Courtesy Social Media Club of DC
Wow! What a great experience it was to present at last Tuesday’s Social Media Club of DC monthly breakfast. The audience was amazing, seemed enthralled, and asked many good questions.
My cohorts, Mike Kohn, Erin Orr and I, spoke about collaborative cross-departmental work in order to produce cohesive digital campaigns and successful social media initiatives.
Mike and I both work for a large architecture and engineering firm called SmithGroup. He’s in HR while I’m in marketing and PR. Together, we collaborate daily on our fledgeling social media program that was launched in early 2010. Small firm Fox Architects is very fortunate to have Erin as its Director of Marketing. She is a social media dynamo who has used Facebook and Twitter to really catapult her firm into one of the industry’s most well known new media brands.
There is a mostly unseen interdependence between HR and marketing with regard to social media. Employees are many times our firms’ best ambassadors and love to promote their places of work. But these tools are so new, staff many times aren’t clear on proper protocol for utilizing them; should I identify myself and/or employer in my blog? Is it ok to post status updates on Facebook about my workplace? How can we use Twitter to become knowledge leaders in our industry?
To answer some of these questions, Mike, Erin and I pointed to the establishment of simple employee guidelines, goals, and training for staff at our firms. These address the challenge of keeping internal staff engaged and active with our firms social media platforms in a responsible, yet still fun, way.
How are you using social media at your office? Are departments collaborating?
I suspect most of us have had pretty bad experiences at the airport. Long lines at security, delayed/cancelled flights, and lost baggage are ubiquitous problems we’ve all encountered even before 9/11.
But my flight home to DC last week from Madison, Wisconsin on Delta Airlines was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had.
Here’s what happened: after a very nice business trip to the wonderful home of the University of Wisconsin, I checked the status of my 6:30PM return flight and discovered it was delayed by 2 hours. Since I was scheduled to arrive so late in DC anyway (via Detroit), I decided to try and catch an earlier flight in the day even though that meant I would be missing some of my business meeting. I had to make record time to the airport to catch that flight.
Delayed flights are the modus operandi for most airlines (with the exception of Southwest perhaps). But the rest of the story is what really bothered me.
First, because I changed my flight, Delta would not allow me to print my boarding pass remotely. I was going to have to use one of the self-serve kiosks at the airport, which is fine because that’s usually fast and I didn’t have bags to check.
But the two kiosks didn’t work. I was told I had to queue in the long line of travelers waiting to be helped by the two Delta employees at the full service desk. Nervous about missing my flight, I actually followed our company president to the first class check-in (with of course no line).
Surprisingly, I was quickly helped. I received my boarding pass, raced through security, and made it to the gate on time. Really on time.
This flight was delayed too. We actually had another hour before the plane we were to fly on arrived in Madison from wherever it was. (BTW Madison, and most of the country, was having amazing weather that day. I still don’t know why seemingly every flight was delayed that day.)
After an hour, the plane finally arrived at our gate ready to take us home and weary travelers celebrated. As we waited for the plane to unload so we could pile on, we noticed the flight crew was deplaning with the other passengers. One minute later, an announcement was made that our flight was cancelled because the crew had too many hours in the air that day and legally wasn’t able to fly another leg.
Hello? Delta? Didn’t you know that handy piece of information way before you told us? I, along with most of the other passengers were quite miffed. Someone in front of me thoughtfully said, “Let’s light @Delta up on Twitter.” And we did.
There was a steady volley of negative tweets going out from our gate, and I easily found other tweeps nationwide complaining about the airline which I retweeted with my own story. (If you’re wondering, I haven’t received any words of consolation from the Twitter Delta mothership.)
I ended up stranded in Madison an extra night which cost me a day in the office. The fact that Madison is such a great little city and my direct flight home the next day was perfect gives this story an uneventful ending.
Still, this was clearly a Delta #fail: delayed and cancelled flights with no or very little communication; information relayed to passengers very late; not enough staff at the ticket counter; broken ticket kiosks.
I’m sure you have a story also. What’s your worst flying nightmare?
We’ve all been following with great sadness the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as it’s now become the U.S.’s worst environmental catastrophe surpassing the Exxon Valdez debacle in Alaska. Without a doubt the public relations folks at BP have their hands full with crisis management, and leadership has lost most of their credibility as they’ve consistently downplayed the severity of the crisis at each step.
One of the world’s largest and richest companies, BP is taking a gigantic hit from which it might never recover. This “Boycott BP” Facebook page has over 220,000 fans urging drivers to bypass BP’s stations and other brands to include motor oil Castrol and am/pm mini marts.
