Social Media’s Industrial Strength

Business Spectator: By Leon Gettler

Quick quiz: What do the Victorian nurse’s union, Kyle Sandilands and The Circle’s co-host Yumi Stynes have in common? They all tell stories about the use of social media as a weapon. It’s a warning for companies, politicians and managers who have until now regarded social media as just a marketing tool and press release.

Social media is a completely new way of doing things for managers. Companies have avoided dealing with it because of time and resources and they regard most of what’s discussed online as shallow when they have work to do. There’s also lack of expertise and ignorance. They might say there are no sufficient tools yet to measure the effectiveness of social media and there is no ROI. But the nurses dispute, not to mention what’s happened to Sandilands and The Circle tells us that will have to change. The nurses’ use of Facebook is a warning that could extend well beyond industrial relations.

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Evacuations, traffic chaos

More than 20 people were evacuated from the Scalabrini Retirement Village in Austral, south-west Sydney, after the Bonds Creek flooded.

“The creek broke its banks there, so it was a pre-emptive flood rescue,” a State Emergency Service spokesman told AAP.

Residents of 20 homes in three streets at Marrickville were evacuated because of severe flash flooding.

Motorists were rescued from cars caught in flooding at Rossmore, Austral and Campbelltown.

NRMA spokesman Peter Khoury said patrols had responded to about 1000 breakdown calls, double the usual morning average.

“There are considerable delays of between 2½ to 3 hours across Sydney for people broken down in the wet,” he said.

“Emergency calls are given priority and we rescued a baby locked in a car in Hurstville about half an hour ago. Substantial road closures across Sydney are making it harder to get to broken down vehicles so we are asking people to remain patient and stay off the roads if possible.”

Flights from Sydney Airport were delayed or cancelled and a Qantas plane bound for Sydney was forced to divert to Newcastle.

Trains on the Airport and East Hills and Olympic Park railway lines were suspended about 9.30am because of water on the tracks.

Commuters suffered major delays on seven of Sydney’s 16 main railway lines, including the Eastern Suburbs, Bankstown, Inner West, Airport, South, North Shore, Western, Olympic Park and Northern lines.

Banksia station was shut while dozens of others suffered flooding, particularly in subway and underpass areas.

Twitter became a popular way for some commuters to share their comments and images, with a 200 per cent increase in wet-weather-related comments on Twitter in the past 24 hours, social media intelligence company SR7 said.

There were approximately 70 tweets per minute and about 16,800 tweets between 7.30am and 11.30am about the rainy conditions in Sydney, SR7 added.

Ausgrid said power was cut to about 300 homes in 50 locations in Sydney.

“The majority of jobs involve individual properties where tree branches may have come into contact with the service wire that connects customers with the electricity network,” the company said in a statement.

Fire and Rescue NSW said 250 firefighters from more than 50 fire stations responded to dozens of incidents across the city.

Emergency services were watching the Georges River, with flooding expected at Liverpool and Milperra.

The river was expected to peak at 2.3 metres about 11am in Liverpool and two metres at noon at Milperra.

Policeman’s lucky escape

Meanwhile, a policeman was lucky to avoid serious injury when he fell down a mountain in NSW’s southern highlands.

The 40-year-old male sergeant was sent to Moss Vale Road on Cambewarra Mountain, in Nowra, about 12.30am to help the SES deal with a fallen tree.

The officer was standing by the side of the road when the surface gave way, sending him plummeting down the side of the 650-metre high mountain.

His fall was halted by vines about 30 metres down and he was taken to Shoalhaven Hospital in a stable condition.

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Kony goes viral |Q & A ‘Last gasp’: Kony’s cult strikes again Sam de Brito’s blog: make Kony famous Flashback: US troops to stay until Kony found

More than 11 million views on YouTube and almost 1.8 million “likes” on Facebook in less than 48 hours.

That’s the viral success of Invisible Children, a US non-profit company that is running Kony2012, a social media campaign against Joseph Kony, the leader of African militia the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Australian social media expert James Griffin said that the Kony2012 campaign will be seen as a “turning point where people understood the power of social media”.

Mr Griffin, of social media intelligence group SR7, said part of Invisible Children’s campaign strategy has been to harness social media and the lack of barriers between young people and cultural icons such as celebrities.

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Slowly but surely, Australian businesses are beginning to take social media seriously. But is it a genuine communication channel with customers or just another box to tick?

Research out last week suggests that many businesses see it as the latter. A survey of 100 top-tier retail and service firms found that just 25% of those with a Twitter profile responded to a query.

So how can start-ups avoid the same mistake and engage with customers to boost market presence and sales?

Here are five essential tips to getting the most out of social media:

1. Do your homework
2. Put in the time
3. Be systematic
4. Don’t stick solely to the sales pitch
5. Pick out something interesting

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Start-ups are being urged to rethink their social media strategy as a new report shows businesses are failing to respond to customer queries on Facebook and Twitter in a timely manner, if at all.

