This time around anyway…Fortunately, Brian has agreed to attend TD2010 and speak, but all our efforts have not been for nought…there will be more…so come back for more on the announcement soon and be quick on the button.

Nuff said.

To any business out there considering social media – this is your wake up call. Let Eurostar get a kicking for this and learn from their mistakes.

YOU on the other hand can do it the right way. You cannot get involved in social media if you don’t:

1. Know who is already talking about you – for god’s sake if you do NOTHING else, listen to conversations taking place about you.
2. Have your assets protected – make sure you own your brand name on all the places you need to use
3. Get your back office sorted:

• Assign people – Know who is going to do the listening, where and with what.
• Triage comments – deal with the most important/dangerous/
• Define the information flow – know how information will get from the end user to the person capable of answering it.

As much as We Are Social annoyingly name drop work they have done into every comment they leave on the web EVER, they have some bloody smart people working there and I do think they have been unfairly criticised for their role in this – they have gone beyond the call of duty to manage a problem that is not of their doing, nor their brief to sort.

Eurostar it seems, just didn’t want to do it properly (although I’m not sure I would have said as much on my company blog) which is a fundamental problem and one which ties up my previous post about clients needing to place more trust in the agencies they appoint – that they are doing this properly.

Sure, the problems would not have gone away, but Eurostar would have been much wiser to listen to the people they appointed to run Little Break, Big Difference – after all that is a great piece of work requiring a major budget. If they can trust we are social to implement an initiative of this size, then SURELY they must trust them to help them manage their comms in the same channels too?

Emma Harris, Eurostar’s Sales and Marketing Director shows the problem:

“We’re the commercial department and we were kind of ready for social media but the business wasn’t. To start involving crisis communication and disruption messages into social media, we just weren’t ready for it. “

Again, as per my last piece, perhaps there are so many snake oil agencies out there that clients have come to distrust every agency they meet, or perhaps the comms team see social media as a marketing thing…or perhaps marketing see this as a comms thing…whatever, if you learn one thing from this post and the whole debacle:

Customers are platform and stature-neutral – they don’t care about who you are. Find ways to deal with them in their playing field how they want to play.

WAS – good job folks. I think you’ve delivered above the call of duty and given a good account of yourselves.

Update: please read Andrew’s post for an incredibly balanced, considered view! Your life will be better for it!

The audience in its (in)finite wisdom decide what it thinks its followers would be interested in and communicated it accordingly to their audience. As such, the perception of your brand is as much governed by who spreads what as much as what you spread.

I’m always keen to learn more about “my audience” given that there are now over 1000 followers in it and this lovely little tool, Twittersheep (thanks for the heads-up Sam) tells me a little bit more about my followers by looking at their/your biogs and effectively giving me a tag cloud of the main words used.

Anyone embarking on social media activity of ANY type should always begin by listening and understanding to what the audience is saying, but few (free) services allow us to understand the profile of our audience.

Even though we can dig down into each of those terms, it would be great to be able to see a list of all those people who sit under each of those terms. In the next iteration maybe?

As How-Do readers now know, I am leaving KMP in  mid-February to join Amaze in Manchester as a Social Media Specialist. Darn you Hugh and your self-fulfilling prophecies!

Anyone who knows me, knows how excited I am by the move but at the same time, how appreciative I am to everyone at KMP for the help and guidance they have given me over the last 20 months or so.

It’s been a great time at KMP but the new ride promises to be even better. Having already met many of my new colleagues I am thrilled to become part of such a knowledgeable, creative and genuinely enthusiastic bunch.

Laters dudes…