Qantas Luxury: What I Would Have Done

Last night I jotted down some thoughts as the Qantas Airways #qantasluxury crisis churned away online. 

I can see exactly how #qantasluxury happened. 

The executive team at Qantas would have been churning out BAU (business as usual) messages to rally the troops in light of the negative media they have been receiving around flight groundings and union standoffs.

So, BAU they did. 

Marketing person fires up the Twitter with her brief to position Qantas as a full-service, flagship brand up against price-fighter Jetstar. 

Giving away free merch on Twitter generally works very well for big brands and you get good, positive engagement results. 

So, marketing person rummaged around in the corporate swag cupboard (I have one myself) and bundled some gear to throw on Twitter as a wee promo. 

All very unremarkable and very common business practises. BAU. 

So where did it go wrong?

Qantas is not trading under BAU and it’s naive to think that they are.  People don’t forget the weeks of negative coverage. It’s the national carrier. It employs heaps of people. It is a very high-touch, high-engagement brand and business. 

Qantas misread the sentiment and the generally higher educated and politically aware, news savvy people that are on Twitter gave it back to them. 

I’ve been involved in a number of crisis comms situations (mainly offline in traditional media) and the difference between a train wreck and a ‘whew I can’t believe we got away with that’ is often the ability of the comms manager to step back and not panic. 

Only someone who has been on the frontline can relate to that sickening feeling you get when your phone rings at 6pm on a Friday night and your project is going to be front-page news in the weekend papers for all the wrong reasons. 

What I would have done

First port of call for me would have been to the CEO.  The ‘Houston-we have a problem’ moment that drains all the blood from your soul. 

Second, I would call/email the entire executive team and tell them not to comment to media. This would include legal and possibly an external public relations firm if you have one too for investor relations. 

The message would be “don’t comment. Act dumb. Say you haven’t seen the #qantasluxury hashtag and you’re not the person that talks on those things.” Put everything through to the comms manager who can protect people and buy time. That’s what they are there for. 

Third, I would order everyone out of the pool on and offline. 

All social media accounts are to stop publishing including personal accounts. Go dark. (note: this is very controversial and I have never been able to convince any company to do it. However, I see public domain comment by employees online as a risk in a crisis situation). 

An email/ yammer to all staff with an equal measure of “it’s under control” and “if you talk to media we’ll bloody fire you.” Serious. I’ve had these chats before. 

Be aware that, especially when you are in a change management process like Qantas, disgruntled employees may forward the messages to media so write for the public domain. 

Fourth, I would call an analyst to start mining the data across on and offline media. 

I certainly would not be talking to anyone without seeing a top-line level of sentiment activity. Remember-when you are trending at number one on Twitter Australia your job is containment. Trying to send clever “hey guys thanks for entering” tweets is like trying to put out a bushfire with a garden hose. What topics can you provide clarification on? What arguments will you never win? Is it targeted at the CEO, unions, service, food, groundings, offshoring? I was very surprised to see mainstream news outlets publishing comments from interviews with Qantas people in the middle of the event. Far too knee-jerk. 

Fifth, I would assess the data and come up with a written statement. The recent Telecom “abstain” statement is an excellent example of this working well. The tone is “whoops we messed up, we tried to be funny but we weren’t.” It’s a big step back. Don’t try and be tricky. Comments suggesting that ‘any publicity is good publicity’ are absolutely ridiculous, lazy and unsophisticated. Bad media ruins brands in the same way that good media makes brands. 

With emotions running high, bad decisions can be made out of ego, blame, and sheer panic. 

Good crisis responses whether you get caught in a rip at the beach or responding to a natural disaster require planning, systems, trust and leadership. 

That’s what I would have done. 

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

Cookie Monster Explains #occupy

Anyway, here's a burst of Cookie truth that should be copy-and-pasted everywhere all across the Internet. Today, we are all Cookie Monsters!

Yes, there always going to be rich and poor. But we used to live in country where rich owned factory and make 30 times what factory worker make. Now we live in country where rich make money by lying about value of derivative bonds and make 3000 times what factory worker would make if factories hadn't all moved to China.

Capitalism great system. We won Cold War because people behind Iron Curtain look over wall, and see how much more plentiful and delicious cookies are in West, and how we have choice of different bakeries, not just state-owned one. It great system. It got us out of Depression, won WWII, built middle class, built country's infrastructure from highways to Hoover Dam to Oreo factory to electrifying rural South. It system that reward hard work and fair play, and everyone do fair share and everyone benefit. Rich get richer, poor get richer, everyone happy. It great system.

Then after Reagan, Republicans decide to make number one priority destroying that system. Now we have system where richest Americans ones who find ways to game system -- your friends on Wall Street -- and poorest Americans ones who thought working hard would get them American dream, when in fact it get them pink slip when job outsourced to 10-year-old in Mumbai slum. And corporations have more influence over government than people (or monsters).

It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy -- knowing full well that what could and would happen -- putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.

