Blog - NativeHQ

How To Avert a PR Nightmare with Social Media – Ford vs Chrysler

22 January 2009 by Carl Morris

[ UPDATE, 22/01/09: There’s a link to the Chrysler website in the post below. It appears the car company took action and deleted their entire blogpost and comments on Thursday after some serious action on the recommendation site Digg. The image of the ad is still there. If you want to read the post and the comment pandemonium, Google have a barebones archive version in their cache. In my opinion, Chrysler would be better off owning this series of gaffes and explicitly dealing with the issue on their blog. As it goes, they’ve attempted to cover it up and censor the comments, thus being seen to fail once more. It kind of makes you feel sorry for them. ]

Here’s an intriguing article on Fast Company magazine about how Ford cars dealt with some negative publicity online last month.

While it mentions the rapid responses by their head of social media, Scott Monty, it may leave you wanting more details about the incident. So here’s the full story and Monty’s own account.

The key to this, in my opinion, is that Monty possessed additional information which he was able to share to calm down the bloggers and Twitter users.

In the meantime, many people emphasise the power of the web to engender good reputation for a product. But it’s just as powerful in the other direction. Elsewhere in the auto industry, Chrysler are suffering from the heat of almost a month of commenting fury. Why? Because after receiving a financial bail-out from the US government, Chrysler placed expensive national press adverts – to thank the public for “their” financial support.

This was viewed by many as a crass and wasteful move. The comments are largely variations on this theme:

Your resignation and the resignations of senior executives who have mismanaged the business would have been much more appropriate. Posted Dec 29, 2008, 8:03 PM by California Initiative

Oof! We also have:

My response to being forced to bail Chrysler out was to immediately purchase a FORD Focus and I will NEVER buy any car that Chrysler has anything to do with. This ad you ran “thanking” us was an example of you wasting OUR money. Posted Dec 30, 2008, 11:44 AM by redwood tree

I don’t pretend to know very much about the auto industry. Even so, being based in Cardiff, Wales, I probably wouldn’t have picked up the Chrysler story – if it weren’t for the blogging frenzy that ensued and brought it to my attention. A quick look at Google Blog Search reveals hordes of US taxpayers expressing this. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. Yet another. That’s just the front page of results. Here’s Fox News for good measure. Chrysler never dealt with any of the individual comments. Eventually they did attempt to respond with a very brief post in their own defence.

There’s a good chance your brand or business will not be facing publicity issues of this magnitude. But these are useful reminders of the importance of monitoring what people are saying about you online. People won’t necessarily choose to make any of these comments directly to you. Nor will they necessarily come to “your space”.

Often it will be people saying complimentary things, which is a great way to improve your day. But at some point, you may need to respond appropriately to something negative, or indeed a full blown crisis. Preferably immediately.

Your own blog can be a good place to respond. (You don’t have a blog? It’s extremely handy to have an active blog ready for these situations.)

I must confess to being a collector of these kinds of stories.

Another one of my grisly favourites concerns Target, a retailer, and dates from January 2008. When a blogger complained about an image in an advert, Target’s PR people refused to answer properly. Instead they cited a policy that they don’t talk to “nontraditional media”, in this case a blogger (read: influential customer). Whether or not you agree with the nature of the original customer complaint doesn’t matter. This was a snubbing which backfired – even if Target did ignore the blogs, it ended up in the New York Times anyway.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: chrysler, crisis, fail, ford, strategy

The New White House Online

20 January 2009 by Tom Beardshaw

At Native, we do like to note when current affairs and news intersect with online media.

The site Whitehouse.gov has just relaunched for the new US administration. We’ll be looking particularly at their blog as well as Barack Obama on Twitter and any other officially-sanctioned tools and sites, to see how the US government are embracing them.

If this flood of US news is getting too much, the Kazakh prime minister has not only started a blog but also ordered his ministers to start their own blogs.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: barack obama, blogging, kazakh, twitter, whitehouse

Mike Wesch on social media, education and YouTube

18 January 2009 by Carl Morris

Tom has written a post on his personal blog about the work of Mike Wesch, a prominent cultural anthropologist who researches social media.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: anthropology, lunchtime video, mike wesch, strategy, video, youtube

The Inauguration of Barack Obama – Online Perspectives

18 January 2009 by Carl Morris

Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the USA takes place on Tuesday 20th January.

