Tasha Harrison

Last week saw two great victories for social media.  The first was the Guardian/Trafigura/Super-injunction debacle, that highlighted the growing trend of preventing the press from reporting certain stories that would be particularly harmful to the reputation of organisations.  After much uproar on Twitter the injunction was lifted and the Guardian was able to publish the details of Trafigura’s toxic waste dumping antics.

The second victory was against the Daily Mail.  Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death caused outrage and upset for suggesting that Gately’s death was not ‘natural’, as the corroners report had said, but was in some way connected to his sexuality.  So once again Twitter mobilised to share their outrage, forcing Moir to apologise and causing major advertisers, such as Marks and Spencers, to request that their advert be removed from the page.  See Charlie Booker’s article here.

What these two events highlight is the shift in power from the news being controlled by a few, to it being shared and discussed by millions.  We now have the ability to share information at staggering speed and for the first time in history everyone is a publisher, writer and distributor of information.  What this means for businesses is that they too have an opportunity to join in the discussion, not to control it, but to play an active role.  Trafigura were attempting the old school approach of shut the press up and no one will ever know, but this is no longer possible in the world of social media.

Before Twitter all of our thoughts where focussed into our blog and discussions took place on both our own blogs and other people’s blogs.  You referred to other’s blogs in your own posts and continued the conversation that way.

Now we see a blog post that we find interesting, Tweet it and then continue the conversation on Twitter.  Obviously conversations do still continue on the blog post as it is easier to comment and follow the discussion within that format, but has Twitter diluted the discussion and caused us to blog less?  Instead of sharing our ideas in a well thought out blog post do we simply quickly write them out in 140 characters, possibly losing the essence of what we mean?

As Twitter is evolving I am finding that my blog is still the best place to publish my main ideas, but I’m not sure that this is the case for everyone. It will be interesting to see how blogs evolve and whether micro-blogging is sustainable within the whirlwind of spam that is currently afflicting it.

If ever I saw the benefits of social media for a brand it was last night and today via Twitter. I live at the end of a half mile lane in the Sussex countryside (at the moment). Recently some BT engineers were spotted undertaking some work at the bottom of the lane, a few hours later our broadband went down. A stressed phonecall to my neighbour, who is a web designer, revealed that our landline numbers had changed. The BT engineers had somehow got the wires crossed!

From this address we currently run four businesses, two of which are online based, so this obviously caused massive problems. After some heated discussions with BT personnel in a call centre we were promised normal service by the end of play the following day.

Once I had recovered from my anger I decided to test BT’s customer service and, knowing that they were one of the biggest brands to venture onto Twitter, I tweeted my disgust.  This is the tweet: “Little rant about the idiots at BT: not only have they cut off our internet but they’ve changed our phone number! So annoyed, not surprised.”

The following day, once I had got my internet back I found this from @BTCare: @TashaHarrison Oh dear this does not sound good at all, Can I help you?

It might have come after the problem was fixed, but it made me feel like they were listening. It also delighted me that I was part of a successful internet marketing strategy by a massive brand.

If anyone ever doubts the power of Twitter and the role it can play in customer service then think about how easy it was for them to make me feel better about their company. It doesn’t take long to monitor the internet and then say a few kind words.

In essence social media is simply sites that are social.  These include social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and any kind of online community like a forum or a blog.

The reason social media is so important (and why the media talk about it constantly) is that it enables us to communicate with people who share our interests and passions via the internet. Before the internet people would join clubs and groups in order to meet people with similar interests. For some people this was difficult as there may not have been a group in their area. The internet enables us to meet people online more easily.

Sites like Facebook help you to meet up with old friends and acquaintances. MySpace helps new bands easily showcase their work online. Youtube enables people to share their videos.

There are many more sites that are aimed at smaller communities. LinkedIn is a networking site for business people across the world. It enables you to build a community by connecting with people you already know and their contacts as well. So if you go to a networking event and meet five people, all of whom are on LinkedIn, you can connect with them on the site and then have access to their networks.