What is the Social Media Agenda?

It isn't normally an acid test for a business to ask that if it failed to survive from tomorrow would we miss it. But you could easily ask that question when applied to say the Royal Mail whose collapse would have a very large effect if it shut down tomorrow as post and parcels may not get delivered before Christmas, as an example.

It's perhaps more applicable to ask the question when the company offers its service free of charge, like Twitter.

Yesterday I asked if social media and networking had actually down anything for us. I don't think anyone would disagree that the new medium has helped change the way many of us communicate and therefore it has done something for us. But if a substantial part of social media was to change, not exist or become chargeable as of tomorrow morning, would we actually miss it?

Let's ask that question of Twitter. Why Twitter? because it is the most ingeniously simple of all the social media ideas. In just 140 characters you have to say something that you hope many people will read as something of value. Well I follow some 180 people and I can honestly say that I would value around 1% of what they say. I set aside Cricket Commentator David Lloyd whose list of Christmas presents for his 'Nest of Vipers' was hilarious and Shane Warne's public and sugary growing love story with his fiancé Elizabeth Hurley - they have been intriguing in different ways. Why? Because they are stories 'at source'. They are not newspaper articles or people surmising, they are the individuals saying real things.

But if Twitter died tomorrow, I can honestly say nothing would change of any consequence in my life - my business would carry on, life would carry on. Like the loss of a favourite TV channel, that would be that.

I would say Twitter has that odd feel about it as a business. So much might possibly be done by it but its fragile mechanism and attraction depends almost solely on the users' love affair with chuntering out any old 140 characters regularly unimpeded, unregulated and free from bombardment by advertisers. Mess with any of that equation and you suddenly have the whole lot falling down.

Twitter had further inward investment of some $300m from a Saudi Prince recently. There is no shortage of cash for investment and clearly all the investors see the potential return. Or do they? Is this the rich people's equivalent of putting $300m on the nose of some nag in the 5.30 at Kempton Park? Or have they seen the way that a 100m users will suddenly realise $billions of revenue every year?

If that medium is missable from tomorrow, then you would have to question investors' sanity. Clearly, with that kind of inbound investment money, Twitter is sticking around for a while yet. But the clock is ticking and pay back will be required some day soon. 

I think there is a huge danger in believing that just by attracting a large following that you can suddenly monetize it. Business models are key here but the bit that really worries me is the honesty with the users. If Twitter never proposes to charge users any money then realistically all they are is a database company who will rent out the 'space' each user occupies to the highest bidders to attract those users to spend some money on products or services. Twitter and Facebook, in that sense are glorified TV channels with the IP addresses of all the users which is pretty good knowledge.

That makes them the ad man's dream. If that is the case, shouldn't the users know that some day they will get bombarded with adverts, time and again with ever more personalised content to stimulate us buying? 

The Real Future of Social Media

Some years ago, I went to a presentation on the future by an entrepreneur who had invested in several internet companies every one of which I can say have failed. However, he did foresee that there would come a time when every advertiser on the planet will no longer work on house addresses or hit and hope on TV adverts, they will send personalised adverts into your private space on the internet with full knowledge of your buying habits, the credit cards you use, how much credit you have, what sex, age and dimensions you were, where you shopped, what you did on holiday, where your holiday snaps are, what you do for a living, what private habits you have, who your family were and what you were doing at any exact time. The murmur at the interval was that man was talking rubbish.

If anyone wanted to know all about any one of us, all that information is largely available from many sources on the web. A great deal of it is now held on Facebook and other social media sites. We have surrendered potentially valuable personal details of all sorts onto the web and there is very little left for people to know. The race is on to consolidate that information and monetize it.

Make no bones about it, the business model of every social media company is to whore its user base as long as we don't pay. Advertising of the future will no longer be hit and hope, it will be highly personalised and very intrusive but there will be far more sinister uses for all that data. 

In that context, if Twitter died tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it. But it's records of what I have done and said are saleable to somebody so there is a lasting legacy.

