Category: Using Social Media

George Harrison’s guitar may have gently wept, but it was Dave Carroll’s $3500 Taylor six-string that wailed the loudest.

The result was one of the best-know instances of a consumer using social media to level the playing field with a large company. But that broken guitar also changed Dave’s life, and his forthcoming book about his experiences, “United Breaks Guitars”  has a subtitle that provides a musical lesson of sorts for companies of all sizes: “The Power Of One Voice In The Age Of Social Media.”

The story has been told many times in the social media marketing blogosphere, and there are great details in David Meerman Scott’s latest book, “Real-Time Marketing and PR.” The short version: back in 2008, Dave and his band were flying United Airlines from Nova Scotia to Omaha. They had checked their guitars in baggage. When they changed planes at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, they noticed the ground crew carelessly tossing their guitars around. His Taylor was badly damaged. When he complained, United not only took its time responding, but ultimately refused to pay for the damage.

So Dave wrote a humorous protest song, “United Breaks Guitars” and shot a YouTube for it. In less than a week, the video registered millions of views with the help of bloggers. It hit another level of publicity as Dave’s story hit the mainstream media. Dave not only got a new guitar from Taylor Guitars, he got a model of guitar named after him, and United ultimately apologized – but not before learning a harsh lesson on what YouTube can accomplish in the hands of an irate, albeit musically-gifted, customer.

United now uses “United Breaks Guitars” in its customer service training. Dave now uses “United Breaks Guitars” as the basis for an additional career as a consumer advocate. He is a co-founder of Gripevine.com, a website that aims to make it easier for customers to vent their complaints, and also attempts to help companies become more transparent and respond faster to those gripes. And his first book comes out in mid-May, featuring a forward from noted Forrester Research social media analyst Josh Bernoff.

“United Breaks Guitars” happened three years ago. What grade would Dave give corporate America in 2012 on its use of social media to resolve customer service issues?

“I think that embracing social media is a process just underway,” he told me in an email, “but as more companies accept that social media is here to stay, that consumers have the ability to expose poor products or services, and that brands are co-created more than ever, their grades will rise. The companies that hold onto old paradigms and don’t change will become irrelevant and disappear, I believe.

“Opening up a Facebook page and Twitter account is the tip of the iceberg. There are still many large corporations holding onto the antiquated notion that they can still control the conversation about their brand when in actuality, social media dictates that leading the conversation is the new reality in brand management.”

Gripevine is helping moderate that conversation. Carroll said the site is exceeding his expectations, given that it’s only two months old; more than 25,000 visitors a month stay for more than 7 minutes at a time, and more than 500 consumers have opened accounts. But perhaps more importantly, more than 100 companies, including some Fortune 1000 brands like Coca-Cola and Verizon, are participating in Gripevine’s Resolution Platform which monitors social media conversations.

“What makes us unique for businesses is the ability to engage offline with customers as opposed to having to engage on a message board, and companies like that,” Carroll writes. “What I’m most proud about Gripevine is our goal of solving problems between consumers and companies, as opposed to helping people bash companies, or aid companies in avoiding taking responsibility for bad service.  We don’t choose sides in a confrontation.  We choose to see conflict as something negative and resolving conflict as a win-win for both consumers and companies.”

Small and large companies would do well to reacquaint themselves with “United Breaks Guitars.” It might help them from singing their own version of the customer service blues.

Are you familiar with “United Breaks Guitars?” How well do you think major brands are doing in their use of social media to right customer service mistakes? Let us know in our Comments section.

Renay San Miguel is the Chief Content Officer at Splash Media and On-Air Talent and Host with Spark360.tv. You can find him on Twitter @PrimoMedia. Click here to see all of Renay’s blog posts

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Klout is now the Most Evil Thing in Social Media, the Loki to all the other superheroes in the social network universe. (Facebook as Iron Man? Discuss.) We know it’s official because Klout now has a parody site of sorts – Klouchebag.com, whipped together just this week by Tom Scott, a UK-based web and social media observer/speaker who’s fed up with the controversial influence-measurement service.

Klouchebag purports to measure “how much of an asshat you are on Twitter,” in a satirical take on Klout’s mission to measure your social media activity and engagements. Using Klout-like graphics that stop just this side of copyright infringement, Scott has you enter your Twitter username so his site can use his ARSE rating system to determine your Klouchebag score. What’s ARSE, you ask? It’s described on the website as: “Anger: profanity and rage. Retweets: “please RT”s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style. Social Apps: every useless check-in on FourSquare or its horrible brethren. And English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this’ll be quite high.”

Klouchebag gives you your score and also calls you names based on those figures; “a bit of a prat,” “facepalm central,” that kind of thing.

Scott told Splash Media in an email that the website only went live Friday morning and it’s already burning up his servers. “It took off like a rocket!” He doesn’t have any traffic figures to share yet, but if links to coverage in stories on The Next Web and Mashable are any indication, he’s definitely hit an online nerve. When it comes to anecdotal reactions, “the comments I’ve got have been almost entirely positive. I had one mostly-incoherent insulting response, but other than that everyone seems to like the joke. And fortunately no one’s taken it seriously!”

Not that he’s using Klouchebag as a way to diss all social media, mind you. “Social media’s brilliant, provided you realize that you can always turn it off. Nothing important ever happens solely on the internet. And there’s no such thing as being ‘famous online’ – that’s like being ‘famous on the fax machines!

“Klout, though, is one of the worst ideas ever put online,” Scott said. “Klout annoys me for the same reason that search engine optimization annoys me: it’s an enormous amount of effort designed to game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you.”

