The Smith vs. Southwest Air episode is a great example that demonstrated, 1) the social media communications channel of a company can’t just be open Monday to Friday, 9-5. It must be ready to respond at anytime to customer feedback – because that customers communication channels are open 24/7. And, 2) It’s still challenging to measure an exact R.O.I. dollar figure, but in Southwest Air’s case – it was potentially in the millions related to the Kevin Smith story.

Another reason this case impacted me so much was it unfolded before my eyes – all in real-time.

To recap. It’s late Saturday evening last February and I’m casually working on the computer with one eye on my twitter stream – I see an interesting tweet from cult film director and writer Kevin Smith just before midnight. Now, Kevin has joked himself many times at his own expense about his weight problem. Seems Mr. Smith, who had boarded a Southwest Air flight was asked to leave the plane after it was deemed he was too overweight and their wasn’t an additional seat for him to buy (airlines have a little known policy of requiring severely overweight people to purchase two tickets.)

Smith was obviously very frustrated by the experience and his handling by Southwest Air attendents so he preceded to start tweeting his frustrations (and also some rather strong names for Southwest Air) – to his almost two million followers.

I clearly remember that particular Saturday night, just before midnight when I saw those first tweets from Kevin appear in my stream. You just knew that Southwest Air was looking at a big potential PR problem. When Smith also tweeted out the perfect photo of him on the plane – it didn’t take a genius to figure it was only a matter time before almost every entertainment blog and mainstream media would be picking up on this story.

But this story provided an unexpected twist. And it’s what led me to fundamentally appreciate the important role social media now plays in crisis communication.

The twist was that Southwest Air’s tweeter, after three or four of Kevin Smith’s ranting, hateful tweets bashing Southwest Air, got on the stream and began to engage Kevin Smith. More importantly, Southwest Air, through those first tweets that night – began to add their side to the conversation which by early Sunday morning was on fire online.

Because the Southwest Air person handling the twitter account got out of her bed and back online to handle the storm Kevin Smith started – Southwest Air was made aware of the looming publicity problem and could move their communications team into action.

By early Sunday morning, Southwest Air already had updated their company blog about the issues Kevin Smith raised and even offered a personal apology to Mr. Smith. By Monday morning, when now the story had spread to the mainstream news stations and Smith was interviewed on everything from CNN to NBC – Southwest Air had their representatives ready and prepared with their talking points.

And it worked. In polls later during the week a majority of people ended up siding with Southwest Air and their handling of Smith.

I believe Southwest Air was able to so effectively counter the shit storm of criticism generated by Kevin Smith because their social media person, their “twitter girl” was listening that Saturday night. If Southwest Air had just woken up Monday morning to begin dealing with the crisis – Smith’s side would have been able to dominate the media much more.

Companies still have major challenges in dealing with customers like Kevin Smith – someone who has influence and a large community of people listening – but you’d might not recognize him so he just blends in with the other customers.

The difference is, when a customer like Smith gets pissed off at the service and takes to social media to vent his frustrations – many, many people are listening.

The question then becomes does your company have the social media (and overall communications strategy) to effectively deal with this type of crisis?

As well, the idea behind a lot of my news content marketing is driving traffic – somewhere. And I don’t usually see much benefit in just continuing to drive traffic to other peoples sites like Twitpic (believe me, they get enough hits each day.)

i.shot7.com is going to be the place where I play around with this idea. And with a couple of iPhone apps – I’m going to publish breaking news bits from the assignments I’m on. Consider it a compliment to the hi-res photos I already shoot.

How’s it done?

My easy workflow to go from picture to post in minutes is basically this: I first experimented with a few different ways to approach the problem. I’ve basically settled on this method and the apps / API’s to make the magic happen:

I shoot a photo with my iPhone. I usually then import picture into the excellent and fast Comic Touch app to have a little fun. Save.

Now, here is where I first tried to use the Wordpress app to basically write a post and upload photo from scratch.

