Need it Here, Now, Today!

I was guzzling down a pint of beer on Friday evening and engaged in a casual conversation on football, cricket and rugby with my boss. He's been having a great few months with England thrashing India in the recent Test and one day series, Wales faring well in the ongoing rugby World Cup while also taking pleasure in reminding me (maybe once too often) of the not-so-pretty performances of the Indian team and of course Arsenal. We've never got to the point of aiming blows at each other, so it was all in good spirit. We wound up the discussion quickly and soon I was on the train, heading home and all I could keep thinking of was about the way the world of sports has been transformed in the past decade or so. What I'm referring to could have happened earlier, but of course I'm speaking from personal observations and whether I'm right or wrong, I think you'll agree with me on some level.

I say, “KOP-y this”!

Now that all the hype over Fernando Torres' move to London has died down it's time to shift focus to another interesting development concerning one of English football's biggest clubs. Liverpool FC now has an online version of ‘The Kop’, which is a development in the social media sphere cannot be ignored, especially from a sports marketing angle. It is a proper social media hub developed by a football club just for their fans and it is the first of its kind that I've known of. It is interesting from a marketing perspective, for the club and other football and/or sports clubs and organizations and also for the fans.

Looking at it from an internal marketing point of view, creating their own branded closed space for fans and bringing them together as a community, gives Liverpool FC a chance to capture information about their fans and get to know them better, therefore giving them direct access to their fans without depending on a third party network. This will also let them easily shape conversations around Liverpool FC. Most of the top Premier League clubs now have a presence on Facebook, Twitter or both, and this has allowed them to get closer to their fans and also gave clubs an idea of how many people were actively following them online. Also, since the Premier League’s popularity has become global, a social media presence allowed clubs to get a rough idea of their following outside the UK and actively monitor what was being said about them. Even after these advancements, there are certain areas that are lacking. It is common now to see fans commenting on clubs’ Facebook posts, but the level of interactivity between fans is minimal if not non-existent,

Lessons for Mainstream Brands from Two Sports Celebrities

I am not going to use superlatives to describe two individuals who I greatly admire, as no amount of it will be enough to express their greatness. It will also definitely not make sense to compare the exploits of Roger Federer and Sachin Tendulkar on the field of play either as they both are masters at sports which are as comparable as chalk and cheese. This article just aims to point out a couple of simple points on their social media presences, which are useful for businesses.

Both Federer and Tendulkar  have an enormous fan following (Sachin, probably to a lesser excellent due to the not-so-global reach of cricket) across the globe. They both handle the celebrity status with the utmost humility and they're both wonderful human beings who set excellent examples for those who look up to them. Being a fan of both Sachin and Federer, I follow them on Facebook and therefore I check for updates from these pages. Tendulkar has a Twitter account too, which I follow. When it comes down to how they fare on Facebook, I think Federer has an edge over the little master. I'm not saying that this will cause Tendulkar any distress, as he and also Federer for that matter, have better ways of getting people to talk about them. Federer has 5.7 million 'Likes' compared to Tendulkar's 1.9 million, but these statistics hardly mean anything and cannot give a more inaccurate reading of the number of admirers they have. 

"We do all of these things" @VodafoneUK

A couple of months ago, I was doing some groundwork on the social media strategies of some of the top brands in the mobile phone operator market. I was initially looking through each of their social media pages. There were some of the questions I wanted to try and get answers to. Does the brand have a specific strategy on a particular channel that is identifiable from interactions on the page? Is there two way communication or is it just the brand shouting in to deaf ears? What is the brand trying to achieve through their presence on these social channels? 

One of the brands I happened to be looking at was Vodafone. I landed on the @VodafoneUK Twitter page and found it interesting. There were the names of the staff designated to handle the interactions on the page and a quick look at the page would have told any person that Vodafone were basically answering their customers questions and issues they were experiencing with the service. The page just screamed "customer service". Nevertheless, I decided to scroll down through almost a week's tweets just to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious. At the end, I just confirmed my initial assumption that the page was being used primarily as a customer service channel. 

Then I read what they had mentioned in the 'Bio' section. It mentioned that the page was meant for promotions/offers, competitions and product news. It didn't say a word about customer service. I found that strange and decided to ask them. 

It's probably a good thing that Vodafone were saying they were doing just what their online audience was demanding of them. Still, I wasn't entirely convinced because when you have a majority of the tweets answering customer queries and complaints, something related to customer service ought to be part of the bio section. 