The report, titled Hype or Reality? Social media in Australian retail, was conducted by social media intelligence firm SR7. It’s based on a survey of 100 top-tier retail and service companies.

Of the companies surveyed, 87 have established official Facebook pages while 76 operate an official Twitter account.

The average number of Facebook fans among the companies surveyed is 27,355 and the average number of Twitter followers is 1,008.

The research recorded how long it took companies to respond to customer enquiries on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

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Start-ups are being urged to rethink their social media strategy as a new report shows businesses are failing to respond to customer queries on Facebook and Twitter in a timely manner, if at all.

The report, titled Hype or Reality? Social media in Australian retail, was conducted by social media intelligence firm SR7. It’s based on a survey of 100 top-tier retail and service companies.

Of the companies surveyed, 87 have established official Facebook pages while 76 operate an official Twitter account.

The average number of Facebook fans among the companies surveyed is 27,355 and the average number of Twitter followers is 1,008.

The research recorded how long it took companies to respond to customer enquiries on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Gustaf Sorman-Nilsson, head of social media audit at SR7, says it’s surprising how many companies collect fans and followers, yet can’t respond to them in a timely manner, if at all.

Of the 87 companies with an established Facebook page, 59 (or 68%) responded to a customer enquiry made via their Facebook page.

On Twitter, only 19 (25%) of the 76 companies with Twitter profiles responded to an enquiry.

The majority of Facebook accounts responded within three hours of the customer service query being posted, but only a third of the 19 responses on Twitter were recorded within an hour.

Sorman-Nilsson says companies need to think less about numbers and more about interaction.

“We found that the number of fans or followers a brand has is an inappropriate measure of its level of engagement and success in social media,” he says.

“Brands are placing too much emphasis on the number of followers they have. The true return on investment is customer acquisition and retention, not fan and follower count.”

This story can be read in full here http://bit.ly/z3Zaov

Table below: Time in which it took brands to respond on the Facebook platform.

TO hear Google Chief Executive Larry Page tell it, Google+ has become a robust competitor in the social networking space, with 90 million users registering since its June launch.

But those numbers mask what’s really going on at Google+.

It turns out Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook Inc., which is preparing for a massive initial public offering. New data from research firm comScore Inc. shows that Google+ users are signing up—but then not doing much there.

Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.

Behind the lack of engagement are Google’s difficulties in differentiating Google+ from Facebook.

Photo by Alex Wong

Although Kevin Rudd didn't triumph in the leadership challenge on 27th February 2012, he continues to blitz the political field in the online arena.

Twitter followers as of 9.45am 27/02/2012:

Kevin Rudd Twitter followers: 1,075,258
Julia Gillard Twitter followers: 189,487.

Whether by accident or design, social media firm SR7 said it had seen quite a few instances of voters in electorates directly contacting their MP via Twitter and asking them to vote for Kevin Rudd in the leadership ballot. "This modern form of public lobbying may have an impact on their vote if enough pressure is generated and applied on the MP," SR7's James Griffin said. "It is not clear whether this is a tactic that Rudd supporters have deliberately organised, however it does mirror his theme of 'people power'."

Firms need to stop viewing social media as a marketing “cyber utopia”, an Australian internet expert says, after Woolworths and Westpac became the latest victims of an online backlash.

Facebook users took the opportunity to slam Woolworths this weekend after the supermarket giant called for its readers to complete a sentence.

“Happy weekend everyone! Finish this sentence: this weekend, I can’t wait to: ————,” Woolworths wrote in a post on Friday afternoon.

The responses included: “Throw out the fruit and veg I bought at woolworths only 3 days ago that goes off so much more quickly than the green grocers”, “see a rat running along the back of the shelves … So fresh it’s still running around” and “do grocery shopping wearing a hazmat suit because apparently using deodorant and working at Woolworths isn’s a requirement”.

Not all the comments about Woolworths were negative, with some people criticising the “whingers” posting on the page.

On Westpac’s Facebook page, a post explaining the bank’s decision to increase interest rates on Friday night was quickly slammed.

“Westpac are showing its customers who is really important – and its not the customers!” one reader raged, while another wrote: “Stop paying Gail Kelly and other exec’s such a ridiculous salaries and you might not find wholesale funding so difficult!!”

Commenters also complained their negative posts were being deleted.

Even as social media presents unprecedented business opportunities for marketing, customer service, brand building and consumer relationships, many organizations are still struggling to embrace it for fear that it negatively effects worker productivity or puts the company at risk. A 2011 survey by Society for Human Resource Management reveals that 43% of businesses block access to social media on company-owned computers or handheld devices.

Rather than policing employees, these organizations would be better served by a social media governance model — a collection of policies, procedures and educational resources that allow you to manage social media internally. A sound social media governance model empowers your employees while keeping them accountable. It allows you to quickly recover from a blow to your brand, or even sidestep it completely. It helps you keep your social initiatives on track and aligned with your business’ strategic goals.

While many of the elements of a social media governance model will vary across industries and organizations, here are five fundamental components that should be part of any plan.

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