But alas, I found a quicker way for myself. And it involves my Flickr account and some powerful things you can do in there (though, please note: this does involve setting up the Flickr API so it “talks” to your wordpress blog.)

After I snap my picture and ready to post. I email to a private Flickr address specially set-up. From there the API takes over and automatically formats and posts my email and attached photo to i.shot7.com – a self-hosted wordpress blog (which I actually just made a sub-domain of my main photo site shot7.com)

I find it much faster sending an email than writing a blog post from scratch. Afterwords, if I want to add or make changes, I then use the wordpress iPhone app to edit the post that’s now set up.

Lastly, I do use the Twitter Tools plug-in on my wordpress install so when I email my blog post – it also sends out automatically a nice URL fitted Tweet.

I like to say, I’m documenting pop culture along the way in describing my primary style and interests.

I decided in 2010 to introduce another style into my shooting arsenal – the documentary portrait.

Whether its street shooting, celebrity news, or documentary portrait – never hesitate to contact me about photography assignments.

photographer Steve Carty by Richard Budman

The opening graphic bumper was made from some Megan Fox video I captured during the 2009 film festival. I remembered video from that Fox night on the red carpet from the sounds – the intensity of all those camera clicks and photographer shouts were sounds I would not soon forget. It would make great source video for the opening, and after some playing around in Adobe After Effects – we would have our shot7 bumper.

Because of my previous (and hopefully, future) work on the Cadillac TIFFinsider campaign, I took special interest in one particular session at the recent PodCamp Toronto 2010 social media conference – the talk by Christopher Barger – the Director of Social Media for General Motors U.S.A.

Mr. Barger came to Canada for a weekend to discuss how GM made extensive use of online social media in a presentation titled, “The Social Web – Crisis Response & Reputation Rejuvenation.”

Chris started his talk by stating he was given one small problem – and just one week to prepare a communications plan for it. Simply put, how to deal with the public fallout on what would be the biggest business crisis in North American history – The Chapter 11 filing and bankruptcy of General Motors.

If there ever was a massive public relations challenge – this was it.

Chris knew he wanted his response plan to heavily involve online social media. But he still had convincing to do with some in the executive ranks of GM. Some GM people wondered, in this period of bankruptcy and crisis, was this the right time to be “open and transparent” on social media?

So while there was talk about “going dark” – that is, shut down the GM blogs and facebook groups, and not engage in any new forms of networking (Twitter) – Chris Barger executed a social media plan that pretty much did the exact opposite.

Mr. Barger discussed at his Podcamp talk some key points he discovered and tried to infuse into his social media team. Almost any corporate social media campaign could benefit from a lot of the ideas Chris Barger of his GM communications team have put into play.

1. You can’t over-communicate in a crisis.
Before Chris had his social media team respond to reactions regarding the GM crisis. He Listened. And listened, and listened. A key point he stressed during his Podcamp talk. Before GM was going to respond and be open and transparent in what the company was going through – he first listened to find out what people where talking about and where their concerns lie.
And then General Motors started to become something it hadn’t been before with its corporate communications, “OPEN. OPEN. OPEN.” as Barger would call it.

Those first documents and legal filings on the Chapter 11 – Chris and his team broke up key points and tweeted them out – 140 characters at a time. The General Motors CEO sat-down and did multiple live online chats on twitter.

And GM’s Director of Social Media also made sure of one thing – that traditional media, television and newspapers were always made aware of the social media campaign at each step. GM wasn’t going to forget about the traditional media that has spent decades writing about the company in this new communications campaign.

2. Let others tell your story.
The GM social media plan ensured genuine reach out to online news sites and bloggers. And not just the well-known, influencer type with large audiences. If a blogger with a passion for cars and only maybe had an audience of just 200 people per month. Barger decided that was still somebody to reach out too and engage. That small blogger is still a person speaking to 200 people interested in automobiles and that’s a community GM wants to be involved in. So just like the traditional car journalists and big news sites – GM also started to invite the small blogger in for press events and hands-on driving tests.
Another huge benefit to all the conversations that GM was doing in social media – was that traditional, offline media was listening as well to what the company was doing. A lot of GM’s social media efforts were picked up for stories in traditional media sources. And a lot of the time, the tone of the story was this was a different GM – a General Motors that was engaged in new social technologies and listening to its customers and critics (for perhaps, the very first time.)

