IBM Innovation Center Silicon Valley

Whether you're a multimillion dollar enterprise with a team of social media experts or a startup of 5 trying to grow your brand, you are not immune to the pitfalls of a social media crisis. Crises can range from customer complaints to marketing mishaps, both big and small and everything in between. The way you handle a crisis can ultimately strengthen or weaken your brand image.

Here's a list of 10 must-have tips to manage a social media crisis that I walked away with from Marketing and Social Media professor Kimberly Legoki, who spoke at the Disrupting Business: Social Marketing Symposium at IBM's IIC in Foster City, CA. You're going to want to bookmark this list in case of emergency!


1.    Always be listening and monitoring
When crisis strikes, make sure you've got eyes on everything that's being said so that you can quickly respond and fully understand the scope of the crisis. Aggregation tools like Storify can help you keep an ear to the pulse of the story so that you can assess what people are saying.
 

2.    Turn off auto-post immediately
Auto-posting is great for many things, but if you have to address an unfortunate circumstance you don't want it to accidentally be followed by a post that can look insensitive or contradictory.

3.    Immediately acknowledge the situation
Even if you're not ready to release details, if there is a situation that people are talking about, you need to acknowledge that it happened and that you will keep the public in the know as you gather more information. These actions are necessary for taking charge of what people are saying about your brand.

4.    Get your message to as many outlets as possible
While it's best to centralize all of the information, perhaps in a blog, use all other social media channels to direct people to that location.

5.    Correct – don't delete!
Once it's out there, deleting it won't make it go away and it might make it worse. Deleting looks suspect and creates more negative sentiment. If there's a mistake, acknowledge it and update the information.

6.    If you must temporarily disengage, do it the right way
If you must disengage (as @NASAVoyager2 did during the federal government shutdown – insert image) don't suspend or delete the account. Acknowledge that due to circumstances your organization won't be able to respond to or monitor comments via social media and supply an alternative way of reaching out. Let people know when you return.

7.    Own the #hashtag
In your first post about the situation, use the hashtag and continue to use it to encourage others to use it, too. That first post will be the one that gets re-posted again and again.

8.    Monitor online chatter before resuming marketing activities
Before you get back to business as usual, make sure you're listening to what people are saying about the crisis. You don't want to go back to your regularly scheduled marketing until your customers are ready for that.

9.    Adopt a response matrix
This response matrix from the U.S. Airforce can be adopted to your particular crisis.

10. Practice, refine, repeat
It's important to plan ahead for a crisis. Who's going to post to where? Does everyone who would need access to a platform actually have access? Who approves the posts? Have a template ready to go in case of emergency. Practice a mock crisis every 6 months with this team to ensure that everything is in order.

You are now equipped to handle any disaster that comes you're way.  While I hope you never have to use this list, you'll be glad to have it if disaster strikes.

Professor Legoki is a crisis management savant who has managed and studied crises for over 20 years. Her latest project is called “The customer who tweeted #boycott; an empirical investigation of consumer activism on Twitter.” Tweet @KimLegoki and what you want to #boycott, to be included in her research.

Do you have any other tips to add? Any good examples of companies that didn't follow these tips? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Follow me on Twitter @TheZanieLanie

Customer centric organizations require new tools to deliver better on-line customer experiences, for users today who expect better service.  To gain competitive advantage,  on-line marketers need to quickly analyze web and customer issues in order to provide a better web and mobile customer experience.

IBM Tealeaf solutions are such tools.  By capturing and recording digital customer interactions on a website in near real time, Tealeaf allows companies to visualize customer visits to understand user actions, and any unexpected business results.

Recently a large on line travel retailer noticed that site visitors who booked both air travel and rental car reservations had a conversion rate on rental car bookings of almost 90%.  In other words, 90% of customers who booked air travel and then looked at rental cars were converted successfully. However, customers who just visited the site for rental cars were only showing a conversion rate of some 13%.  By installing and using IBM Tealeaf tools, the retailer found the following:

• For car rental only travelers, the website code was defaulting the arrival time for car pickup to midnight (unbeknown to the end user).  Hence when the web software looked for car rentals at that time, it found that most airport rental agencies were closed at midnight, so returned the default message,  “no cars available” to the on-line shopper.
• Air Travelers meanwhile inherited a car pick up time of the airline flight arrival time, which resulted in a high conversion to rental car bookings.

Using IBM Tealeaf,  the on-line retailer was able to gain deeper insight into the customer experience and see quickly how their own web site software was causing the problem of low conversion rates on rental cars, for car only shoppers.  This allowed a quick correction to the web software which in turn drove higher revenue from on-line car rental bookings.

For any online businesses facing pressure to increase revenue and decrease cost, managing the customer’s experience has to be part of an essential strategy.  IBM Tealeaf solutions provide the ability to monitor a customer’s website issues on an almost real time basis.   Tealeaf allows organizations to intercept web problems quickly, to increase revenues and customer loyalty.  In effect, it allows on-line merchants to view their own digital commerce sites thru the eyes of their customers, and experience it as they do. Reading the tealeaves has become an important part of managing  web businesses.