Techcrunch have a wideranging list of a plethora of online sites and applications related to the event. These cover where to watch it, where to respond to it, approval ratings and more.

My favourite is probably the Obameter which tracks the status of 500 promises made by Obama during the USA election campaign.

I’ve previously mentioned Obama’s use of social media to gather supporters and communicate. If you’d like to read about that, here’s a good start.

So online media can assist politicians in gathering supporters. Can online media assist the electorate in holding politicians to account – and thereby improve the democratic process as a whole? It’s a huge question, I know. We can but hope. Actually it’s not just about hope – people have to USE these tools.

I hope you find these links useful. Although Native is based in Cardiff, Wales, I’m very guilty in this blog of being US-centric in my link recommendations. Although I will continue to reference useful US-based pages where relevant, I’ll also make an effort to redress the balance from now on!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in online tools related to politics and democracy in the UK then check out the various projects of mySociety. Game-changing stuff.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: campaigns, community, democracy, manifesto, mysociety, networks, obama, usa, voting

Animal Collective Man on the Digital Music Experience

16 January 2009 by Carl Morris

This is an extract from a recent interview with the US band Animal Collective, or rather one of their members, Geologist.

With the whole downloading thing I suppose it’s easier for people to have an opinion immediately after they’ve heard, like, half of a 128kbps vinyl rip or something like that. What are your views on leaks?

We take whatever minimal steps we can to prevent it, but we know records are going to leak. It’s not even about whether it’s free or not free, I mean the day you release it it’s free to the world anyway, what with the technology these days…

I have a lot of strong personal feelings about how people consume music these days, even myself. That’s why I have these feelings; because I can see how my own listening habits have degraded over the years with the advent of the internet.

Like, when people tell me about a new band that I should check out, before I would have gone and bought the record but now I go to Myspace and listen to 20 seconds of their song through my laptop speakers and I’m like ‘whatever’ – I think that’s disgusting on my part to form an opinion that way. I’m trying to break myself out of the habit. People ask, ‘why do you give a shit about a leak, it’s going to leak anyway, it’s such an outdated, antiquated way of approaching music’ and I guess that’s true, but I’m unapologetic about it, in a way, growing up in a time when the internet wasn’t around.

I always think back to when I discovered Will Oldham’s music… at first I bought the record because it was on Drag City and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t get this, is it country music or is it Americana music? It doesn’t sound like Pavement, I don’t get it’. Y’know, I was like 15 years old and if it had just been MP3s on my computer that I didn’t buy or have a physical copy of I’d probably just have deleted it and never listened again. But because it stayed on my shelf I put in effort to get into it, I kept going back to it. And there’s just one day, I don’t know if it’s because the weather is right or you’re just in a different mood, but it suddenly clicks for you.

Personally, I don’t have that many experiences like that anymore because I’ve been taken in by the accessibility of music and I’m disappointed by what that’s done to _my_ music. That’s why I’m not into the whole leak culture or digital music in general. I don’t want to take part in it by being, like, ‘Leak our record’ or whatever. Even streaming it before it’s released, that goes against my views on how music should be listened to. Doing that or putting it on iTunes first, it’s giving people another option from which they can hear your music for the first time. That’s my feeling, it’s very personal and it has nothing to do with the industry war that’s going on right now or anything like that.

Full interview at drownedinsound.com

If you’re unfamiliar with them, Animal Collective are perhaps best described as an avant garde psychedelic folk band. Although they are sounding a bit more polished these days. What does it matter? Hardcore fans will probably disagree with my descriptions.

You can judge for yourself by listening to their official Myspace page, presumably maintained by one of the other members, judging by Geologist’s views on music streaming.

I’m inclined to see his point here, but I disagree that this view holds in every case.

Certainly though, the fan’s experience is important.

What do you think?

You could also explore this debate in a video context. Which reminds me – Monty Python have a view on this issue. They recently launched a free and official streaming channel for Monty Python highlights on YouTube, partly out of disappointment with the poor quality of unofficial uploads. In their case, official DVD sales through their official site increased by 6,800 percent over the first three days, as a result.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: animal collective, audio, geologist, monty python, music, streaming

Remixes Promote Colbert TV Show For Free

15 January 2009 by Carl Morris

Lawrence Lessig is a well known proponent of copyright reform. He is perhaps best known as the founder of Creative Commons, an organisation which posits alternative ways of licensing your content.

