Hundreds of comments have been added to their Facebook page today (19 Mar 10) since lunchtime, with more arriving every minute. The page has over 90,000 fans, although it is clear many joined only to attack the company.

Comments include:

shame on you! You are causing deforestation and trashing orang-utan habitat

here’s two chocolatey fingers up to Nestle

All publicity is good publicity except in this case. Losers.

A similar campaign is now running on Twitter, with around 10 posts per minute on the topic.

Although not yet confirmed to be directly related, the Nestle share price has fallen since the social media backlash started.

Is this bad news for companies thinking about social media? That probably depends on the company.

If you genuinely care about your customers, their concerns and how happy they are then no – social media is the perfect way for people to understand your values and that you care, even when something goes wrong.

However, if it turns out your values are open to question, expect people to use social media to question them. And they’ll do this whether your business is engaged in social media or not.

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“In short, a faceless presence on a social network doesn’t really work that well. People are there for people, not brands. Companies need to put their own employees out there authentically if they hope to break through in the Age of Streams.”

A great point, missed by many companies.

Jasen commented: “So companies should have posts like evangelists to work in social media space?”

No!

I’d like to speak to real people when I speak to corporates on social media. I don’t think that’s a social media evangalist, or a specially created post.

If I’m speaking to Dell, I might want to speak to a technician who really knows my hardware inside out. If I’m speaking to a hotel chain, it might be the member of staff who is a keen hillwalker knows about nearby routes.

BT staff are encouraged to blog about their jobs helping us understand what they do (taking customer confidentiality into account). I believe AT&T pay their staff a bonus if they help someone out on a social network – they don’t have to be “customer service” staff.

Surely it’s all about ethos. Zappos is successful, and was bought by Amazon, because it is a customer service company, not a shoe company. Every member of staff is a customer service evangalist, not a brand evangalist.

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Spotify, which today became available on the iPhone, allows its users to legally share playlists of music.

Twestival ( Twitter-Festival) is a global series of events organized by volunteers around the world under short timescales, which bring people offline for a great cause. There’s one in most cities around the world. 4TM is supporting the event in Inverness, Scotland.

You can enjoy some great, free music inspired by the event by loading the playlist at: http://sharemyplaylists.com/twestival-tracks/

You need to have the Spotify desktop client (free) to use the playlist. Tracks include: Noisettes – Wild Young Hearts, Michael Jackson – Black or White and Queen – Don’t Stop Me Now.

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You can visit the group yourself – while it remains up and running anyway.

What may get missed in this story is that it is not the fault of social media or Facebook. They’re merely (powerful) tools. Rather, it suggests poor recruitment and customer service training within DSG – why should staff have such a poor attitude towards customers?

Perhaps as importantly, it also tells us that DSG have not been proactively monitoring social media; if they had the problem may have been resolved before the media found it and turned it into a major public relations disaster. Just how could a major company miss a public group of staff with over 3,000 members?

Some choice comments from current and former staff include:

“I worked for this soul sapping spawn of Satan in the mid late 90’s. I’ve the bottle of champagne on ice for the day they go bust.”

“well i had a person askin 4 an Aerial 4 his car, and if we did, do we also sell systems 4 the cars!!!! i mean WTH!!!!!”

“Some customers are really really stupid….. I grow weary of explaining to customers that a wireless enabled laptop does not magically pluck the internet from thin air without the need for an ISP!!”

“We have to put up with customers being arsey, mardy or just plain stupid. This is our reply to them.”

At the time of writing customers are fighting back:

“You do all realise DSG has the worst reputation mainly due to it’s staff ? You are all a bunch of drooling doe eyed idiots.”

“Most of the times I’ve been into Dixons, Curry’s or PC World I’ve been frankly astounded at what I’ve heard the sales staff telling customers”

The lesson? Ignore social media at your peril. Could this be a new Ratners?

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Her post to her university’s Facebook fan page, “…welcomes the class of 2013 to campus on Thursday”, received 17 comments and 23 likes within minutes of posting. A similar post about moving in day had 10 likes and 6 comments.

In short, she created a message that was simple and very concise, yet was a statement people wanted to interact with. The SUNY New Paltz alumni remember when they started university, and were delighted to have the opportunity to send greetings and wallow in just a little bit of nostalga.

We’ve found the same on the Forres Facebook page, which we created for the Scottish town in which we are based. A simple post “It’s Flying Ant Day in Forres” quickly clocked up 12 comments. A review of the posts on the page suggests that shorter, punchy posts get more responses. It’s a reflection, perhaps, of the difference between Facebook and Blogs. Facebook is about quick interactions, acknowledging others, exchanging memories. Blogs are more considered, and tend to receive longer responses.

What are your experiences of Facebook posts? Which posts get the most feedback?

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It’s a highly significant development in the music and mobile industries: for £10 a month users will be able to download, legally, their choice of commercial music to their iPhone.