Some of the initial results of the online campaign included thousands of conversations across many social media platforms and millions of hits for a special website GM put up explaining the situation in better detail.
But with all the online efforts Christopher Barger’s team put in – he never forgot one golden rule – 90% of word-of-mouth advertising still occurs offline. The GM team never forget to keep offline media aware of their communication efforts and ensure dealer and retail touch points was engaged and also participating with the new media.

3. Follow-up and value the relationships you’ve built.
The GM Social Media team can look back to last year and have a good idea of the news sites, bloggers, tweeters, and more that contributed to the dialogue of incredible change that occurred with the company. And when it comes time for the communications team to reach out again for a “GM hands-on” campaign, you can be sure this engaged community that Barger’s team has carefully cultivated, will hear about any new plans – as well, get their invitations.

NOTE: I’ve adapted this post from what I originally wrote on HoundsTV.

I further developed the Twitter.com/tiffinsider account. Over the course of six-weeks, the Twitter account amassed over 1,400 followers. Hundreds of exclusive tiff photos were shot and uploaded to twitPic and Flickr which saw tens of thousands of views during the campaign. Also established the TIFFinsider YouTube channel, and with nineteen videos uploaded has seen over 25,000 views cumulative.

I consulted and made recommendations to the Maclaren Momentum technical people regarding blog design, SEO, and issues related to server security, maintenance, and plug-in recommendations on the Wordpress managed blog.

But in gearing up for the premiere of the show in early 2010 on cable TV in Canada – the shots I got from Kayvon’s meeting with Prince Charles provide the perfect content to mark-up with some graphics and provide some promos to distribute through Facebook and Twitter to tease the coming soon of the show. This type of content marketing proves even more effective when done in the midst of a news cycle event that is been heavily reported, like the Royal’s visit to Canada was.

Curious to what went down between Kayvon and Prince Charles? While you’ll have to tune into AUX and BITE TV (in Canada) during early 2010 to exactly find out – I can say it does involve Kayvon’s quest to have TEA with Charles (what else for two distinguished British chaps to do?)

]]> http://www.budman.tv/2009/11/prince-charles-canada-for-kayvon-tv-content-promotion/feed/ 0 http://www.budman.tv/2009/10/shot7-source-of-entertainment-news-photos/ http://www.budman.tv/2009/10/shot7-source-of-entertainment-news-photos/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:16:22 +0000 Richard http://www.budman.tv/?p=135
shot7.com is a web-based source of entertainment news photos by a network of professional celebrity photographers.

I created shot7.com to showcase and share my news photography. I like to consider it the beginnings of a new type of photo agency – one where content is first thought in terms of how it connects, rather than just a means to commerce.

The shot7.com home page lets users know the latest photo news we’ve posted and images you can grab. Also, the blog is where we talk about the stuff that makes us all better photographers, as well, some behind-the-scenes stories of our assignments.

High quality celebrity photography you see in magazines, newspapers, and brand-name websites is now available to blogs and all news sites – for free or little cost (the cost is just a link!) Premium services based on real-time reporting and photo exclusivity are coming in 2010.

I’ll have much more to say on this one as this deal evolves. But it looks like our little online show – KayvonTV.com – is going to become a full length 30 minute show on the new AUX.TV digital cable television network in early 2010.

When watching this clip of Kayvon interviewing big-time U.S. rappers Talib Kweli and DJ Hi-tek – the questions Kayvon is asking become almost secondary, it’s the reaction of Talib and company to Kayvon that becomes the priceless stuff to watch. The wondering of “what’s real?”