Its just been confirmed over the past while that Zappos has been bought by Amazon for $890M in a direct swap of stock – Zappos have yearly turnover of approx. 1 Billion USD . Its an interesting move – one that seems to make sense – in a video by Jeff Bezos from Amazon he talks about the similarity in the “culture of obsession with the customer”.

Certainly in the case of Zappos they truly believe in providing fantastic service – and are a transparent company in terms of external communications – almost to it being slightly cult-like. It would seem that from an online retail perspective that Amazon could incorporate the obsessive communications model and open itself up to being more communicative as a company talking directly to customers and beyond (they had a bad run of it recently with the #amazonfail fiasco – very badly handled). Tony Hseih and about 400+ employees are on Twitter, they blog constantly, ZapposTV – they try and turn the company inside out so that you get to see whats going on. Be interesting to hear other voices and analysis over the next while – its not exactly a huge shocker that Amazon would buy it – it softens up Amazons brand, injects some colour – whilst making business sense. And for Zappos it means they can scale – and beyond the US where I think it only operates now.

Stay tuned – it will generate a huge amount of buzz. Its been a while since someone got taken over – last one was Sun by Oracle. Watch for trending topics on Twitter – #zappos, #Amazon.

social networking amazon, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hseih, Zappos

There’s been a couple of very poor examples of using social media in the UK and Ireland over the past week. In Ireland, it is the turn of the national Gas Company, Bord Gais, for really doing a spectacularly bad job at managing their reputation online. A while back they launched a new campaign to entice customers to switch providers of electricity over to them, in a campaign called The Big Switch, and with this they orchestrated an outreach programme to the online community where they identified 100 “influencers” and met up with them to solicit their feedback. They ran a good offline campaign and garnered quite a bit of online support from the blogosphere over the course of the campaign. They also instigated a Twitter account @TheBigSwitchIrl which did a pretty good job of engaging with the public – the guy who ran the account had a very natural way of interacting with followers and helped organise user participation in Ad shoots and ran competitions. So all that was good.

Then the company lost 75000 details with bank account numbers last week on laptops that were not encrypted when stolen (why they were on laptops in the first place is another question) and all of a sudden they put a gagging order on all social media activities. Obviously people were asking questions to the @TheBigSwitchIrl account, but rather than answering them – the only post they have issued since then has been a link to the press release – other than that there has been no communication on the account. They even reverted to getting the PR agency who deal with the company to start RT the link to the boilerplate press release – and left it to them to answer a few of the questions.

What this tells us is that Bord Gais actually don’t take any of this social media seriously – it was just a marketing ploy to go along with the campaign. And if things get serious (like losing 75000 people details), they will revert back to the old way, which is issue a bland press release and then say nothing, and wait till it all blows over. What they sould have done was start answering questions immediately on twitter, organise for the CEO to get himself onto twitter or some other social channel to answer questions and explain what the situation was, and exactly what would happen if people’s bank accounts started getting hacked, and let people know of all the measures that were now being taken to ensure no details would be unencrypted or kept on laptops, and also answer the legitimate questions that people had in relation to why their details were being downloaded onto laptops (by an apparently irregular process that violated the companies internal rules). But they didn’t and now their social media presence and reputation is very tarnished – it will be very difficult for them to re-start the good work that was done at the beginning. All because they reverted back to old school “tell them nothing” tactics. I think it’s time they started thinking more openly and realise that old style PR lock downs don’t work and people openly talk about what an appaling job you are doing – which hurts your brand.

In the UK, Habitat have done a really good job at damaging their reputation this week. It was noticed by SocialMediaToday that the new HabitatUK twitter account was using trending hashtags to trick users into clicking on their marketing driven tweets. For a big brand to be engaging in this was insane. They were hoping when people went onto twitter search that they would see their link and click through (and hopefully follow them). So Spam. This was wrong on so many levels. Not least because one of the hastags they used was #moussavi who is the main leader of the opposition in Iran which was obviously trending high last week. So basically, someone in Habitat decided to try and piggyback on a political movement where people were getting killed to get a few cheap links – it defies belief. So when this was pointed out, they then went and started trying to delete the posts. But thanks to twitter search, you cannot delete them until they come down off the twitter archive. So they are there for all to see. But rather than come out and hold their hands up and say they made a huge mistake they brazened it out and continued to tweet special offers etc…

Then today, Thusday 25th June, they come out and apologised and said that it was done out of ignorance and they obviously would never use a political issue to garner any benefit from. So at least they had the good grace to go and admit that they had messed up big time. But a couple of people then started asking who was actually doing the tweeting for them, was it an agency and if so why were they using an agency in the first place. Then Habitat come back and announce on the SocialMediaToday site that it was in fact an intern and he’s been fired. Whats amazing is that big organisations do not understand how the online community think. Blaming and firing an intern is nearly as bad as the initial cock-up. They need to take responsibility for their actions and be seen to do so. Why not fire the person who hired and allowed the intern to run roughshoud initally – thats who I’d be firing. And blaming an intern is ridiculous and it shows how little they value and understand social media and the online community in general.

Lessons out of all this, is that big organisations have a long way to travel before they understand how to participate meaningfully with the social web. And its about time that anyone in responsible roles started understanding and stop claiming ignorance – because there’s no excuse. And rather than hiring and firing junior roles for mistakes made, those who do the hiring should step up to the plate.

BrandListening, social networking, social software, socialmedia Big Switch, Ireland, Public relations, Social network, twitter, UK

In the aftermath of the Iranian elections where the incumbent Ahmadinejad putatively won the election which then sparked marches on the streets of Tehran, much of the coverage of the marches has been covered in incredibly compelling updates on Twitter. There has also been much coverage on Facebook. As Monday  progressed more and more tweets were being posted about the situation on the streets there. The authorities in Iran then moved to shut down IP proxies, but interestingly through the medium of twitter open proxies were being ReTweeted for those on the ground to pick up. So we currently have this situation where the authorities are shutting them down and as this happens available ones are being distributed on the twitter network. All of this can be tracked in Twitter search under #Iranelection. Its amazing to watch it in real-time. Some notable tweeters from the ground are are @persiankiwi who was adding about 1000 followers every 30 mins at the time of writing 16.40 GMT Monday.

So long as these proxies stay up twitter is going to be the most important network over the next few days. Although updates are being pushed through facebook, it is times like this that you realise that Twitter is at the moment an unassailable force in the real-time world – the simplicity and vernacular of twitter is its strength – it just gives you the information you want and need without any noise and nonsense. I suggest everyone go and follow @persiankiwi and start searching under the hashtag above – this is where the news about what is really happening is going to come over the next while.

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I was reading an interesting article in Slate.com about why Google has offered users the ability to create vanity urls for their personal profile. It raised the more fundamental question of how social technologies can monetise themselves and become profitable. The article’s contention is that Google essentially want to create a stealth networking site. If you subscribe for the profile page, you must firstly have a gmail account (they can garner information about you from this), then you add in more details about yourself i.e. professsional, personal, interests, etc… you can also add in links/feeds to other sites (facebook, linkedIn, blogs, photosites. etc…. – therefore Google can access and mine this information too. So that by the end of filling in your profile, you have either wittingly or unwittingly given Google access to a lot more information about yourself so that it can then target what they call “behavioural” ads (basically ads that are relevant to you) – and thus create more clickthroughs and conversions.

The reason this is so important is that search has proven to be the most profitable of services online. Google makes vast amounts of money from its main search and content network. But the big social networking sites even though they have huge user numbers are not converting for advertisers. Users don’t want to engage with ads when updating and catching up on the likes of Facebook. But if google can collect even more information about you through this Google Profile page and the links you provide, that means that it can tailor ads specific to deep information you have provided about yourself, especially when you are surfing on google affiliate content sites – slate.com, give the example of browsing a newspaper site, and getting ads that relate to the content you are reading and your particular characteristics (whatever they ar and how they are defined) being served up to you – the thinking goes that you will be more likely to cllick through and therefore make more money for Google in doing so.

It seems like a reasonably plausible business decision. Google’s foray into social networking have not been overly successful. Orkut is big in Brazil (over 30 times the site of Facebook) and in some other countries such as India, but it has not been taken up anything like Facebook or MySpace. So rather than trying to compete with them, this could be a far more cost effectie way of mining more information from people. And was previously posted, it can do you no harm to register with Google profile (if your in the business of bineg found on Google). Also, Facebook, still don’t offer vanity urls for most people they have bgun for a few celebs) – which is annoying as your id for facebook is essentially gobbledegook if you are not a machine.

As they say, keep an eye on this, behavioural search is a hot topic, will be interesting to see it in action.

social networking

Facebook have just launched and announced that they are now making available their “live stream” in an API (which is basically the realtime feed that they have recently introduced in the latest re-design which caused all the flurry online) to developers to build third party applications. This is what Twitter have been doing for a longtime now, hence the mass proliferation of third party applications built out on top of the Twitter API.

There was a Facebook presentation yesterday where third party application developers such as seesmic who have recently released the seesmic desktop which will replace thwirl which brings together facebook and twitter updates. Also there was Adobe, who talked about their recent agreement to collaborate with Facebook using AIR as a development platform.

We can now expect over the coming months a bevvy of applications and mash ups that take data out of the stream and present and reconsitutue it in some creative ways.

That said there’s already some controversy over the developer terms and conditions about some restrictions being imposed by Facebook.

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