And the bashing continues. In early May, someone smelling an opportunity created a Twitter account with the handle @BPGlobalPR which falsely claims to be authored by the PR people at the real British Petroleum, but in reality skewers the company for their handling of this disaster. Each day, over 100,000 followers are treated to dozens of satirical tweets, each more scathing than the next. And those followers are retweeting the often hilarious posts all over the social media channel. Here’s an example:
“If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn.”
As BP’s reputation and brand gets dragged through the oily mud, it got me thinking about how it should respond to this “brandjacking”. It seems within BP’s rights to have Twitter shut this account down since @BPGlobalPR doesn’t identify itself as a parody as Twitter’s terms of service mandates. But can you imagine the public outcry this move would create? But doing nothing and ignoring @BPGlobalPR doesn’t seem to be the right move either.
Crisis Communications Manager John Taylor thinks the answer is a hybrid. Taylor says that rather than asking Twitter to take down the fake account, it should force @BPGlobalPR to identify itself as a parody. Next, the oil giant should use its official Twitter handle, @BP_America, differently by actually identifying the real people tweeting and writing in a more conversational style. Folks want to converse with real people and not big corporations or brands. Comcast uses Twitter in this way.
So, what do you think? If you were in BP’s shoes, how would you handle this unprecedented crisis?
I went to a networking event a few weeks ago and slightly embarrassed myself. Although I was having a great time and seeing many friends and acquaintances, I forgot the name of someone that I had met a few times over the past months. She said, “Hi Brian” and I replied with the classic, “Hey, how’s it going………?”
She was wearing a nametag but the event was packed and the name was hidden from view. [not that it’s a good thing to have to stare at a nametag to recall a name you most certainly should know.] The alcohol certainly wasn’t helping my recall either.
It really wasn’t an issue, but it bothered me because I’m grateful to have this particular person in my professional network.
My wife has something called synesthesia. Sounds bad, right? It’s actually quite a gift. Synesthesia is is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In short, Jen associates letters and words with colors.
In conversation she sees a “stock ticker” of colors scroll through her head as she speaks and listens. In her alphabet of color, the letter A is red, B is orange, and C is yellow. Each letter, A-Z, has a unique hue, although some letters are differentiated by only slight variances in shading. Pretty cool, don’t you think?
My name, BRIAN is orange, brown, white, red and blue. Jen says the color of the first letter of a word usually dictates the color of the word, so I’m orange. And this color thing works for numbers too.
Why am I telling you about this?
It’s because my wife has the most amazing memory of anyone that I’ve ever met. She uses her “gift” to remember street addresses, dates, and most important for this discussion, names. Jen has bailed us out so many times over the years, recalling names of people she may have met quickly one time (oh, he’s green…E…and it’s a short name…it’s Ed.)
Presumably, you and I don’t have any form of synesthesia. Remembering names is tougher for us, and if we’re going to avoid the embarrassment of reaching into the name vault and coming up empty, we’re going to need to work at it.
Before heading to the event, try and find a roster of potential attendees and scan the names and companies they’re with. Get to the event early and examine the unclaimed nametags at registration. Before heading into a conversation, inspect the room for familiar faces. Having some stress-free time to collect your thoughts before seeing a contact will jog your memory for not just names, but also appropriate ice-breakers that will make your networking event fun and rewarding.
There is no better validation to someone than to see them at an event, shake his or her hand firmly, look them in the eye and say, “Nice to see you [insert name here].” I think we all agree that remembering names is a great way to make a favorable first impression and to get a leg up in business.
Pam Beesley, overhead
[editor's note: I've edited the original text slightly from this post to protect the anonymity of the people involved.]
“But they don’t generate profit for the firm. They’re overhead.”
But I was caught off guard by this comment made by a member of the technical staff when the name of an overhead person came up. This overhead employee had been with the firm for roughly eight years and had clearly been doing a great job with their projects.
Was this the perspective of most of the technical staff at my firm? Perhaps that’s how we in marketing (and other overhead staff) are viewed. Are we just glorified admins?
Judging by the collective gasp in the room after the “overhead” comment, I do believe that this person was in the minority. But it did get me thinking.
The marketing group at our firm – to include business development and public relations – is an absolute strategic resource to the firm, highly respected professionals operating at a very high level. We partner on strategic planning and implement that plan. We meet with clients before projects are announced. We prepare go/no go scores and push back against principals who wish to pursue difficult projects and demand they make their case. When a go is made, we do whatever it takes to make a comprehensive and beautiful proposal and interview so that we are in the best position to win the project. We promote the firm’s projects and people and frequently place project mentions, staff quotes, and authored articles. And we help win design awards for our projects.
I started this blog to share some of the insights I’ve gained over the last ten years marketing professional services for a major architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) firm so that you too can evolve beyond just being 100 Percent Overhead into a marketing powerhouse and a strategic resource for your firm.
