Looking at the coverage on the TV and the Web, it struck me that the news stories did not have a strong voice from Maclaren and that got me interested in how the company was managing the crisis and specifically whether they were using social media as part of the campaign.  After all, the decision to undertake a recall of these proportions would not have been taken lightly or quickly by such an established brand and surely the media/PR planning would have been meticulous …

A bit of web searching unearthed a fascinating blog post from Harvard Business Review entitled “Maclaren’s Product Recall: What Would You Do?”  The post discussed the impact of the recall on the company’s brand and business and then put forward some strategies from crisis management experts originally included in an HBR case published in 2001 on an eerily similar theme.  I have summarised HBR’s recommendations below:

Engage a reputable, independent, outside investigator …

Hire a crisis management expert charged with setting up and training a permanent, internal crisis-management team comprising people from the operations, marketing, IT, security, and legal departments …

Call the babies’ families. Offer to meet with them privately and provide whatever assistance possible, including paying the medical bills …

Announce the recall in paid advertisements as well as issuing the joint press release with the CPSC [U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission] …

All of these recommendations make complete sense of course, but they don’t go far enough.  What jumped out at me was that the proposed strategies completely ignored the role of the Internet and in particular how Maclaren should engage with their customers through social media to get their message out, tell their story, rally their advocates, answer customers’ questions and respond to their concerns and fears.

This omission looks all the more glaring as in this case, Maclaren has not pursued an aggressive, nor systematic online campaign – as Time has noticed.  Just take look at the very tame official twitter account for Maclaren UK, or indeed the slightly more proactive (but still lame) account for Maclaren US.

So to answer HBR’s question, this is what I would do …

1. Hire an experienced community manager fast:  You need a community manager (more likely a small community team) who can take part on Maclaren’s behalf in online conversations across the Web.  This person or team will also be responsible for bringing these conversations into the company and will be a vital interface with senior executives, product management, customer service and PR. Believe me an agency could not perform this role for you as they cannot be an authentic voice for the company in the public domain, and they are external to the org, so cannot help you with internal co-ordination.

2. Make sure you know what people are saying about you and where: if you are to have a responsive campaign around the recall, you need to be listening to the multiple conversations people are having about you.  Use a social media monitoring tool like Radian 6, Scout Labs, or Nielsen Buzz Metrics, to understand how the issue is resonating on the web and the impact your campaign is having.

3. Take part in conversations across the Web:  Once you know what people are talking about and where, don’t sit on the insight, but use it to engage with your customers.  Don’t assume that having social-media powered conversation means putting up a page on Facebook.  For an issue of this type the most active conversations may be across multiple parenting communities and blogs.  Send your Community management team to listen first and then engage where the discussion is happening so they can clarify issues, help customers with information and put your side of the case openly.

4. Use Twitter properly: Don’t fall into the big brand trap of using Twitter simply as a tool to push out press releases or company information.  If you do that, you end up (like today) with a handful of followers.  You need to build up a following and use Twitter as another conversational tool. So look for who is tweeting about Maclaren and the recall, reply to them, follow them so you can DM them, and retweet your advocates.

5. Work with advocates and detractors: There are many people who are still on your side across the globe and of course many who aren’t.  What binds them is both communities are emotionally involved with the issue.  So work creatively with both groups and make it easy for them to share and pass on information about the recall through the digital media they use and the communities they are involved with.  

6. Facilitate discussion on your Web site about the recall:  You are really missing a trick with your Web site. It won’t be effective for you, if you simply use it to push out a corporate message. That well-intentioned light box message on the home page won’t change what people think, and is intrusive to people who are trying to find out information and get advice.  So junk it, and instead use your customer service area as a place of conversation with your customers.  At this stage people are more likely to believe what others are saying about you than your official messages, so creating a structured conversation on your site will work to your benefit.  A tool like Get Satisfaction is a good option here.

Making online conversations a core element of the crisis management strategy for Maclaren will also deliver longer term business benefits for the brand as it builds a platform and team who can absorb and act on feedback quickly from customers. This will only reflect well on brand, improve Maclaren’s customer service, and help in new product development, long after the PR storm from the product recall has passed.

