Zavee Thinking » Mashable

A New Aviation-Internet Creation

Ron — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:26:53 +0000

Remember Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger? He’s the US Airways pilot who landed a fully loaded jet in the Hudson River in January 2009 with only minor injuries to the 155 people on board. His skill and heroism brought him well-deserved fame, but the quick actions of smartphone-enabled witnesses brought his actions to light nearly in real time, as they posted photos to Twitter almost before the plane stopped moving. This event didn’t just catapult Capt. Sullenberger into the public eye. It also changed the perception of Twitter from a forum for narcissistic ramblings to a mainstream social media tool.

Emergency Slide (via NASA)

Now the airlines have given us another social media star, Steven Slater. Mr. Slater is the JetBlue flight attendant who got into an altercation with a passenger as his flight approached the gate at JFK, then grabbed his bags, grabbed a beer and fled down the plane’s emergency chute. In addition to extensive coverage by local media in New York, Mr. Slater’s own Facebook page has more than 25,000 friends and growing at the rate of several thousand friends per hour. Other Facebook users have started their own pages about the incident, including one called “Free Steven Slater”. On Twitter, the event is reported to be the number one trending topic in New York and several other cities

Will Mr. Slater’s instant celebrity, which is owed in no small part to social media, make him, as some suggest, “an online folk hero”? That depends, I think, on whether Mr. Slater’s actions tap into something authentic about how we feel about employers, airlines or both. The urge to tell your boss to “take this job and shove it” is timeless, but people rarely act on the sentiment. (Although this resignation by storyboard is pretty classic). The combination of tighter security, increased baggage fees and, perhaps, fuller planes has led to either customer service failures on the part of the airlines or more abuse from passengers, depending on who is asked.

Perhaps, then, it is timely to remind businesses of every size how valuable social media can be as a customer service channel. With all the buzz that this event has created, there is no good reason for JetBlue, no stranger to social media, to have stayed largely quiet about it. Whether to reassure passengers about their safety (and the airline’s hiring standards) or even to laugh it off, JetBlue should be much more engaged with its customers.

The Zavee takeaway:

Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but the getaway slide is pretty impressive.
JetBlue is doing no favors to itself or its customers by yielding the social media (and conventional media) environment so completely to Mr. Slater.
There is a difference between being a folk hero and a real one, even online, and most people know which is which.

Update (8/11/10): TechCrunch confirms that the “resignation by dry erase board” is a hoax.

The Social “Ask”

Ron — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:40:42 +0000

Remember Ask.com? Back before Google became almost synonymous with internet search (sorry, Yahoo!), Ask had users enter natural language questions rather than strings of keywords. Ask is about to relaunch with an interesting new structure. First, the search engine now returns natural language answers instead of links. Second, and even more interesting, users will be able to open their query to the user community for a crowd-sourced answer.

via Horia Varlan (Creative Commons 2.0)

Ask is hardly alone in making Q&A part of social search. A startup called Aardvark enables social Q&A by finding a person in the user’s network to answer a question. Aardvark may have been onto something, as it was recently acquired by Google. Other social search sites that have enabled social Q&A are Quora and Formspring. Quora considers itself a “continually improving collection” of user-generated questions and answers. Formspring is oriented toward “conversational Q&A [that] helps you express yourself”. Among the major social networks, Facebook is developing a Q&A application, which is currently in private beta. LinkedIn long has supported the ability to ask questions and hold threaded discussions within user groups, while Twitter can support Q&A but doesn’t have a specific application.

We think that Q&A is a natural extension of social search and will become a permanent part of the social media landscape. We think Q&A is particularly relevant to social shopping. The process that now begins with a shopper’s review or recommendation can just as easily begin with another shopper’s request for information. Like writing reviews, answering questions is a way for shoppers to provide value, demonstrate expertise and gain influence. Of course, we at Zavee are continuing to develop and refine our own social search capabilities, so you can look forward to exciting new features over the next several months.

The Zavee takeaway:

Social Q&A is suddenly hot, but that doesn’t make it a fad.
Q&A is a natural extension of the social shopping feature set.
Look for exciting new social search features coming soon from Zavee.

The Count of Social Media

Ron — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:42:21 +0000

Imagine having that on your business card! In a world of Brogans, Vaynerchuks and Mashables there is no shortage of candidates worthy of the title, but this post isn’t about any of them.

Anyone who has kids, or who was one fairly recently, will remember Sesame Street’s Lugosi-eque math whiz, Count von Count. The Count would count anything, anytime, anywhere. And he was much better at it than, say, The Spanish Inquisition:

Imagine, then, what the Count – let alone the Inquisition – would have to say about this: a Flash-based application that provides a real-time count of Social Media activity. Courtesy of Gary Hayes’ Personalize Media blog, here is Gary’s Social Media counter:

Visit Gary’s blog if you want to know about his sources, but the details are almost beside the point. Spend even a minute watching the numbers cascade and you are sure to be convinced – if you weren’t already – that Social Media is a communications channel (or group of channels) that marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you are marketer with a small company and a small budget, Social Media is perfect for you. If you are just starting out, take the simple advice that you’ll get from everyone: listen first.

And if you would like to learn about a Social Media marketing program exclusively for local merchants, feel free to get in touch with us here at Zavee.