Outside Innovation

What We Can Learn from How the Boston Globe Covered the Marathon Bombings

Last week we published an article about the Boston Globe's coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and aftermath. I commended the Boston Globe for doing an exceptional job of keeping the public informed with real-time, and accurate, information as the Marathon bombings and aftermath unfolded. Here are the highlights of what the Boston Globe not only did right, but did outstandingly, and should be a model for other media outlets, whether print, broadcast, or digital.

1. Provide a real-time stream of updated info—most news sources already do that for paying or registered customers. The Boston Globe extended that service to everyone—for free!
   
   
2. Fact-check everything! Unlike many other sources (and, especially, social media outlets) the Globe refused to spread rumors.
   
   
3. If you find that you posted or retweeted something that is wrong, correct it immediately even if you weren’t the source. (The one time the Globe passed on erroneous info from CNN, they fact-checked and corrected it quickly.)
   
   
4. Make it easy for others to share your updates or retweet what you send so that you become the trusted source.
   
   
5. Use all media, including short text posts, photos, video clips, and links to longer articles. In this way, the Boston Globe reached people on all devices with information that they could access in a media that spoke to them.
   
   
6. Get all hands on deck. Don’t leave this type of major coverage to a small team that deals with social media; everyone needs to be involved. At the Globe, every employee (who was safe doing so) was involved in some related activity, from live reporting to fact checking.
   
   
7. Have hot backup or a shadow system that can scale to the increased traffic resulting from everyone wanting information NOW! When the Boston Globe sites were saturated, the paper not only added additional servers, but shifted the real-time blogging to a single live blog hosted by ScribbleLive. Make sure you have an infrastructure in place to ensure the message gets out.
   
   
8. Let your people and your customers know how much you care. The Globe made employee safety a priority over news reporting, urging those who couldn’t come in for safety reasons to stay home and not worry. And the executives at the Globe made sure that the hard working staff knew how much they were appreciated.

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Boston Globe Masters Social Media in a Crisis
How the Boston Globe Covered the Boston Marathon Bombing
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, April 26, 2013

What does it take to beat all the major news and cable networks in news coverage? An amazing team and a commitment to getting it right! The Boston Globe took the time to fact check every piece of information, yet keep up-to-the-minute with a continuing real-time blogging. And it opened up all its paid online services to everyone for free information all week. As a result, the Boston Globe became the trusted source of information during the Boston Marathon crisis.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

Swipp: A More User-Friendly Answer for Social Search?

Enter Swipp.com. According to this article in Wired, Swipp was planning to remain in stealth mode a bit longer, but decided to launch early in response to Facebook Graph Search. Right now, it offers mobile apps that let you take pictures, comment, and find and discover things of interest. It’s kind of like Pinterest for the world. Apparently, the Swipp team hopes to develop a more customer-driven approach—one in which users are able to help one another find and appreciate things. And Swipp promises to make its data very open to its users, so we can export and control the things we’ve posted really easily. Let’s give it a try. Looks like fun!

Facebook Search Graph Is Here: Fix Your Privacy Settings (Again!)

Facebook Graph Search joins Timeline and Newsfeed as a third “capability” in Facebook that most of us didn’t want and haven’t welcomed. The clue is in the name itself. No real person wants to search the “social graph.” Only robots spawned by marketers do. Facebook Graph Search lets applications and algorithms (and individuals) look for and aggregate likes, check-ins, photos, and profiles.

What’s in it for us? As an end-user (not an application), you can search for other people who like Gilbert & Sullivan who live in the Boston area—that’s useful if you’re putting on a performance. But marketers and their algorithms are likely to be much more invasive. And what about those things you “liked” that you may not want showing up on a search. For example, I work for Apple, but I liked Samsung phones at some point in the past?

Anthony Kosner’s thoughtful article in Forbes, “Facebook Graph Search Is A Disruptive Minefield Of Unintended Consequences” provides some thoughtful analysis about what Facebook Graph Search means for marketers and competitors.

Electronic Frontier Foundation provides the best guidance for how to fix your privacy settings, including “unliking” things you’ve liked in the past and untagging yourself from photos.

 

Is Amazon the Next Big Social Gaming Platform?

Social games are hot! People of all ages are now playing games with their friends on their mobile devices, on Facebook, and on other social networks. Many people dismiss these games as trivial because they’re designed for casual users. Some of the most popular social games are Farmville and Words with Friends (by Zynga), Texas HoldEm Poker, and the Sims Social (Electronic Arts), among many others.