And as for Harvard Business Review, well, good effort but need to try harder. Time to update the case methinks …

As we are poised to enter possibly the worst global downturn since the Interwar years, a 1920s theme could turn out to be remarkably relevant! Weimar Republic anyone …

On a brighter note, I do hope this theme conveys a little more of the spirit of the original Fumoirs, as described in the French version of the Wikipedia thus:

“C’était un lieu de convivialité, qui pouvait être à mi-chemin entre le cabinet de curiosités et le boudoir.”

In other words, a place to kick back, share ideas and explore new things.  

And have a puff of course.

Bonne année à tous. Happy new year

The story of the growth of this label is fascinating, not least because it was started in the 1950′s by a brother and sister who were white, yet it made its name by discovering and promoting some of the most well-known African-American artists of all time, supported by thoroughly ethnically integrated backing bands.

Remarkable for its time and place.

Key to its success (and in sharp distinction to Motown) was its open-door policy of allowing anyone to come in off the street and play with the band. People came and went, participated, connections were made, talent emerged and became part of the Stax community.

I couldn’t help thinking that the open-door model is really what makes for a successful community-based web site. The record label was the platform. Stax removed the barriers to participation and created the place where individuals wanted to come together and be creative.  The label was also the social object around which the community could coalesce meaningfully. The label became successful once it had created a vibrant community (it’s ‘family’ as Stax and its artists described it) and a nexus for talent.  Cash followed community.

A really simple recipe for success that we could all do well to strive to emulate.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T

From 9 – 11 June I spent my waking hours at the O’Reilly conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, in Washington DC. Lots of senior developer types from Facebook, Google and Myspace and the like presenting to a fairly geeky audience. As someone whose interest in social media is heavily skewed towards small businesses and commerce, I was a little disappointed that neither term was actually mentioned over the three days!

Content aside, what stood out from the opening minutes was the collective audience behaviour. As panellists talked, the audience went about its business: maintaining profiles on the social network of choice, tweeting like no tomorrow, and I kid you not, listening to iPods whilst updating Facebook. In short, we weren’t listening. For those with an interest in the conference proceedings, this was often enjoyed as a mediated experience. Following the GSP East Twitter Feed, or reading live blogging coverage from one of our fellow attendees took precedence over actually sitting back and digesting what the people just a few metres away were saying.

(With an absence of irony, the conference organisers did request on day 1 that mobiles were turned off less they disturb the sessions!)

What did I take away from this experience?

1. For those in the social networking biz, the tools of the trade seem to be at least as important as the content – in other words, the medium trumps the message. This is nothing new to Web 2.0 though: Nietzsche reflecting on how his writing style had changed since using a typewriter said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Well that explains Twitter then …

2. The views of others take precedence over a personal and original standpoint – it’s easier and faster to consume another person’s perspective than think about something yourself for the first time (This point was drilled home to me by the UGC videos introducing each session, which were practically all derivative riffs on other people’s work).

So it appears to me that we may be suffering from a Web 2.0 induced attention deficit disorder. Quite a worry really.

I am currently agnostic on this one. There are lots of claims being made in the SaaS and hosting space that software running on multi-tenanted servers is inherently better for our collective futures on this rock than running multiple single-server installations. That seems reasonable. But what about the case of hosted software, such as Google Apps, that is largely meant to replace client-only software (e.g. Microsoft Office)? Is this greener? Maybe not. In this case we are actually adding a server into the mix, rather than taking one away. And the environmental costs of running massive server farms are huge. The Economist commented recently that ‘the largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume’, noting that Microsoft’s new facility in Chicago requires three electrical substations with a capacity of 198 megawatts! Offset that if you will …

So, am I damning the polar bears every time I use Google Docs, or not?

For two days this week in Brighton, the BT Tradespace team, our development and marketing partners and customers shared, debated, informed and firmed up our plans for the next stage in our development. Exciting stuff and good fun too as Derek our Community Manager captured on the Tradespace blog.

The highlight had to be our field work where the whole team – everyone from developers, to experience architects, to marketers, to PR, to producers and programme managers – hit the streets and started talking to local businesses about the BT Tradespace proposition and how the tools of social media can help small businesses grow their business online.

In a telling sign of the times that SMEs are already on the case themselves, one of the companies we spoke to blogged about the experience of being ‘crashed’ by the BT Tradespace team. And yep, hands up I was the ‘senior tech/sales guy’!

The whole experience was a practical reminder that markets are conversations and conversations power commerce. All right, where next …