Social Media Fail of the Month: HMV

We’re now quite used to getting end of the year round-ups of social media faux pas – and they serve a worthy purpose, providing object lessons in what not to do, as well as a bit of gentle schadenfraude, which is never a bad thing…

Here at Canverse we’ve decided not to wait till the year-end to trawl across the business social media landscape to find you likely candidates to be bestowed with the ignominious title of social media ‘fail of the month’.

January’s prime candidate has to be HMV. We tweeted about this very story when it broke. But it got us thinking there was more to say about it.

Already suffering the indignity of its near demise from the high street, Britain’s once most popular music retailer began sacking staff on January 31, with the minimum of notice.  190 members of staff were made redundant and one ex-staffer likened it to the “mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand.”

How do we know? Well, because the staff in question told us – us and anyone else trawling Twitter (then soon, pretty much everywhere on the web), that is.

Like a social media mutiny on the sinking good ship HMV, desperate staffers managed to commandeer the firm’s  official Twitter account and began broadcasting a minute-by-minute account of  dismissals.

The actual tweets have since been deleted from Twitter, but screen grabs were published beforehand here among other media outlets.

The only conclusion to be drawn from a business point of view is that in the midst of the chaos visited upon HMV and its subsequent fight for survival over the last quarter, the former high street giant did not consider its social media channel to be one of its most important assets – until it was taken over by a rebel crew.

Many a successful military coup d’etat began with a similar takeover of the state broadcasting service.

While HMV’s fail appears marginally less extreme in comparison, there’s a lesson in there for all businesses: make sure you have a steadfast, legally binding social media policy running through your communications strategy (outlining who can say what on your company’s behalf and when) and stick to it.

And communicate very clearly what a breach of that policy will mean for any flouters.

If HMV survives it corporate woes to return to the retail world in some guise, what’s the   wager it’ll think differently about the power of social media next time time around?

What the West Can Learn From the Rest

 

It’s time we in the “West” got rid of the erroneous notion that all technological innovation essentially takes place in the ‘developing’ world only to filter down to the ‘developing’ world.

One area in which this myth has been particularly exposed is within mobile phone innovation – specifically within the mobile payments space.

For instance Africa is at least five years ahead of Europe in the realm of mobile money transfers.

You can read my piece on the ‘trickle up’ effect here.

 

 

Facebook Goes Old School for Wisdom, Intellect…and Bigger Weapons

 

Facebook’s recent patent shopping sprees from IBM and the Microsoft last week flagged up a perennial flaw in western philosophy – that tendency to valorise youth over experience.

Yahoo! suing the young social media giant brought attention to just how  lacking in experience of the corporate cut and thrust Facebook is…  

As it approaches IPO, it has become patently clear, dare I say, that it must now beef up its arsenal ready for the corporate battles ahead, in ways it has until now not quite comprehended. See my posting on this at the social news and knowledge network Mindful Money.

What’s Santa’s Email Address?

Christmas is coming, ushering with it the season in which technology manufacturers get to show off their relatively recent innovations in the hope of global domination of the Santa’s stocking space by any means necessary – be that online or through the high street.

But I witnessed a small event today that served in its simple parable, as a reminder that new technologies never wipe out the incumbent overnight (turntables and 12-inches, anyone). It has normative human behaviour to contend with.

As I was walking to the letterbox at the end of my street, a car pulled up alongside it and a woman in her late 30s or maybe early 40s got out of the driver’s seat, grasping an envelope and what looked like a folded sheet of paper in her right hand.

Standing in front of the box now, the woman turned her head around back towards the car briefly and called to a boy in the back seat: “I’m posting it to Santa now Jack,” she said. And in a swift singular motion, she posted the envelope, but quickly folded the sheet of paper once and hid it in her trouser waistband, pulling her jumper over it.  To the unsuspecting child, not tall enough in the car seat to witness the ‘disappearance’ of his letter to Santa, his list of wants was now well on the way to Greenland.