In some unnerving way, the whole business model of social media is mass blackmailing. I don't necessarily mean blackmailing as we know it although there is a great deal of potential there, but I mean advertising of such a personal nature that it 'blackmails' our sensibilities into making us do things we wouldn't have done without the stimulation to do so. And the 'protection racket' will be for us to pay to stop receiving such offers all the time.

The internet will become a legalised, largely unregulated forum for a good old protection racket.

There's more. Just as financiers have turned to nuclear physicists to help them beat the markets, psychologists can be used to make us all part with cash we would never have parted with otherwise. Supermarkets use 'data warehousing' to look at our individual buying habits and give us 'suggested trolley loads' and then tailor offers to make us buy more - because they know we will. In fact, they will be able to predict the precise moment to know when we will be more prone to do so.

How? If we Tweet or add a Facebook message with specific data, don't be surprised to find something specifically tailored to the context of what you have just done using all your personal data to predict exactly what you will do next. To sell that exact moment to an advertiser could become the nirvana of every social media company.

So it isn't just your personal space that is for sale, it is every second of your existence based on the intimate knowledge of you as an individual and every personal and financial piece of data on you and your family, friends and business associates.

There is a way to go yet on this journey. But people don't invest this kind of money in such flimsy business ideas without the firm knowledge that there is a mega payback. The payback will be guaranteed by our ever increasing willingness to not just surrender more personal data onto the web but to be able to track exactly what we are doing and when.

You didn't think there was a reason for setting Facebook as your default internet page with automatic login? Didn't you, really? 

In the world of monetisation of social media, the real fun has yet to begin. I hear people bleat about data protection and privacy but I would challenge that not more than 1% of all the 800m Facebook users has ever read more than the first sentence of the company's Terms of Use.

You didn't really think all these benevolent platforms were for free, did you? Microsoft gave us all those lovely free products and yet made 40% net profit on sales. 

Nothing is ever really given for free.

Pulling Down the Big Bucks

On average, CEO pay increased some 32% from this time last year. That's going to hurt a few people when they read that.

Are these guys worth it? I mean, as a customer, when was the last time you got visited or called by a CEO of one your suppliers? When did they last even get visibility of your complaint let alone help with it?

Instead, low paid, often offshore staff get the blunt end of the customer wrath when things go wrong and all they are equipped with is a few scripts to handle supposedly every situation. Not one of them is empowered to make a decision and none of them are allowed to escalate something beyond a local supervisor. You want to speak to a Director? Oh dear, they don't take calls, I'm afraid, sir.

Hearing that makes me so angry.

So what precisely do Directors and CEOs do while these poor wretches have to deal with unreasonable people like me who don't take their fob-offs?

Let me give you three examples that occurred to me recently.

1) The Good

Step up Virgin Media. OK we got off to a bad start as they took my order to change from Sky and then found out their records were wrong and my house was not served by fibre. I complained and some offshore chap said a new installation would be arranged. The engineer came and reaffirmed that no fibre came to the house. The cable pit was 5 metres from my front gate but a small private road was in-between. So no go. That's it - no services and you can go and re-order Sky, pal.

Never to take things lying down, I Googled CEO email addresses and there is a super site that gives you them. The CEO at Virgin Media is Neil Birkett. I dare say he did not personally handle my case but I got an email of apology back immediately and within a few weeks the road was dug up and I was cabled up too.

Damn good job, Mr Birkett. You deserve every penny you earn in my book for responding to customer needs and realising when mistakes are made they need to be rectified. For the cost of digging up a road he will probably get a lifetime's loyalty and some.

2) The Bad

I fell for it. I bought one of those cheap and nasty Apps on my iPad that tells you they can make the thing print on any WiFi printer. Like heck they do.

So I emailed support as phones do not exist on this App world. Someone responded soon enough and told me to install something called 'WePrint' on my PC and this would solve it. Err, not as such. Now my iPad recognises my printer is there but the signal gets lost in the ether somewhere and WePrint sits there doing naff all.

It's not a great deal of money at stake but, frankly, if something doesn't do something it should do then do not have the gall to charge, I say. Not so, Print Central was a waste of a few quid and nobody was happy to refund me. Now EuroSmartz Ltd the software writers can suffer by having their name mentioned negatively in a user's blog. The software was rubbish and the support was hopeless. And you had the cheek to keep my money.

