It’s easy to be critical

Posted Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 11:19pm in Blogging, PR General  | 

Back in April I wrote a critical blog post on Innocent Drinks’ foray into using the microblogging platform Twitter for the company’s 2008 annual general meeting (AGM). My thoughts were that the company wasn’t using the platform to its full extent and given the Innocent brand (companies wanna be them, marketers wanna be with them) I thought they could be doing a lot more in terms of interaction and dialogue. Check the comments, not everyone agrees with me.

The particular post in question has recently been featured on Inside CRM’s ‘The Twitter Hall of Shame‘ which was subsequently featured on the front page of Digg and linked to by a number of prominent bloggers. Loads of traffic ensued.

It’s easy to be critical though. And now that this particular post has been featured alongside some **real** Twitter howlers I know I could have been more constructive in my critique while at the same time praising Innocent for its innovative approach to its AGM

Anyway, Ted, the digital marketing guy from Innocent, has recently left a comment so I’ll publish it word for word here as he raises some valid points and gives you insights into his and Innocent’s way of thinking. Incidentally, Ted wrote a post on his own blog about my blog post some time ago which I saw through my referrals but didn’t respond to but I should have.

Ted says:

Hello.

We should have replied directly to this conversation a bit earlier but I suppose now is as good as time as any to join in. I think the original thought of this post and resulting debate raises some really interesting points about the place a lot of brands are in with their use of social media at the minute.

The first point should be that innocent have ultimately benefited from this post and the associated comments. Which is always a good thing, so thank you all. As Stephan points out in his last comment, we did indeed change our behaviours in using twitter directly as a result of this post. As with most things we welcome comment, be it praise or criticism, indeed you often actually get more positive benefits from the criticism. Hence addressing this blog post straight away with our twitter followers ( http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008/statuses/794949909 ) and then taking on the suggestion regarding following everyone else’s feeds. From that point of view alone our feed, and what both innocent as a brand and our followers as consumers got out of it, ended up better than it was before.

It also brought up the below interesting thoughts as part of the wider context of our own use, and the general use of social media at present…

-no wrong or right way to use social media
I kind of agree with Michael’s & Alex’s thoughts that there is no wrong or right way to use twitter or social media, but probably a set of behaviours or social courtesies that will enable you to get more out of what you are doing. A good example of this for me would be howies blog. They have never had commenting enabled in their long history of blogging but it is no less an interesting or inspiring blog to me. Nor could you say that howies is not embracing openness or the use of digital communities, just have a look at the do lectures stuff they’ve got coming up.

-wearing stuff in, not out
Again as Stephen rightly says, he made these points as he called it when he first came across our AGM twitter feed. In reality this was only a couple of weeks in from when we first set up the twitter feed and quite far off when our AGM stuff really started to get going. The important bit of this though is that social media, and digital in general, tends to get better the more and longer you use it. Hence the thought, that like a nice leather, sofa you’re wearing stuff in, not out.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/wearing-stuff-i.html

-direct line to head office
Another thought on this is the way we first came across Stephen’s post (via a Google alert set up on ‘innocent drinks’). I think every brand should have Google alerts set up on themselves to pick up and act on stuff like this quickly for their own benefit.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/a-direct-line-t.html
http://www.google.com/alerts

-it’s good to talk
Social media is basically making it easier and more transparent for brands to speak and have conversations with consumers. And as Dan says on the comment to this post (another example of how we’ve benefited from what people say about us and we pick upon), ‘talking is good’.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/06/quick-quick.html

-falling forwards fast
My last thought would be around the context and resulting lessons we’ve now learnt post AGM twitter feed. At innocent we subscribe to the ‘fall forward fast’ principle of doing things in digital (http://www.tomski.com/archive/new_archive/000063.html ). The AGM twitter feed was ultimately a test case in using twitter. In doing stuff like this it’s kind of inevitable that things will go wrong along the way, but in the same light it’s inevitable that you’ll learn invaluable stuff in the process. And learning stuff will absolutely never leave you in a weaker position than when you started.

Hopefully others will be able to take some learning’s out of this as well as us. So we’ll all have learnt something.

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