But with the ubiquity of email and the smart phones with which to dispatch them, you’d think that an inert red cylinder at the roadside would no longer necessarily mediate a boy’s contact with Santa Claus, and that this icon of a bygone era would fall in line with the overall decline in ‘snail mail’ as a means of urgent communication. Couldn’t you have just ‘texted’ or emailed him, Mum?   

You could even get ‘Santa’ to leave your offspring an online video message, checking on just how good they’ve been this year. 

But it seems, alongside email and status updates, there’s still life in the big red box yet – even if it is a life largely of hibernation in between the ‘personal’ landmarks of our own lives – births, marriages and deaths. Oh, and Christmas…

 

When Public Becomes More Public Than Ever Before

I saw this appalling video of the overtly British racist at work and in her element today and was struck by how some things, depressingly, never seem to change…

After my initial reaction of being utterly stunned at her (possibly drunken, or just mentally ‘slow’) performance, my heart lurched at the sight of the little boy she had on her lap – and how the challenge to transcend what must already be an utterly miserable existence has a been thrown at him at such a young age.

I also started to think about the changing notion of what is now considered ‘public’: this already publicly racist tirade was made even more public – if that’s at all possible – by the presence of a mobile phone camera in the vicinity and the people’s broadcaster YouTube, just a few clicks away.

 

That woman’s digitally mediated utterances will now be on a trajectory as fodder for online newspapers, daytime TV chat shows, pub and dinner conversations at home and abroad, political rallies and – possibly – evidence for prosecuting charges of inciting racial hatred.  The over 37,000 accompanying comments already posted on YouTube give a hint of the possibilities. 

With this relatively recent digital ubiquity, will we ever adjust to the idea that our public performances now transcend our immediate audience? Sure, we’ve all seen the odd round robin email unwittingly exposing the original sender’s lacklustre sex life. But this newfound ability to reproduce, watch and listen to acts of social transgression makes for a chilling spectator sport. Should we soon expect ‘new’ notions of ‘free speech’ to match the changes in what it means to be ‘public’?

 

Facebook, Automated Sociality & Me

 

I’ve a confession to make: I have to an increasingly ambivalent attitude towards Facebook in general and what is fast becoming the automation of our social relations in particular.

Despite being one of those half a billion users the company patted itself on the back for recently, I’m having something of a problem with devolving the act of friendship management to mere algorithms.

Algorithms that see relationships as just another set of clean 0s and 1s, rather than the very messy flesh and blood they are.

 

Whether or not I wish to ‘reconnect with X’ is very rarely the binary, ‘yes or no’ question that Facebook poses every so often.  A whole bag of contexts gets poured into that decision process. 

And whether or not I act upon a Facebook recommendation to ‘friend’ someone can be even less straight forward.

And as for ‘people you might know’… well… How can Facebook even begin to process the various reasons for which such people are NOT already in one’s network? 

For example, every so often  it suggests I make friends with a particular work colleague who over the time I’ve known them has barely spoken to me until spoken to (even then it’s hard work…) and who  has consistently gone out of their way to make themselves unavailable for face-to-face (or at least synchronous) communication. So why the hell would I want to be friends with them on Facebook? Analyse that…

That said, there are presumably far worse reasons for which people will not want to heed suggestions and friend requests on Facebook…

This lack of insight into how real relationships work could be the trigger for the mother of all backlashes – one that’ll make the protests on privacy so far seem like online summer festivals, because it often comes across as a direct challenge to what it means to be human – Man versus Machine writ large.

Facebook needs to be made to mimic how human relations work far more closely, or this devolved management of our relationships will corrupt the very thing that makes us social.

Of course it may not after all ever be able to completely replicate the human mechanism for building and maintaining relationships, but as it pushes those boundaries for ever increasing participation, perhaps it could put little something back for the sake of humankind, and pay a bit more attention to sociality as it is played out in the real world.  