Shame on you. Where was the CEO when I asked for them? They don't get involved in such trivia. Ah well, my mistake.

3) The Ugly

There had to be a humdinger. Step up Charles Dunstone and his Carphone Warehouse crew. Let me explain, I have been a customer of theirs via a single number my wife uses for over 12 years, always upgrading and spending £thousands with them over time.

The love affair ended abruptly last year, sadly. My wife took an upgrade and got a Sony Ericsson phone - nice too. Within a year the thing could no longer be charged up. It still worked fine, just the external copper connecters had a short on one of the prongs and would no longer accept charge. So we took it for repair to the CPW shop in St Albans and my wife, as she runs her entire business from her mobile in terms of contacts etc, explicitly pointed out that the phone worked fine and that the data on the phone should be preserved, i.e. do not zap it. This was typed onto the Work Docket and signed by my wife.

Two weeks later the phone came back. It still worked but all the data had been zapped off it. With it came a diagram with an arrow pointing to the charging connector saying it had shorted. The genius engineer stated that 'water damage' had caused this and therefore it invalidated the warranty and the phone was now 'Beyond Economic Repair' (BER in their parlance).

The kid in the shop said the only remedy now was to buy a new phone at £350+. At this point, I must admit, I lost my customary cool. To all the questions about why it had been zapped when we asked for this not to be done, why can't the connector be replaced, why can't we pay for the repair if no warranty, what does the manufacturer say was 'like it or lump it' in so many words.

I subsequently got the phone repaired for less than £40 at a shop around the corner. CPW somehow kept our memory card which they did return eventually but perhaps not before some enterprising person might have taken a peak as to what was on it as was revealed in a recent court case which CPW lost involving Chris de Burgh's daughter. I would never say such a thing but you wonder, don't you?

Some weeks and a verbal admission of blame by an engineering manager later which was subsequently denied, I got through to the 'Office of Charles Dunstone' no less. This is an elite team of 'fixers' who act in his name to remedy customer problems. Don't believe it.

By this time I had cancelled our remaining contract with CPW which happened to be with O2. I was charged the outstanding amount. So when I contacted Dunstone's office all I wanted really was my £40 and remaining contract money back - after all they had agreed not to zap the data and the phone could have been repaired. There was no need to try and scare us into buying a new phone and part with all that cash.

No way. A Neil Rosen actually called me a blackmailer over the phone for asking for my money back. It was as if I was extorting him by holding his family at gunpoint when I had paid them £135 for no service.

What possesses people to say such slanderous things to customers is beyond me - what did he hope to gain by doing so? Did he not know that it as actually something for which he or his company could be sued for? I even consulted a lawyer who said to take them to the Small Claims Court. But guess what? I didn't. Why? Because I could not be bothered even though it would have cost me nothing to do so. I simply did not have the time and energy. Dunstone won.

In the end, I lost the will to live. But I marked down this. To my mind Charles Dunstone and his Carphone Warehouse team tried to extort money out of me for a new phone when the one I had was less than a year old and still working save being able to be charged up. For the price of a new copper connector, the thing could have been repaired and I would still be customer today and set fair for another 12 years of coughing up money to them.

Instead, here I am blogging and tweeting about a bunch of nasties who even had the audacity to accuse one of their customers of 'blackmail' when raising a problem.

So there are CEO's and there are CEOs. Neil Birkett and Virgin Media could not get higher praise from me and they deserve any recommendations I can give.

Carphone Warehouse - don't touch them with a barge pole is my advice and the CEO is full of hot air in pretending to be involved in customer care. Count yourselves lucky you did not get a case raised for slander.

Blackmail, my backside. It was my money - perhaps we should look up the definition in the dictionary.

The Point

All these situations can be avoided. Empowering front line employees is a brave act but giving them the power to make on the spot decisions that even cost money will save loads in the long run.

If you don't believe me, just try and it and see. Customer loyalty doesn't cost that much when you do it right. Do it wrong and it costs a bomb.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad