Category: Case Studies

Using social media to promote handball

In February 2007 I registered the domain socialamedier.com which is the Swedish translation of “social media”. Back then, the term was fairly new, but today there are literally thousands of self proclaimed social media experts out there, giving advice about how to be successful on blogs, Twitter or Facebook. It has come to the point where “social media guru” is almost seen as an invective.

So if you can’t stand to hear one more social media evangelist tell you about how they will end starvation and bring world peace through social media, instead you might want to read this blog post from a newbie who just recently discovered the benefits of social networking. Dominique Dumont is the USA Team Handball’s East Regional Director and she blogged yesterday about her experience with primarily Facebook and how she “discovered the holly grail of social media”.

“We promote the use of [Facebook], why, because the biggest problem in developing our sport is getting people together, communicating and getting organized. Facebook allows this in one swoop and it allows for unlimited growth. Not four physical walls of course, but a forum to meet each other, share ideas and plans of action on the subject in common. Once athletes participate in this multi-directional forum, they quickly gain momentum. “

It’s really a good story about a skeptic that turned into a convinced user. I encourage you to read the entire post. Dumont concludes:

“One day forced to use social media, and another, proud to see how useful it can be for all of us.”

 

 

Samsung-gate spreading outside Sweden?

I blogged the other day about how a “viral agency” had been posting nice reviews in Swedish online forums on behalf of Samsung, but without disclosing their true identity. The scam was revealed and in a comment to the marketing blog Adland, Samsung said that the procedure was out of line and that they had put an end to it.

However, it seems that this undercover operation to get a buzz going may not be limited to Sweden. In an article today on the UK computer forum Computeractive.co.uk, Deputy Editor Tom Royal, writes that someone has started threads on the forum, promoting Samsung products such as digital video cameras.

“The user who started the thread wanted to share a video showing the “12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video” of a Samsung camera – which is fair enough, perhaps. But then check his previous posts: here, here and here. It’s fair to say that he’s very interested in Samsung products and nothing else.”

The IP address to the user “Huey” comes from Seoul, South Korea. Tom Royal is pointing out that the IP addresses are not directly associated with Samsung. But we are starting to see a pattern here. I did some further investigation and found that the video that was linked to in the Computeractive forum has also been posted on a number of Korean forums, as well as this UK forum. The text in this post is the exact same as the text on Computeractive:

“This is a short sample video that is recorded by a new Samsung camcorder R10. Although the environment of aquarium was not proper enough to shoot by a camcorder, R10 did capture every single movement of beautiful sea animals in a dark aquarium. It has a 12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video.”

Even though we still have no evidence that this was done on purpose, it may just be a fanatic Samsung fan, we should dig a little deeper. If you do a Google search of a snippet of the text above, you get more hits in online forums, for example here. Once again, same video, same text as above. But this time it was posted by a user named “samsungimaging”, located in London, which is also linked to an official Samsung page called http://www.samsungimaging.net and this page is run by Samsung: “SamsungImaging.net© has been launched in January 2009 by Samsung Electronics, in order to improve the relationship and communication with our customers.”

Other places with the same text and video are here, here and here.

I realize that it is possible that Samsung has nothing to do with the spreading of this video, it may just be enthusiastic fans or spam sites that scrape content online. But it is starting to look a bit suspiciuos don’t you think? Tom Royal has tried to get a comment from Samsung and promised to post if he gets a response. We will continue to follow this story as it unveils.

Footnote: Original story found here, in Swedish.

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Samsung caught in fake Swedish viral campaign

Samsung has been caught with their pants down in an attempt to create a buzz in Swedish online forums for their LED tv sets. A Swedish agency called the Viral Company has been posting comments and questions to numerous forums about the best LED tvs, pretending to be an ordinary consumer. With fake identities the Viral Company tried to get the word going in forums about gaming, movies, home electronics, outdoor life and so forth.

samsung-led-tv-1

But they did a major mistake when they added a smiley to the posts with the purpose of tracking conversations, since the URL for the smiley icon went to a domain name owned by the Viral Company (http://power.moltoman.com). So the little scam was brutally revealed, and here is the fun part – someone else is following in the footsteps of the Viral Company, calling them out as cheaters. A user named “Felmeddelande” (Error message, in English) posts comments to the different forum threads explaining that these posts are done on behalf of Samsung, which in most cases are in breach of forum rules.

samsung-led-tv-2

If you do a Google search for http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/PMfegnEb/smile.gif (the image has now been taken down) or http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/ you get a long list of forum posts, almost all about LED tvs. The question now is, how much of these tactics did Samsung Sweden know about. If the campaign has been approved by Samsung then they are in desperate need of some rethinking in terms of social media strategy, because this campaign was doomed to backfire from the very start. It will also be interesting to see how they will handle this online crisis situation. Will they stay silent or will they address the issue?

Hat tip to @pellet who blogged about this story he calls Samsung-gate, in Swedish this morning. See also Adland (in English).

Update Feb 15: Adland has talked to Samsung about the matter. See more details here.

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Vodafone gained Twitter followers after bad tweet

Companies that manage an issue or crisis well may often come out stronger on the other side. As a follow up to my post yesterday about Vodafone and the obscene tweet, I thought I would check in on the number of followers to Vodafone’s Twitter account. In my view, the company handled the indicident well and I almost expected that they would gain a number of followers from the attention. As you can see from the graph below, that is exactly what happened. We can see a sharp increase in number of followers for VodafoneUK since the unfortunate tweet was published, almost twice the amount than on a normal day (+377 compared to +215 on average).

vodafone uk

Graph from twittercounter.com.

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One tweet causes crisis for Vodafone

When social media enters the business world, a larger number of employees get to speak on behalf of the company than what was standard practice before. Often this is a good thing, but of course there can always be one or two bad apples that will take advantage of this new found power and try to harm the organization. That was probably what happened to Vodafone today when someone internally tweeted an obscene tweet from Vodafone’s corporate account. And since Twitter is Twitter, also bad news spread extremely fast. That’s why VodafoneUK currently is involved in some serious online crisis management, see their Twitter stream below.

vodafoneuk

The story is currently among the top tweeted stories on Tweetmeme.com, but Vodafone is acting switfly to limit the damages before there are any major impact on its brand. They seem to be directly addressing a large number of people that are commenting on the issue or retweeting the obscene tweet. And I think Vodafone will manage to go quite unharmed through this incident. Fresh Networks sums it up nicely:

1.They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.

2.They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

Update: According to a statement from Vodafone, the employee has now been suspended. From the Telegraph: “The employee has been suspended immediately and we have started an internal investigation. This was not a hack and we apologise for any offence the tweet may have caused.”

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Health care site named best Swedish site

Internetworld tonight presented the list of the web sites it ranks as the 100 best in Sweden. The winning site this year was the health care site OmVård (www.omvard.se) which presents statistics from different health care providers so that patients can make an informed decision about where to turn for health care. As a curiosity, it’s interesting that the top Swedish site only has links from 7 other sites (in Google).

Among the traditional media companies, these were the ones that made it to the top 100 list.

2. SVT : Best media site
5. TV4
7. DN.se : Best news site
19. Aftonbladet.se
21. SvD
69. Nyheter 24
71. Viasat on demand
82. SR
90. Sydsvenskan.se

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