The iPhone application understood to be limited to 3,333 tracks being available offline at a time – about 8Gb worth – but user will be able to swap the downloaded tracks at any time.  The full Spotify music library – currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain – can be streamed wherever there is a suitable network connection. That’s an amazing 3.8 million tracks available on your iPod or iPhone for you to choose from.

To date the main source of music for iPhone users has been Apple’s iTunes store. It’s not cheap – often charging more for a downloadable album than the equivalent CD delivered to your door from an online retailer.  Spotify are effectively offering access to over a million pounds worth of music for a modest monthly fee.

This is a disruptive technology and business model. A review of Twitter posts about Spotify suggests that the music industry doesn’t just benefit from the revenue generated by Spotify. Many tweets suggest that users have re-discovered bands on the service and bought merchandise to bring back the memories.

There is a growing social element too. I can put together a playlist of tracks I think a friend would like, or suit a mood, or complement an event. That playlist can be shared with any other Spotify user, without breaking any music sharing laws. Expect to see many Spotify playlists published on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo over the coming months. There could be an impact on music-led radio stations as everyone can put together a selection of tracks.

Many are surprised Apple has approved the application at all. They recently rejected Google Voice for being too similar to the in-built phone. Isn’t an application that downloads and plays music tracks similar to the built in iPod?

It may be that Apple plan to launch their own subscription service soon, and wish to ready the market and avoid the controversy that rejecting the application would have caused. Apple would have an inbuilt advantage over Spotify’s app – you could listen to music while using the iPhone or iPod for other tasks. Apple do not allow third party applications to run in the background meaning the music will turn off if you try to play a game or surf the Internet.

There may be another reason for approval. Apple have repeatedly admitted to being in dialogue with Spotify during the approval process. Is this normal? We have yet to get our hands on the final release, so it’s possible the application has been modified from the test versions released earlier.

It is also possible, however, that the dialogue has surrounded the revenue model. Apple already revenue share on paid applications, and may have agreed to Spotify becoming available on the basis that they received a cut of the revenues generated by the app. That might have made the likely hit on sales at the iTunes store just a little more easy to take.

(A side note: users who have Jailbroken their phones can install an unauthorised application  which will allow Spotify to be used in the background. This may be another incentive for users to circumvent Apple’s walled garden).

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She argues that the best place is customer services: other departments such as marketing and PR tend to have one way interaction, whereas customer services already have a two-way discussions with clients.

Without a social media strategy in place, many organisations have drifted into thinking that social media is an extension of PR. Used properly, it can provide value for research, development, customer service and lead generation as well as brand development. Using social media to provide additional contact with customers outside marketing in itself can improve perception of a brand among customers. I have bought software because a company was responsive to customer comments and queries on Twitter.

Any strategy should be holistic, and customer service is as good a place as any to push a strategy forward.

Even small businesses, where one individual can adopt multiple roles, can benefit from thinking of social media in terms of multiple business functions in order to squeeze every last drop of benefit from it.

What are your thoughts?

The Forrester Blog For Business Process & Applications Professionals.

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In a report on the use of Twitter by tourism marketing organisations, VisitAviemore scored a mighty 7 out of 10, one of only 3 local tourism organisations to be featured in the review.

“Who could resist a live video link showing three newborn osprey chicks in their nest at Loch Garten? If that doesn’t make you want to jump on the next train to Aviemore there is a paintballing video on YouTube, deals on golf course fees, holiday deals and news of local events.”

Visit Scotland scored 5/10, Visit Wales 4/10 and discover NI only 2/10.

4TM provides social media advice and services to Visit Aviemore. Congratulations to the team at VisitAviemore.com!

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Again, like so much else on the Internet, web analytics often comes head to head with privacy concerns. Should people have their movements around a website tracked, even if the information is anonymous? The EU thinks not.

Currently the Privacy and Electronic Communications directive insists that web sites using cookies have to let visitors know about the cookies and how they are used. In UK law, this simply means having a privacy policy page readily available on the web site (have you got one?).

However, a proposed new law means that cookies can only be used with explicit consent of the user, unless it is essential to the functions of the site. For most analytics packages, which rely on cookies, this means that explicit consent would need to be sought and granted by the website user before they could legally be used, possibly using a pop-up or intermediate screen. It is reasonable to expect most users would say no, meaning webmasters would be unable to accurately track usage of their content. This in turn could make it difficult to measure returns, improve the web site based on how people are using the site and make a case to advertisers.

For more information about proposed regulations, visit the Outlaw.com web site. Let us know what you think using the comment form below.

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FriendFeed has been around for a while and has drawn a small and mainly technology focused group of users. Paul Buchheit’s involvment and a redesign may change that, and he’s certainly worth listening to.

For our part, be do believe that for most business users, email is now highly problematic. Team conversations on email are difficult, and there is too much “noise”.  There has to be a better way of working, and Paul could be the very man to deliver it.

The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real-Time Conversation is What’s Next – ReadWriteWeb.

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