Amazon Game Studio’s Living Classics

© 2012 Amazon Game Studios

1. Amazon Game Studio’s first social game is Living Classics—a Facebook game based on classic children’s stories. You click on moving objects to earn points and move to the next level.

What all of these games have in common is that you can play them anywhere, on your device(s) of choice, you can often play them online or offline, you can share your progress with friends, and/or you can invite them to join you asynchronously or synchronously.

Learn from Alaska Airlines’ Director of Customer Innovation

By Ronni Marshak

In her interview with Curtis Kopf, Managing Director, AlaskaAir.com and Customer Innovation, Patty Seybold learned how the commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience resulted in the airline’s pioneering work in customer-facing innovation. It surprised me to learn that Alaska Air Group (Alaska and Horizon Airlines) is the seventh largest airline in the U.S. (Here, on the East Coast, Alaska Air seems very niche and exotic). Further, the airline was the first to book flights and sell tickets via the Internet, the first to offer Web check-in, the first to use onboard POS devices to accept debit and credit cards in the air, among other innovations! Who knew?

Curtis Kopf heads up Alaska Airlines’ digital, mobile, and ecommerce team. Patty is a fan of his combination of responsibilities: “It’s hard to separate e-commerce and online self-service from mobile tools and your mobile-friendly web site. So it also makes sense to combine mobile and e-commerce/online under one role. But what’s different and particularly interesting to me about Curtis Kopf’s role at Alaska Airlines is his involvement in the company’s initiatives to use technology to make it easy for customers to get things done when they’re interacting with Alaska Airlines and its personnel at the airport and/or on the plane.”

How could your organization benefit from an explicit executive focus on customer innovation? Maybe it’s time to hire or promote a Director/VP of Customer Innovation in your company.

~ Ronni

Managing Customer Innovation at Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines Combines Customer Innovation with E-Commerce & Mobile
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 31, 2012

Using Facebook’s Timeline for a Business

In my recent article, Facebook’s Timeline: Seductive and Dangerous?, I criticized Facebook’s forced march to Timeline and, in particular, the way in which Facebook is seducing consumers to use Facebook apps that will log their (and their friends’) every action. I have no interest in switching my personal Facebook page over to the Timeline view and I dread the day when I will be “Timelined.” However, it’s part of the human condition to enjoy reminiscing and “strutting our stuff,” so, when the time comes that I have to create a Facebook Timeline, I may find myself getting carried away.

However, I can report that using Timeline to “tell the story” of a business is a lot of fun, and I think it can be quite an effective marketing/communication tool. I can report that it is also an incredible time sink! Don’t tackle this unless you’re prepared to lose a week out of your life!

Updating our “Customers.com Company” Facebook Page

Our company is officially 27 years old, but it existed before that as a department within my father’s company, Seybold Publications, which was founded in 1971. So there’s quite a bit of history to chronicle. Our history is also the history of the evolution of technology—as we all moved from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to LANs to open systems to distributed computing to internet computing and to mobile. It’s also interesting to see how customer experience and customer co-design have permeated our consulting projects throughout the years.

Why Customers.com? We chose to use the Customers.com brand name a few years ago in creating our Facebook page as part of our overall brand strategy. Right now, we’re Patricia Seybold Group, “the customers.com company.” Soon we’ll become Customers.com “brought to you by” The Patricia Seybold Group. We probably SHOULD have a Patricia Seybold Group Facebook page, too, but if we do, we’ll just redirect folks to this main page.

How Can You Keep Facebook, Google, et al. from Tracking You and Your Friends?

I’ve been blowing the whistle on both Google and Facebook recently for their customer-unfriendly approaches to tracking our activities and the activities of our friends. (I don’t plan to stop there. Next, I’ll take a look at Apple’s privacy practices and Microsoft’s.)

I’m not complaining about the trade-off between using free services and receiving targeted ads in exchange.

I AM complaining about the routine collection of very detailed information about each of us—logs that are not anonymous but connected to our identity, our computers/phones and our physical location, and the actual activities we’re doing online. These are logs that are not only able to be used by Google and Facebook for ad placement, but they can also be used by any entity that claims it has the legal right to spy on any of us.