His observations are astute. If you work in the creative industries, his recommendations for the future of copyright law may provoke, dismay, shock, delight or inspire you. It really depends on your point of view.

I’d like to mention Lessig here because, whether you like him or not, you cannot ignore the remix, mash-up and reappropriation mindset which totally pervades our culture right now.

If you’re a writer, artist, musician, photographer, record label, song publisher, book publisher, production company or TV channel, his work will in some way already intersect with what you do.

Here’s an interview between Lessig and presenter Stephen Colbert, originally broadcast on US television on 8th January 2009. If you’re not familiar with Colbert, his signature deadpan style can be an acquired taste. It’s better to view this whole clip as a stunt, for reasons I’ll describe below.

Certainly Lessig has a lot of insightful things to say but, in among the joking from Colbert, you won’t get the subtleties here. You get a mere taste of what’s in his new book, simply entitled Remix.

It’s somewhat ironic that an early copy of this video stream was removed at the request of Viacom, who – despite what Colbert or Lessig might say – are the actual owners of the footage. If you’ll recall, Viacom fought an expensive legal battle with YouTube to assert just that, with regard to hundreds of other clips.

So if it has been taken down by the time you read this, in the clip Colbert repeatedly tells us NOT to remix the clip.

Of course, in keeping with his affected comic personality, Colbert is in full knowledge that he’s baiting the bedroom video editors and remixers around the globe.

These are people familiar with music sampling (whether via hip-hop records, Fatboy Slim or Kylie), copying, parodies, re-edits, homages, music mash-ups, LOLcats, Banksy… and much more. Oh, and Sleeveface.

Original is best right? Well, not always.

Besides, what original version? Back in my schooldays I originally heard the tune Can I Kick It? by A Tribe Called Quest years before discovering the original source of the bassline, Take A Walk On The Wildside by Lou Reed. This was my first awareness that digital sampling was taking place in music – which blew my young mind. (I learned about the intricacies of copyright law much later.)

Back to Lessig and Colbert – and it wasn’t long before the remixes did appear.

Here’s one unofficial remix of the Colbert clip with Lessig. At the time of writing, YouTube alone has 17 search results for “colbert lessig remix”.

I can’t vouch for the quality or content of any of these DIY remixes. That’s a job for the vociferous YouTube commenters. But we do know that the remixes are reaching people who would never have seen the original programme. People who had never previously heard of Colbert or Lessig.

Marketing people, take note.

All this may explain why rap artists often put out acappella versions of their tracks, usually on the official release. Remix-friendly stuff! Let’s face it, hip-hop is a genre of excellent marketers and self-promoters.

We live in a world where a large section of the population feels that they “own” their favourite songs, books and shows. Of course, when copyright law is taken into consideration this is technically mistaken. And there are huge problems with this. Copyright is not only a legal structure which allows revenue generation but one which protects moral rights.

But what happens if we forget about the problems for a moment? There are opportunities here.

What if we could get the marketing department and the legal department to trade places? If only for one day?

Actually let’s forget about monetising, owning or controlling views of a particular piece of content. Again, this is just for a moment and just for a thought experiment. Let’s imagine one of the best items of work from your catalogue being deliberately released in a different way.

What if the ONLY thing we cared about was having people consume and spread that piece of content? And then to adapt it, re-appropriate it or engage with it? Imagine it. Colbert did, can you?

I have so many more intriguing examples to share. But let’s leave this open for now.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: audio, colbert, lessig, mash-up, remix, video

Tim O’Reilly says “Work on Stuff that Matters”

14 January 2009 by Carl Morris

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly book publishing and is a thinker and businessman whose work I seriously respect.

Given the time of year and the fear of a worsening economic downturn, I thought I’d share this blog post on how to focus your business on stuff that matters.

O’Reilly’s emphasis here is on tech companies but I think the advice is enlightening whatever sector you’re in.

I often recommend his material to people. In fact, I’d recommend subscribing to his blog feed or at least following his updates on Twitter if you’re set up to do so.

(If you’re not set up for that or would just like to tell us about your business, we at Native would like to hear from you. Just get in touch.)

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: brian eno, google, microsoft, tim o'reilly

Introducing Trydan – a Cardiff meet-up for people into social media – and our reasoning behind it

7 January 2009 by Carl Morris

We’ve started a series of social media cafe events in Cardiff called Trydan but first, some background…

Tom and I thought it would be interesting and profitable to get together with other people in Cardiff who are interested in similar things.

