checked, valid customer comments replied to and inappropriate content removed.

    The ASB ruling reaffirms what sensible social media experts have been advising all along, and that’s good news for them and their clients.

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  • Verified Jerks

    Verified Jerks

    When you work in customer service you quickly learn that some people are just rude jerks. Depending on how bad a day you have it could be 2, 5 or 10% of the population.

    For these people the Internet has been a paradise with almost anonymous forums and newsgroups allowing them to be rude and obnoxious with little risk of being held accountable for their spiteful behaviour.

    One of the hopes of social media services was that forcing people into using accounts tied to their real identities would impose some self discipline among these trolls and haters,

    Sadly The argument that verified identities would stop people being irresponsible is wrong.

    The sad story of seemingly mature people insulting and wanting to beat up a five year old participant on a reality TV show illustrates how manners, good taste and style are beyond some people.

    It’s depressing, but unsurprising that this demographic can’t figure out that ‘reality’ TV shows are anything but real. The programs are carefully edited to suit the dramatic narrative of the producers with some of the participants being portrayed as villains and others as heroes.

    The little girl in question could be in a spoilt little brat, but you’d want to be careful making that judgement from what you see on TV.

    Many would put the spiteful behaviour of the Facebook commentors down to being another example of social media destroying our society, but this behaviour pre-dates the web.

    In the 1990s we saw a similar wave of insults aimed at President Clinton’s then teenage daughter Chelsea. In many ways it was far worse in what we are seeing today in that those encouraging that behavior were the leaders of political parties and their ideological fellow travellers in the media.

    The abuse of Chelsea Clinton marked the rapid decline of standards in politics that leaves many of us now sickened by the behaviour of all parties – and that of the media that treats their shenanigans seriously.

    Notable about the raucous political partisanship is that most participant are happy, even proud, to be named as they debase the institutions they’ve been elected to represent.

    The reason is they aren’t accountable, they know most of us are rusted on voters and the few that aren’t can be conned long enough by expensive advertising campaigns to get them elected.

    Should they not get elected, they’ll be welcomed into the arms of their corporatist friends who will find them a nice sinecure on a board, committee or think tank.

    The real reason people act like jerks is because they think they aren’t accountable – the politicians know they aren’t and most Facebook users figure the odds are in their favour that they’ll never be held to account for their boorish behaviour.

    Anonymity is the reason for bad manners on the net, accountability is. While our society doesn’t make people accountable for cruel, rude or corrupt behaviour then these people will thrive. With or without the internet.

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  • ABC Nightlife Computers: The state of tech

    ABC Nightlife Computers: The state of tech

    Join Paul and Tony Delroy to look at some of the trends and events that are affecting how you use phones, computers and internet in your home or business.

    A lot’s happened in the tech world over the last few weeks – Facebook has gone from the web’s golden business to being shunned, new tablet computers have been launched and we’ve had a virus threaten to knock people off the Internet.

    If you missed the show, you can listen to it online through the Nightlife website. Some of the topics we looked at included;

    • So what was the DNS Changer Trojan? Did the FBI really take over a criminal computer network?
    • Could a virus really damage computers and bring the Internet to a halt?
    • Is it true the US, Israel and North Korea are using viruses to attack other countries’ computers?
    • Should we worry about viruses on smartphones and tablet computers?
    • What about virus hoaxes? There’s a good one going around about Facebook at the moment?
    • Both Microsoft and Google have launched new tablet computers, will they knock off the iPad?
    • Microsoft’s tablet is going to run the new Windows 8 operating system, how does that look?
    • Facebook seems to have gone from hero to zero since they launched on the stock market. What happened?
    • There’s been some pretty serious Facebook privacy changes recently, what should people watch out for?
    • Microsoft have had some big security updates this week, what are they.

    For the Microsoft updates we mentioned, the major security updates can be downloaded from the Windows Update page or the Automatic Updates in Windows Vista and 7.

    Windows 7 and Vista users should also disable the desktop widget feature, Microsoft have two fix it tools available for download and users should run both.

    Listeners questions included the following problems;

    Alternatives to Outlook Express

    George was looking at upgrading to a new version of Windows that doesn’t have Outlook Express included but still wants a computer based email client rather than trusting a cloud service.

    Some of the alternatives include;

    Antivirus programs

    Margaret asked about antivirus options for Macs, there’s a couple of free antivirus programs designed for the Apple Mac

    For Windows users, the easiest free anti-virus to use is Microsoft Security Essentials.

    Microsoft Silverlight on Android

    Accessing Microsoft Silverlight based services like NineMSN on Google Android devices can be a problem as Jason found.

    Unfortunately at this stage there’s no clear solution for playing Silverlight sites on Android devices as Moonlight, the open source Silverlight player has been abandoned.

    Next Nightlife spot

    Our next Nightlife tech spot will be on August 6 and we’ll decide the topics closer to the dates. Watch the website for details over the next few weeks.

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  • Facebook’s final fail

    Facebook’s final fail

    We’ve come to expect Facebook storing and manipulating our personal data, but is changing our contacts’ email addresses the final straw for the social media service?

    Last week Facebook started changing users’ default email addresses to their inbuilt @facebook accounts.

    This was irritating for many users, but now it appears the social media service has gone too far with changing the address books of their users.

    If you have connected your iPhone, Android or Windows smartphone address books to the Facebook App, there is a chance that your contacts’ email addresses are now set to send to the user’s Facebook address rather than their “normal” email account.

    When you synch your phone with your PC or laptop these changes will also be made in your main address book.

    Given most people don’t use their Facebook supplied email this means many people won’t see messages sent to that address. This is a serious problem

    You can check if your address book has been changed by simply looking at your contacts’ email addresses.

    If it has, let your contacts know their addresses may have been changed as they can change the settings on their accounts. Read Write Web has instructions on fixing the address book problem.

    Facebook’s behaviour on this is seriously worrying, it’s bad enough they store all of our data but altering our personal information is for me a bridge too far.

    Given most mobile phone users would rather have their wallet stolen than lose their handset, Facebook’s messing with phones address book is going to shake their confidence in the service far more than the myriad privacy issues.

    If the IPO was Facebook’s peak, it could well be this poorly thought out tactic that marks the beginning of the company’s decline.

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