The company's headline on the page is what a lot of people would look at when they started to 'follow' them. If people just looked at the tweets they would in all probability think just like I did and send tweets if they were having trouble with their services. So its no wonder that they had to do "what people ask us" as those who didn't read the Bio section will look at the tweets and say "Well, looks like we can just ask them about that problem we're having over here". What I found even more puzzling was that they had  a separate account called @VodafoneUkdeals that was meant for deals and online exclusives which now has this headline.

After my tweet to them, I kept visiting the @VodafoneUK page once in a while to see if there was a change but for a few days it didn't happen. Recently, I happened to check back (I was trying my luck on their #mademesmile campaign; that's another story if you're interested) and I did see something different this time. 

Vodafone probably realized that they had made a mistake. The 'Bio' now is a lot more generic and does not spell out anything specific that they aim to do on Twitter. So it was either just oversight that caused the mistake or there was a flawed social media strategy, wherein they were not exactly clear what they wanted to use Twitter for. I think it's the latter, as they still don't seem to be entirely sure if they should use it for multiple activities or just customer service. This is true for a lot of brands who are just "there" on social media websites but are still very unclear of what they aim to achieve out of that presence.

I don't want to claim here that I prompted the change on their Twitter page, but when asked they didn't acknowledge the fact I was pointing to and then changed it in course of time.  What does that say? Well, I'll let you make up your mind on that one. 

An Online CV With a Difference

In my last post I talked about people's inclination to grab others' attention through Facebook status updates and also at the end talked about how employers nowadays were looking at job applicants' social pages to form a first impression (Germany do have restrictions now). You can argue endlessly with regard to the merits of using online behaviour to judge an applicant before even meeting the person but since it is already prevalent that is a pointless argument . Ever since my interest in Web 2.0, social media, SEO and related areas grew a few months ago I have been discovering and learning new things and also experimenting with tools that I might not have otherwise noticed. 

Going back to the point about getting people's attention, for a job seeker, its of course employers whose attention is desired. I happened to come across a couple of websites/tools that I think might be extremely beneficial from a job-seeker-point-of-view. I've just started experimenting a bit with one of them called Flavors.me. It is just a platform where you can create an entire page which you can then use to do the talking - for you  and about you. The demo video on the website is great and captures pretty much everything that can be done using Flavors.

Picture Courtesy Themecraft 

The great thing about this tool is that the entire page is just about you. On online searches too, there is a good chance of this page being found, and from here you can direct anyone to all you other social, professional networking pages, blogs etc. As my professional interests are in the internet space, my CV would be incomplete if I didn't include links to my presence on these social pages. For starters a platform like Flavors will save some space and allow me to say a bit more about myself in the other sections of the CV!

An account upgrade at US $20 will give you access to real time stats, more layouts and fonts, the option of including a contact form and a listing on the Flavors directory. An option to also buy a domain is in the pipeline. These options could be extremely useful for freelance professionals and small/home businesses who/which may not have the time or technical know-how to set up their own website.

The second website is called About.me which seems to be a similar kind of platform. It has not been fully launched as yet. It will be interesting to see how different it will be from Flavors and what extra features it might have. I've reserved my URL, so hopefully I'll be getting confirmation that I can start using it very soon. 

If you're still reading I assume you are yet to try these so give it a shot and let me know what you think. Before I conclude this post, if you haven't already heard of a 2010 Business Management graduate named Kyle Clark you might want to take a look at how he got himself the job he wanted.

Update: (Dec 13, 2010)
I just read an article (courtesy @beastoftraal) related to people who have used innovative job search techniques. Whether good or bad, they surely are different.What are your opinions?

And by the way I've also just added the Disqus widget below which allows you to comment using Twitter, Yahoo etc. so there's a few options for you! :)

The Facebook Status Update Syndrome

Facebook status update syndrome is a disease that has affected and is currently affecting a lot of people. Being a Business Management graduate I am aware of the fact that the phrase - 'a lot' means nothing. Do I mean 70% of Facebook users or one in every five users? I’ve not taken a survey or done too much market research to prove the point either. I'm sorry I don't have any stats so let me just say 'a lot'.  If you think differently please feel free to do so (although I think that might be  a sign that you’re one of the ‘diseased’!! Ha Ha Ha!!!)