Klouchebag is a fitting capper for an interesting week for Klout. Wired published this profile piece that revealed some companies are asking for Klout scores in their hiring, which got the same negative reaction as the recent news that some businesses were asking job applicants for their Facebook passwords. The company also released an iPhone app and Brand Squads, its version of brand pages. I blogged about those developments on the SplashCube website this week; I found the iPhone app lacking in terms of content and features, but Brand Pages show promise as long as Klout can figure out a way for smaller businesses to play.

Others have been piling on Klout since the company angered its users last fall by tweaking its influence-ranking algorithms, lowering scores in the process. This week alone, Forbes and the New Yorker have detailed why Klout has become the social media service you love to hate.

I like the idea of Klout democratizing influence, giving average users a chance to rank as high as Justin Bieber. And as Wired reports, big brands are starting to reward high Klout scores with discounts and giveaways. There’s nothing wrong with loyalty and incentive programs, but it shouldn’t be limited to large companies; again, Klout needs to get busy with SMB’s the way FourSquare and Facebook have. But the company now has a serious perception problem in terms of its algorithmic credibility. Too many people are just fine with not knowing their Klout score, despite the obvious appeal many of us have with knowing how we rank in various aspects of our lives. That’s the behaviorial temptation Klout is feeding off of, but indifference to Klout scores are becoming a badge of honor in the social mediasphere.

As Klouchebag’s Scott says, “to quote the WOPR computer from ‘War Games:’ ‘the only way to win is not to play.’”

Renay San Miguel is the Chief Content Officer at Splash Media and On-Air Talent and Host with Spark360.tv. You can find him on Twitter @PrimoMedia. Click here to see all of Renay’s blog posts.

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If you’re a Facebook user and you are also on the BranchOut App – which targets professionals and sits inside your Facebook account – you may have seen that you’re now getting email notifications from FB friends who have joined your BranchOut network.

The notifications are evidence that the BranchOut App continues to scale in ways that are surprising to social media observers. Last week Forbes.com, in a story headlined “BranchOut Looks To Dethrone LinkedIn,” reported that the San Francisco-based company recently landed another round of venture capital financing and has now hit the 25 million-user mark.

When Renay San Miguel interviewed BranchOut CEO Rick Marini in this SplashCast from August 2011, the speculation was that his company had less than 10 million users, which should give you some idea of the rapid growth achieved by the app. At the time of the interview, Facebook was reporting 750 million users; it recently updated that figured to 900 million, so BranchOut seems to have chosen the right partner for its future.

In this SplashCast, Marini talks about how the company differentiates itself from LinkedIn and details his long-term goals for BranchOut.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same: as a teenager, I collected Marvel comic books. As an (alleged) adult, I collect GetGlue stickers for films based on Marvel comic books.

Even though “The Avengers,” the movie that brings together several of Marvel’s superheroes from previous blockbusters won’t hit theaters until May 4th, I’ve already checked in to the film via GetGlue, the entertainment-based social network. I did that because of the limited-release Iron Man sticker that GetGlue was offering as an incentive to its users. Yes, I’ve linked my GetGlue account to Facebook (there are smartphone GetGlue apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry), so my friends can see the virtual version of the sticker. But I can also send away for the physical versions to be mailed to me if I really want to fly my comic book-geek flag.

“We reward users with stickers and film trailers for sharing their excitement about movies before they open,” Kimber Myers, GetGlue’s senior director of partnership told Splash Media via email. “Once the films arrive in theaters, sharing that you’re watching them will earn you more stickers, with an especially cool one for going opening weekend.”

This is how the New York-based company has gathered more than 2 million users since its launch in 2008: by offering exclusive content, incentives and discounts, as well as a virtual salon for media lovers who want to comment on the latest movies, TV shows, books, music and live sporting events. And with the summer movie season officially launching with “The Avengers,” GetGlue executives say they are expecting those social media-based film conversations to get very loud very soon.

“For most of the studios, having GetGlue stickers is something that they do for every film they release theatrically,” Myers said. “Movies are also making GetGlue a part of their standard social sharing on their sites.”

No wonder: with the millions they spend on “tentpole” franchises and sequels, the summer movie season is make-or-break time for the studios, and more of them are turning to social media marketing to generate important pre-release awareness. Because GetGlue stickers and check-ins can be shared via Facebook and Twitter, “the studios are getting additional amplification from this activity.”

How much amplification? “Studios can see 15-20% of their total social activity coming from GetGlue and its 2 million-plus movie-loving users,” Myers said.

GetGlue has special plans for several of the summer’s highly-anticipated movies. Myers said her company is working with Marvel to try and make “The Avengers” the biggest movie in GetGlue’s history, a title currently held by the recently-released “Hunger Games.” GetGlue will offer special stickers when the movie hits 500,000 check-ins and again when it passes the million-check-in mark. (“The Avengers” is currently at more than 300,000, making it the summer movie generating the most buzz, Myers added.)

All that makes GetGlue activity a good barometer for not only which summer films people are talking about the most, but how effective the studios have become at social media marketing. Myers cites “Snow White And The Huntsman” (100,000-plus check-ins), “The Dark Knight Rises,” “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Dark Shadows” as GetGlue favorites creating a lot of pre-release buzz.

Renay San Miguel is the Chief Content Officer at Splash Media and On-Air Talent and Host with Spark360.tv. You can find him on Twitter @PrimoMedia. Click here to see all of Renay’s blog posts.

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Why aren’t more businesses using Google+ Hangouts in their social media marketing strategy? The live multi-user video chat feature of Google’s social network offers a lot of opportunities for companies of all sizes to get closer to their customers. So what’s keeping businesses from taking advantage of it?

Maybe the recent redesign of Google+ will change that situation. That’s the focus of this SplashCast, featuring Splash Media social media manager Duncan Gilman, co-host of the daily live SMTV online broadcast. Gilman goes over the Google+ changes – which put Hangouts in the spotlight – with SplashCast host Renay San Miguel.