Andy Hadfield

Every now and again, a reader leaves such a well thought out, effort-laden comment that it deserves a lot more attention than it gets in the comments.  Landi Groenewald from DigiVox did just that - so let me continue the debate on commodity service brands and social media using her comment to riff off. See her original comment on this article . LANDI : We believe however, that the point is to be transparent and relational, and therefore honest. ANDY : Yes, in a perfect world. But the sooner social media providers realise there are company's that don't HAVE to care, and therefore shouldn't be in the space, the better. I'm just worried the Twitter/Facebook is being punted as a cure-all, to everyone. Where that line gets grey is commodity brands. Make no mistake, I think they have amazing opportunities in the education / sponsorship coverage areas, but that has to be carefully weighed up against the fact that they'll immediately attract a lot of attention, purely d

Doing more reading these days and just picked up another doozy from Roger Hislop, Sentient Communications . He's talking about iBurst's efforts in using social media as a service channel and doing damage control through positive, pro-active engagement with unhappy customers. This quick quote perfectly sums up the issue I've been battling with when looking at commodity service brands and social media. There isn't much to talk about except complaints - and unless you are willing (TRULY willing) to fix the base problem that caused the complaint in the first place - don't bother with social media. The reality is that a company providing a "commodity" consumer service such as telecoms will typically have a slightly negative online score - people generally speak up when they're unhappy. Everything working fine is what users expect - the marketing team is realistic about how much you can "surprise and delight" a customer with a service that is onl

Love this quote from a Memeburn article about the J&B Start a Party social campaign in South Africa. It's spot on, highlighting the delicate balance between ease of use, viral and ego that social campaigns need to have: W hen asked why so many great campaign ideas on Facebook never go anywhere, Zylstra reflected that “often, the barriers to entry are just too high. People are inherently lazy, and if a campaign is just too clever or complex, they won’t go with it. You need to understand the behaviour that is driving social media if you are going to make it work for you.”

Call me crazy, but this little screenshot sent in from an anonymous digital source shows one of Samsung's main Twitter accounts posting via an iPhone? Yup! I know the iPhone is irresistible, a work of art, gets geeks girls... but come on guys, surely some brand loyalty is at stake here!? Ha ha! ( click the picture to enlarge )

Here's a 10 minute highlights real of the Online Reputation Management talk  (you can find the slide deck at that link) that Craig Rodney and I gave at the Heavy Chefs Event about a month ago. Came out quite well and whips through the salient 10 points with a brief explanation next to each. Edits unfortunately always bias certain topics, just due to time. The "Google search results" example had a good side as well! A side that pointed out how much effort that particular company is putting in to understand ORM vs Search Rankings. But other than that, well worth a watch. Enjoy!

So I attended just one talk from Tech4Africa . Graced Justin Spratt of IS with my presence before bolting out to the dreaded SMS: "my waters have broken!!!!!". No kidding, at least five exclamation points. Bummed to have missed Tech4Africa, but did swing by the next day to take part in the Social Media panel. Which went well, I think. Panels are hard, they're definitely not the forum for case studies, which is what the audience seemed to crave. But it was an entertaining, far-from-mutual-backslapping romp around the real issues that the SM industry faces these days. Thanks to all involved for playing your part. Here are the crowdsourced "best practices" we put together from panel and audience. It doesn't sound like rocket science, because it isn't. The industry just needs to realise the trickiest thing about social media is... you guessed it, the people. People have issues, emotions, baggage - and in the past, marketers just had to inspire / cut thro

I've been wanting to post this for ages, just been waiting for the trigger, which finally arrived in an article on the illustrious GeekList community. Here's the link and here's the money paragraph: Some investors also worry about Google's ability to keep pace with consumers' evolving use of the web. Say you want to buy running shoes to train for a marathon. Five years ago you would have simply Googled it, looked at the list of results, weighed your options, and made the purchase, perhaps by clicking on one of the sponsored links that accompanied your search. Today you might still do that, but increasingly you might pose the question "What running shoes should I buy?" to your friends on Facebook, or maybe write "Who knows about training for marathons?" on Twitter. By the time shopping service Groupon sends you (and 25 of your friends) an offer for the perfect shoes and registration for a race, you'll probably just pounce on it. This is a bi