How do you handle a bad online review of your products and services? It is something that restaurants are having to deal with. Interesting piece here about how restaurants can turn a negative into a positive, which is relevant to other sectors as well.
The key point is that people are having conversations online and you need to get involved in order to protect your position and reputation and in order to promote positive things you are doing.
Ben Edwards, Executive Vice President for The Economist Group, who runs The Economist’s online publishing business, will be giving a breakfast seminar to members of the Social Media Leadership Forum on March 4.
In this seminar, Ben will be talking about how The Economist Group is using social media – how their strategy is evolving, the social media channels they are using and how they are measuring the results.
The Economist is using Twitter, blogging, YouTube and Facebook. In particular it is interesting how they are using Facebook – with the number of fans building impressively.
It is good to see a global media organisation which has such a strong reputation in business circles embracing social media in innovative ways.
Members of the Social Media Leadership Forum – which is managed by ItsOpen – include Aviva, Shell, Motorola, First Direct, Unilever, Asda, SAB Miller and Vodafone.
Will Buzz help Google keep up with Facebook? That’s the question. Well no, not really. Google is hardly a social site and seems just to be intent on slapping social functionality on top of applications. Its main interest is generating relevant data for search results to help its ad business.
There’s been some criticism of Buzz. Commentators have pointed out that it is limited and you can for example bring Twitter into Buzz but not use Buzz to publish Twitter.
But I think the last word has to go to Jeff Jarvis who points out that ‘the internet is our social network’.
It’s a question of finding the best ways to organise the internet. Social networking will never be won by one particular site. The internet is far bigger than one site – even bigger than Facebook.
The Technology for Marketing and Advertising show is on next week at Earls Court (February 23-24) and one of the six themed seminar theatres will be focusing on social media.
Eight talks have been scheduled over two days on topics such as ‘twitter for business’, ‘how companies are connecting to the social web’, ‘creating conversations for online communities’ and ‘creating an integrated social media strategy’.
There’s a strong technology bias, with speakers from Oracle, RightNow and Alterian, for instance, and it would have been nice to see marketers from big brands giving the benefit of their experience using social media. Perhaps next year. Even so, there’s likely to be a lot of useful stuff to be gleaned.
More details here.
