X-Factor and Eurostar

If you have any interest in the power of connecting people via the web, this weekend provided a couple of examples of the good and the bad when it comes to social media

X-Factor vs Rage Against the Machine

Jon and Tracy Morter decided they had had enough. For the past 4 years, the number 1 single at Christmas had been whatever song X-Factor had produced. This year they decided it wuld be different. They set up a Face Book group Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No.1 and then went all out to promote and push their chosen song to beat the Simon Cowell record. For the past week it has been the power of the internet vs the power of the marketing machine behind getting Joe McElderry’s The Climb to the top spot.

The internet won! RATM beat The Climb by over 50000 sales. Although in reality, Sony BMG won, as they ultimately control both artists. There’s another winner as well, with Shelter picking up at least £70k via a JustGiving campaign plus band profits from the sale of the music.

This is a perfect case of using social media to rally people around a cause that they are passionate about, using Facebook, Twitter and a lot of imagination that people can make a difference. There’s nearly 500k members of the Facebook group and over 500k copies of the song sold. Around 17 million watched the X-Factor final and they only sold 450k, which has to be an indication of the engagement factor surrounding this race.

Eurostar

On the other hand, Eurostar provides us with a case study of what happens when you ignore social media in your crisis planning. Five trains stuck in the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar had enough operational issues to get to grips with, but there was a growing online reputation issue to be dealt with, as reported by the Techcrunch article

Reading tweets this morning I was struck at how many people felt like they had no idea what was going on. The lack of information on suck a big accident was staggering.

Meanwhile, the Eurostar Twitter account, which could well have been used to communicate to passengers about what was going on – and loved ones at home – is being used by someone in Shanghai.

For the people on the trains, Twitter would have been useless, as there was no reception., However, for the increasing number of people who were waiting and who were due to travel, it was a information source that many were looking for – especially as the company were on Twitter at two places @little_break and @creamoflondon. But as both of these accounts are marketing accounts, they were not being used by any of the Crisis team as a communication channel.

This was not a social media issue as such, their communication issues were far larger than that; they did not get anything on their website until late in the day and were often completely absent from traditional media channels. However, the concern over the lack of information on social media channels by people who use social media channels and the way this managed to make the mainstream news is indicative of how the choice of channel in PR is no longer the company choice. You have to go where your customers are.

Eventually, these twitter accounts, plus the Little Break blog started being used for travel information. In the case of Little Break, this was being done despite the fact that they company managing it had never been contracted to provide these services, their remit being only the campaign. As Robin Grant of we are social explains

When we first met with Eurostar, as we do with all of our clients, we talked to them about the need for to put a real-time social media listening and responding programme and crisis plan in place, and proposed a conversation audit and consultancy project to help them implement such a programme. As is common with any business at the early stages of coming to terms with social media, they could see the long term benefits of such a strategy, however as adapting their existing processes had wider implications across the business they decided to start small by moving forward with the Little break, Big difference campaign, to learn from the experience of engaging in conversations in social media.

However, they ended up going into the Eurostar office

Since lunchtime, we’ve been sat in Eurostar’s St Pancras offices alongside Emma Harris, their Sales & Marketing Director. As things were changing so fast, we had be very careful not to communicate incorrect information, which restricted how much we could say, but we did pass on via Facebook and Twitter any news we could the minute we received it.

Some lessons to be learnt from this:

• Communications cannot be confined to the channels that you as a company want to work in, they need to be done over the channels your customers work in. This includes social media like Twitter and Facebook.
• Even if you only currently use these channels for marketing, expect to have to leverage them in a crisis. Crisis management planning should take a holistic approach and be aware of all the tools that could be used – and have access to them.
• Monitoring is needed Knowing what the wider public is saying about you is just as important as knowing what they are telling you directly.

So, two examples of how communications and marketing continue to change on a continuous basis with the increased adoption of tools and channels that mean the customers can connect with each other. How are you going to learn from them?