Smarter Commerce, up to just recently, has been kind of a nebulous term to me.  Hard to actually define.  In effect, it is using  up to date new tools, such as mobile technology, social technologies,  analytics,  and cloud technologies to build applications that a few years ago were unheard of, or probably impossible to construct due to lack of computing power or tools to execute them.

I recently experienced "smarter commerce" first hand, which brought home to me the power of these new applications and why they are so important.  My interaction with "smarter commerce" was via United Airlines.  The Airline industry has made a lot of recent strides to improve service and customer satisfaction by using smarter commerce type applications.

In my situation I was scheduled for an air trip to Rochester NY.  I received the normal email message 24 hours prior to departure to check in.  I did this on line, and completed printing of boarding passes etc.  At that point, I thought my interaction with United was complete until the following day at the baggage drop off.  However, late that afternoon, I got a mobile text message addressed to me from United on my Samsung 4 Galaxy.  United informed me that my flight that I had checked in for to  Washington DC was cancelled due to mechanical problems.  It also directed me on the spot to a UAL site to choose a replacement combination of flights AND seats to reach my destination at around the same time.  I was able to complete this in a short time and actually book a replacement flight via Chicago that got me to Rochester 45 minutes earlier.  So I went to the airport the next day, with booked flights,  seats and no issues.  I tried to imagine this trip maybe a few years ago.  I would have arrived at the airport to check in with boarding passes for a flight that was cancelled,  stood in line for minutes if not hours getting new bookings, and of course been delayed hours if not days due to lack of available alternatives at the later time. So United Airlines,  by using a little data analytics, and mobile technology had taken a potentially bad customer sat situation and turned it into a positive.  A very powerful business case.

Smarter Commerce allows companies to put the customer at the center of the process, instead of the company at the center. It anticipates, via analytics and an extension of core system data, and uses mobile and social tools to allow optimization and real time action to deal with business problems, that even just several years ago, were impossible to deal with.  Smarter Commerce is.....,  your customer in context.

Infrastructure matters because business outcomes matter and new outcomes entail new infrastructure demands.

With new workloads, such as, cloud, analytics, mobile and social placing additional demands on the server, sever virtualization management tool and storage systems we are currently utilizing - the right infrastructure matters, and the right infrastructure needs to be fast, flexible, reliable, secure, and manageable.

Come learn how the breakthrough with Flash storage combined with the very latest innovative IBM POWER8 technology announcements meet these new demands.

Technical details:

PowerVC:
PowerVC is the new advanced virtualization management offering for Power Systems, built on OpenStack. PowerVC delivers advanced virtualization management for IBM AIX and Linux environments on IBM POWER Systems. PowerVC has quick time to value as the focus of this offering is simplicity and ease of use. PowerVC enables Power Systems customers to lower their Total Cost of Ownership with simplified ease of use and capabilities, easily deploy and move workloads and maximize resource utilization. PowerVC has been built to require little to no training to get moving on optimizing your power system virtualization, with advanced placement policies and monitoring and management of VMs.

PowerVC editions include the following features and benefits:

• Virtual machine image capture, deployment, resizing, and management
• Resource pooling through shared storage pools
• Policy-based VM placement to help improve usage and reduce complexity
• Real-time management optimization and VM resilience to help increase productivity
• VM Mobility with placement policies to help reduce burden on IT staff in a simplified GUI
• A management system that manages existing PowerVM deployments
• Security through existing Active Directory deployments

PowerVC Standard Edition includes new support for PowerKVM which includes the following features and benefits:

• Support for managing Red Hat and SUSE guest VMs that are running under PowerKVM
• Enhanced storage configurations specific to PowerKVM, including NFS storage
• Support for Open vSwitch network configurations under PowerKVM    

Register at this link

IBM BlueMix is IBM's new PaaS environment.

Learn more on this link. And if you want to do some background reading on PaaS and how it is revolutioinazing app development in the cloud, what better book to read than Lucas Carlson's Programming for Paas.?

If you have any questions about IBM BlueMix just reach out to your neighborhood IBM Innovation Center or let us here at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley know.

To get started with BlueMix, simply click on this link.

The 100 BlueMix Days - Hands-On Workshop at the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley on Friday March 28 drew a full house of IBM business partners.

IBM BlueMix is an implementation of IBM’s Open Cloud Architecture, leveraging Cloud Foundry to enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks. IBM will provide services and runtimes into the ecosystem based on our extensive software portfolio.

If you are interested in learning more about IBM BlueMix, just contact the nearest IBM Innovation Center.

On Saturday, March 29, 2014, a team from the IBM Innovation Center in Silicon Valley attended the  2014 Harker Research Symposium to introduce IBM programs and technologies of interest to the tech-savy students.

The Harker School is a private, co-educational, non-profit college preparatory school in San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1893, with its own incubator and students who already have their own startup companies. The Research Symposium drew a large croud of students to the IBM booth. 

Of the several hundred students who visited the booth and talked to the IBM team, the vast majority were interested in 1) IBM Watson, 2) the IBM Global Entrepreneur program.and 3) Internships at IBM.

Several students had already founded their own companies and were clearly on the path of becoming he future movers and shakers of Silicon Valley.