But I fear that the sheer number of members it has will be seen by Messrs Zuckerberg and Co as some sort of vindication for the way Facebook does things now.

The Answer to the Mobile Phone ‘Gender Gap’ is Not Simply More Phones

The latest research on mobile phone ownership around the world highlights what it claims to be a “300 million gender gap” in low and middle income countries.

A report by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women funded by the GSMA Development Fund says women in Africa are 23 per cent less likely to own a phone than a man and 37 per cent less likely in South Asia. Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity curiously comes to the conclusion that this gap amounts to an “incremental annual revenue of $13 billion” – a sum that should be enough of an incentive for mobile operators to act and fill said gap with their goods and services.  

A classic case in which a little ethnographic research could go a long way into cutting  through the seductive froth of the ‘numbers’ and pull out some experiential substance.

Those that have done precisely this in analysing mobile phone ownership and use across the globe have generally reached conclusions that would show that “300 million gender gap” up for the over-simplification that it is.

The reasons for fewer women owning mobile phones than men are myriad – too many to go into in this blog.

On looking beneath the surface, that scenario of the Grameen Bank–rolled Indian villager and her mobile phone kiosk success story doesn’t travel or translate that far from home.

Why not? Cultural specificity, that’s why.

The CBFW is currently carrying out some work on advancing women’s’ adoption of the mobile phone in Nairobi, Kenya. It would do well to take a look at the sterling ethnographic work carried out by the University of California Berkeley academic Jenna Burrell  in neighbouring rural Uganda.

There she found that rather than liberate women, mobile phones actually reinforce mens’ dominance in a patriarchal society. The phones merely slotted into the way things are done out there: the way gender and power relations are already played out and have been playing out for some time. Ergo: men are in control of their relationships with women and men control the means of communication too. No amount of mobile phone re-distribution is going to change that. Any ‘change’ here will have to be cultural.

Prof Burrell is of the opinion that a lot of research and conclusions about ‘inequality’ around the mobile phones remain opaque:

“… the explanation for how difference translates into inequality in such research has not always been explicit or consistent. This is exacerbated by the tendency to portray the mobile phone as an end, rather than a means to specific social improvements such that any lesser degree of access and use is registered as disadvantage.” [1] 

 Put simply, is it about ‘ownership’ or about ‘access’? In other societies there is greater emphasis on communal sharing, so that the mobile phone belongs to the community at large rather than individuals of either sex, in the same way that other technology – bicycles, televisions, radios – is often shared.

There is no doubt that mobile phones have the ‘potential to transform lives’ with the possibilities of mobile banking, e-medicine, and just plain old ‘communication.’ Entrepreneurial opportunities may also arise through mobile phone use.

But there is no basis for assuming that the mobile phone in and of itself is the ‘liberation technology’ that Women and Mobile and other reports purport it to be.

Another thing holding back the aforementioned potential is the frankly prohibitive cost associated with owning and/ or using mobile phones in low and middle income countries. At worse, the vast majority of populations in this group are subject to absolute telecom monopolies, or at best cartels that carve up the market while charging the maximum and investing the minimum required. Vast rural landscapes where they majority of ‘new growth’ in mobile phone take-up is likely to come from (and where it is needed the most) get ignored in favour of urban centres.

And woe betide a user that wishes to make a call across different networks – only to face the wrath of the mobile termination rate (MTRs), the premium paid to their home network for making such a transgression. 

Nothing will begin to close the so-called gender gap without looking at how deeply entrenched cultural mores dictate behaviours and addressing with some urgency the distorted marketplace in which mobile phone carriers operate.

To ignore this is to fall into the trap of peddling cliché after aphoristic cliché – the same trap that the discourse around the ‘digital divide’ often finds itself in.

 

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[1] Burrell J., (2010):  Evaluating Shared Access: Social equality and the circulation of mobile phones in rural Uganda, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 15; pp 230-250