I am ALSO complaining about how difficult it is for customers to:

a) Know exactly what is being tracked

b) Understand how to turn off tracking

c) Keep the people in our social network from inadvertently violating our privacy

d) Keep applications and other websites that are “in” these companies’ networks from compounding the problem by adding their own tracking and aggregation on top of what is already being tracked about us

The Dangers of Facebook's Non-Optional Timeline

"OMG, I've been Timelined!" is becoming a common lament among Facebook users these days. Facebook is making a sweeping user interface change that:

1. Is mandatory for both business and consumer pages

2. Entices consumers into capturing and sharing life events for easier data mining and target marketing

3. Encourages users to adopt applications that log their actions in the virtual and physical worlds

4. Is promulgating a de facto standard API for defining actions and objects on the Internet

5. Seduces Facebook users into violating their friends' privacy without their consent

Customers Want to Interact With Each Other In and Around Their Activities and Projects

By Ronni Marshak

As we continue to do our web site audits on how well companies “manage our stuff,” Patty Seybold surfaces some insights based on our research and our customer engagements. As customers describe how they’d ideally like to get things done in the perfect world, a subtle requirement emerges: at the core of the next generation of win/win business models are customer-centric ecosystems that don’t just answer product or business transaction questions, but, rather, address the issues of how do I get things done. And, for advice, they turn first to their inner circle of family, friends, and colleagues; next to their outer circle of people out there in the world who are facing the same challenges; and, only as a last resort, to the subject matter experts that are associated with your brand.

Build Community Around "My Stuff"
How Will Online Communities and Social Networks Evolve?
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, November 10, 2011

Salesforce Invites End-Customers Into Its Social Media Groups: Great News for CABs!

Salesforce.com has been touting its enterprise social media strategy for some time. Now there’s a new and very important enhancement: the ability to invite customers into Private Chatter Groups for cross-company collaboration around customers’ issues. Salesforce Chatter is a B2B equivalent of Facebook (that also integrates well with Twitter, Facebook, et al). You can see a good, current demo given to Rackspace’s Robert Scoble in late August, 2011 here. (Thanks, Robert!)

Salesforce’s enterprise social media strategy is simple and seductive:

1) Give employees social media tools that are integrated with the enterprise applications they already use as well as with external social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

2) Ensure that your employees have visibility into their clients’ companies’ and individuals’ social media activity so they’ll know what’s going on with their clients’ companies and with their individual customers.

3) NEW: Enable employees to invite customers into private social groups for customer interactions. These can be customer-account-specific groups to work collaboratively and in an ad hoc manner on customers’ issues or proposals. They can also be private groups of customers who are working on a common project with your subject matter experts. This is the kind of collaborative support that’s perfect for supporting the ongoing work of Customer Advisory Boards and Customer Innovation Teams.

What I like about the new version of Chatter is that you can create private groups of employees + customers from MULTIPLE customer accounts. Think about a customer advisory board or a group of customer co-designers who are providing input and feedback to your strategy and your product directions. All you need is your customers’ email addresses in order to invite them. They can accept the invitation whether or not Salesforce.com Chatter is used within their own organizations. You’ll be able to share files and do real-time screen sharing and collaboration with the members of the group. Everyone from your company who joins in the conversations will KNOW that this is a group that includes customers. So they’ll engage in appropriate behavior. But the interactions will be more casual, more ad hoc, more free-flowing, and they can be tagged with keywords that will make it easy for members to follow (or subscribe to) the conversation threads they’re interested in.

Salesforce.com has also made Chatter part of its Force.com platform with an open API (REST), using its Heroku (Ruby on Rails) integration. So third-party developers will be able to write applications that build on the Chatter foundation.

Will Inviting Customers into Chatter Turn the Salesforce.com Ecosystem into a Customer Ecosystem?
We’ve been longtime fans of Salesforce.com’s fantastic ecosystem of applications, developers, partners, and consultants—known as Force.com—and its AppExchange (which pre-dated Apple’s App Store). What’s been missing for us is the fact that the Salesforce ecosystem has been designed to be ABOUT end-customers, not FOR end-customers. Most of the applications in the Salesforce.com ecosystem help companies manage their relationships with customers. There are few offerings that help END-CUSTOMERS manage their relationships with their suppliers.

Now, customers get to participate, too! We like the friction-free support for cross-company collaboration that Salesforce now offers with the new version of Chatter. This may be the way that customers gain more visibility into the conversations, interactions, and workflows that impact them! Chatter will benefit customers in many ways. It can be used to streamline approval workflows and to add visibility into that process for customers (e.g., approve a discount for a pending deal; approve a credit to a customer that impacts the customer, the reseller, and his distributor). Chatter can be used to resolve a thorny technical problem with multiple experts adding their advice (e.g., get real-time help from company experts, partner experts, and peer experts for a real-time customer problem). All of these typical collaborative brainstorming and/or problem-solving activities can be visible to customers. This is the kind of transparency that most customers are seeking!