“Social media” is the closest generic term for what excites us, it’s our area of expertise.

Some examples of social media tools are blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networking platforms like Facebook, search engines (to an extent), collaboration systems like Google Docs and many other examples – including things currently being developed.

Often the term “social media” is conflated with the term “web 2.0” which itself has a related meaning along the lines of “systems which get better when more people join”. (We have Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly to thank for that particular term! Although, to be fair, it was more akin to a remark to be understood in the context of the dot-com collapse of the late 1990s. Web 2.0 covered all the platforms and services that were able to provide enough usefulness to survive.)

We also want to avoid the hot air and wishful thinking that goes along with any new technology. Real benefit is the key. Enthusiasm for shiny tools and gadgets isn’t intrinsically wrong necessarily. But it can easily become a needless distraction from whatever you’re trying to achieve, which is why it’s important to measure the outcomes.

This stuff is real. We get excited about using these new tools and platforms for measurable benefit to the individual, company or organisation.

Our emphasis would tend to be on outward-facing stuff, which includes your blog, your website and your web presence. This intersects with what’s traditionally known as marketing and public relations.

That said, social media can have a great effect on your collaboration and interaction with colleagues as well.

Anyway, social media have somewhat disrupted the strict boundary between the external and the internal – but only for those brave enough to seek the benefits.

In other words, the philosophy of having a strict wall around your company, or your company as “black box”, is often not the only way or even the best way.

We’re not journalists but crowdsourced video for news is one good example of this. However much the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman may dislike it, people are not content merely to be passive viewers anymore. They now expect some element of interactivity with media.

This movement towards interactivity started with so-called new media and is trickling into established media. Of course, people hardly ever use the term “new media” any more. Especially not the young.

The chef Gordon Ramsay is another example from TV, inviting viewers to contribute recipes via YouTube. He’s supposed to be the expert, right? But now he’s become even more expert by opening up and responding to his fans.

The other Gordon in authority, Mr Brown, who has a blog and has also chosen YouTube to communicate with voters in both directions. And of course Barack Obama used a combination of Twitter and his blog to reach out to voters, in tandem with his supporters on the ground to secure his place at the White House.

Those examples hint at some of the well known stories and there are many more. There are many more abject failures as well. But you can expect to fail when you try these things. Fortunately, social media is cheap and pretty comfortable with an iterative process. Just adjust things as you go or replace them with something better.

But still, we like to get good results as quickly as possible. We had a sense that other people were thinking along similar lines – and thought there could be demand in the Cardiff area for a place to swap ideas and practices. Social media is about sharing after all. So we’re starting a series of regular coffee events in Cardiff where we can discuss this stuff – what works and what doesn’t and why.

The event is called Trydan and we’re co-founding it with two of our friends: journalism tutor Glyn Mottershead and journalism researcher Andy Williams, both of whom are based at Cardiff University.

The four of us are also co-founding it with everyone who turns up for the first meeting.

For inspiration, we’re giving more than a passing nod to other social media meet-ups we know about or have attended – Tuttle in London, Social Media Cafe in Birmingham and Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr)

So that’s some of the thinking. You are invited to join us if any of this interests you. The event is set up as a separate entity – just head to the Trydan wiki on which you can read more, add your name to RSVP and also edit.

Filed Under: Company news Tagged With: cardiff, community, networks, Trydan, wales, web 2.0

Hello, world

9 December 2008 by Carl Morris

We have now launched NativeHQ.

Our core belief in starting NativeHQ is that regular and meaningful communication is vital. This company blog is a key thing for doing our own communication. It’s a living part of our business, where we model what we endorse.

We will mainly be discussing the wider subjects around our work, which covers social media, the web and the useful aspects of technology.

With this blog we want to avoid a one-way “broadcast” model which is perhaps the strongest temptation with a blog so closely allied with a business. We will listen, read, watch and otherwise check out what everyone else is offering and regularly respond here. We much prefer that way and we suggest that the benefits of real discussion are massive and ever increasing. On that note, anything that is (or resembles) blatant advertising has no place here.

We have deliberately set a broad remit and this will be reflected in the blog, which we plan to guide and shape along the way.

That leads us to our hope for you too – that you enjoy reading it and that it will help you in your work over time.

NativeHQ
December 2008

Filed Under: Company news Tagged With: blogging, launch

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