That what the soul-searching about. When Liberals run country for 30 years following New Deal, American economy double in size, and wages double along with it. That fair. When Conservatives run country for 30 years following Reagan, American economy double again, and wages stay flat. What happen to our share of money? All of it go to richest 1%. That not "there always going to be rich people". That unfair system. That why we upset. That what Occupy Sesame Street about.

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

Burson-Marsteller Asia-Pacific Corporate Social Media Study 2011

<div style="width:477px" id="__ss_9867062"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px">Burson-Marsteller Asia-Pacific Corporate Social Media Study 2011</strong> <div style="padding:5px 0 12px"> View more documents from Burson-Marsteller Asia-Pacific </div> </div>

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

Apple Brand Architecture

Excerpt from Richard McManus post

Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 in a failed leadership battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley. In 1997, he returned to Apple and one of my favorite Jobs stories comes from that time. On his return, he reduced Apple's bloated computer product range from about 40 to just 4. This passage, set in an internal meeting, describes how he did it:

He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.

via @readwriteweb

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

Social Media Is Nearly Dead And I've Got My Mojo Back

I’m back.  Didn’t last long did it?

There are a couple of reasons.
 
First of all, when I wrote my previous post I guess I was pretty fatigued by the whole thing.  I had spent so much time with companies and individuals writing up strategy documents, training, planning and they just weren’t getting it.  The decision to go back in-house after eight or so years as an independent was a biggie. I knew it would inevitably mean I had to colour inside the lines and be more careful about what I said.

I guess I thought it would just be easier to shut the whole thing down. One less thing to worry about.

I was wrong.

Having a voice and giving others a voice is fundamental to who I am as a person.

It is fundamental to my faith. It is fundamental to my political ideas. It is the most powerful agent for social change as we’ve seen recently in the Middle East with dictators falling and the peasants taking back the keys to the palace via mobile phone.
People around the world and around the corner here in Auckland are occupying what is rightfully theirs. People are being encouraged to speak up and demand accountability and respect for all human beings. Suckers like me that were taught macroeconomics at university by right-wing professors bought the lie that it would all just ‘trickle down’.

I read this article about two weeks ago and magically, I got my mojo back.

I realised that I am very lucky to be alive at this point in history and that the changes going on around me personally, globally and spiritually are not to be feared. I realised I need to lift my eyes away from guru spats and rubbish like ‘gamification’ and think about what my Big Boss is doing up in the iCloud.  He’s giving people a voice.

Change is in the wind. Social media as a concept is dying. People whose thinking I admire such as Kiwi Andy Lark (Dell and now Commonwealth Bank of Australia) are all heading back to safe harbour to regroup and prepare for battle.  Brian Solis has announced the end of social media 1.0 in his latest book. It’s going to be a wild ride and I have no idea what is going to happen next.

So I’m going to draw a little line --------------------and everything before it was me and everything after it is still me just with a bit of “views expressed are my own and not those of my employer” etc etc. You know the drill.

God wants all of us to have a voice. Me included.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

Cue The GoodNight Kiwi Music

A few of you have been asking what I've been up to lately as the prolific blogging has stopped being prolific and has turned into a black void of darkness that makes your soul weep with lonely. 

That's not actually true. And when I say a few I meant one person. And that was my Mum. 

The FOR REAL version is that I have decided to put my big girl pants on and go back in-house to work as permanent employee. Permanent like Vivid but not so permanent like a tattoo because, as my good friend Jo explained to me, it's not like having a kid: you can undo it.

Some people have been surprised at my decision. Some people have been frightened by my decision. The thing is, I never went out to talk about and advise in Social Media. I've studied marketing and business. I first vanity web published for a wonderful little site called Home Biz Buzz in around 1999 and started blogging on Typepad not long after. I've always loved amateur publishing and I saw that most of the discussion about social media was being had by folks that either came from a tech background or worked in smalll business. Nobody was really talking about the environments that I worked in everyday- big business and government departments. 

I set up a little Blogger account and started writing into the abyss. Turns out a few ad agency guys around NZ saw my stuff and got me along to help them with some ideas. That's how that happened. 

Do I think there is a future in social media advisory? No. 

Do I think there is a future for dedicated social media agencies and services? No. 

Will there be a demand for people that can produce ideas, work strategy and generate content for paid/earned/owned media models? You betcha. Big demand. 

Did I take a permanent role for financial reasons? Short term: No. Maybe in the long term yes because I don't think social media advisory is sustainable. 

It's been fun but I'm changing course a little bit now and working on more of a fun thing just for me over at http://mylifewithme.co.nzThe walls are pretty bare at the moment but I'm really looking forward to writing about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with marketing, social media or business for a while (I'll be doing plenty of that during the day).

So on that note, I hang up my SMEG badge and hit PUBLISH. 

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous

How Much Do Artists Get Per iTunes Download And A Pirate LolCat

So while you're all getting exciting about streaming music services, think of the poor-arsed artists. 

Artist payouts per stream:

Spotify=0.2865 cents

Pandora=0.0102

iTunes/$.99 download payout = 70 cents

By Glenn Peoples (@billboardglenn), Nashville

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/business-matters-did-you-know-48-streams-1005282722.story

Posted via email from cjlambert's posterous