Case Studies | Media Culpa

KLM and social media – how to become a social business

This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Engage 2013 conference in London, courtesy of Socialbakers. Among the top speakers, we got to listen to Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM who talked about KLM’s journey to transform social users into customers.

KLM has been working actively with social media for quite some time, and the airline’s presence in social media jump started with the crisis management during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010. It was not until then that the company really started to take advantage of social networks in communicating with customers.

“The ash cloud changed everything”, said Lassalle.

According to Lassalle, one of the key factors in becoming a social business is to be able to break down the silos and start to co-operate between different parts of the organisation. Also, for KLM, customer service is the backbone of the organisation in social media. The airline has the ambition to answer questions in social media within 1 hour and to solve customer service issues within 24 hours. Currently, KLM answers within 15 minutes (on average) and solves issues within 9 hours. Impressive.

The experience from the ash cloud crisis management led to the establishment of three principles that guide KLM in social networks.

KLM’s three leading social pricinciples:

Service is sales
Be cool to hang out with
Don’t push, create stuff worth sharing

Social media can drive sales
One of the main take aways for me during the day was that we saw several examples where social media can actually drive sales. One project for KLM in the Netherlands increased sales with 30%. Also, Bruce Daisley of Twitter UK told us how sponsored campaigns on Twitter had shown that there can be a strong correlation between Twitter ads and sales. Some campaigns had been more than four times as effective as spending that additional amount on traditional advertising.

Becoming a social business
KLM has the ambition to be a social business and by relying less on stand-alone campaigns and working more with long term solutions, the airline has come a long way towards that goal. Here are a few more quotes about their social media strategy, from Lionel Lassalle’s presentation.

“We are connecting social media to our core business, which is flying.”

“We are heading to become a social business.”

“Social media is no longer a platform, it is integrated throughout the whole organisation.”

“From one side it makes our customer’s life easier, but it also constantly helps us to improve the quality of our service.”

And finally, about return on investment: “Is it worth the money? Hell, yeah!”

Below you can watch the entire presentation from Engage 2013.

Burger King and Jeep turn Twitter hacking into PR opportunity

Earlier this week, the official Twitter account for Burger King was hacked and turned into a McDonald’s feed. Now, the same thing has happened to @Jeep. The Jeep logo was replaced with a Cadillac logo and the hackers tweeted things like “We got sold to @Cadillac because we caught our employees doing these in the bathroom” with an image of a bottle of prescription-only pills. Jeep soon got control of the account and deleted the tweets tweeted by the hacker.

For a brand, crises like these are of course serious, but handled correctly they can also become an opportunity. Often an account that is involved in a similar incident gains a lot of followers, thanks to the increased attention.

This time, both Burger King and Jeep turn the hacks into a PR opportunity by posting some clever tweets. Burger King seized the opportunity to send their wishes to a brand that was the victim of the same type of crisis, which showed a human side of the brand.

Jeep cleverly responded with this tongue in cheek tweet.

As you see, both tweets got loads of retweets and were marked as favourite by many followers. Also, note the dots before the Twitter handle, enabling all their followers to see the tweets, not only the ones that follow both accounts.

I’m lovin it 😉

Abercrombie & Fitch and Espresso House also hijacked on Instagram

Yesterday I blogged about how SAS, Emirates and SF got their brands hijacked on Instagram. Today I found two new examples of fake accounts that promise to give away gift cards in exchange for email addresses. Hundreds of Swedish Instagram users are currently giving away both email addresses and even mobile numbers on the fake accounts of Abercrombie & Fitch and coffee chain Espresso House.

Fake Abercrombie & Fitch at http://instagram.com/abercrombiesverige. The account bio says: “We are soon opening a store in Sweden! Follow the instructions in the image to get unique offers and gift cards”. The image caption says that the company will give a gift card worth 1,000 SEK to all followers of the account if they add their email address in the comments.

abercrombie instagram

Fake Espresso House at http://instagram.com/espressohouseofficiell. The account bio says: “The first 5,000 that follow and share this account will get a gift card of 100 SEK at Espresso House”.

espresso house instagram

Generous Danish Lotto millionaire on Facebook is fake

Ok folks, it is time to apply some critical thinking to social media. As I blogged about yesterday, it is incredibly easy to trick thousands of people to like a fake account and even post their email addresses publicly on Instagram. Today I found another example on Facebook that was posted yesterday evening.

A Danish guy says he won 23.5 million Danish kroner on Lotto and that he will choose two people who like his picture who he will give 75,000 DKK. The problem, it is fake.

It took me about 30 seconds to search for the facts on Google. A Danish newspaper wrote about it this morning. According to a representative at Danske Spil, the company behind the Danish Lotto, the coupon in the picture is from February and that no such large prizes were awarded during February. The person in the photo is not a Lotto winner.

The image has been shared 62,000 times since last evening.

Once again, take a second or two to double check if the image you are about to share is fake or not. It might save you some embarrasement.

14,000 people fooled by fake SAS Instagram account

The Instagram account SAS Scandinavian, @scandinavianairlines, promised two tickets to New York including 5 stars (sic) hotel to the first 20,000 people that followed the account. The account quickly attracted more than 14,000 followers.

Of course, this was not the official account of the Scandinavian airline, which can be found at @FLYSAS. Instead, the account soon changed name to @s0viknes and it belongs to, it seems, a young Norwegian guy who did this as a prank to get a lot of followers. He boasts: “follow this king who tricked them all”.

Note: I have cropped this photo because it seems the person in the photo was not the person behind the account.

As always, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If SAS would give away 40,000 airline tickets that would cost about 44 million USD. Plus hotel rooms for 40,000 people. That’s just ridiculous. And you would think that the lousy English spelling would reveal that this was not an official account. Please think before you follow and share hoaxes like these.

And for brands, it is always wise to secure the most apparent versions of your brand name on popular social networks. At least that makes it a bit harder for others to use your brand to scam people.

Update: Several similar fake accounts have apparently appeared the last week. Via @AndersEriksson we can see a screen shot from the fake @emirates_dubai here: http://instagram.com/p/Vb9H-VNmYo/

And one account is pretending to be the Swedish cinema chain SF: @sfbioofficial. It says it will hand out 10,000 movie tickets to people who follow the account and add their email address in the comments to an image. More than 6,500 comments can be found so far, most of them include email addresses to teens and kids. And new comments are still being added every second as I blog this. The official account can be found at @SFBIO.

Parents, you need to have a talk with your kids about scams on Instagram. Found via @kingdeborg and @jonatanahlin on Twitter.

sfbio instagram

Update 2: The account @sfbioofficial changed name to @williammkarlsson, then reappeared with the first name with new followers and new images. @williammkarlsson is now gone, hopefully because it got reported as spam. The scam continues and new comments are added every minute. It seems that the account adds a new image now and then to attract new followers and commenters.

How to get a million likes in a day – and a puppy

President Barack Obama promised his daughters a puppy when he was elected in 2008. Another dad required his two daughters to do something themselves in order to get a new puppy. He agreed to get a dog if the girls could get a million likes on Facebook. Impossible, you say? How about doing it in 24 hours? That’s what the girls achieved. And dad kept his promise, the girls and their three brothers are now getting a new dog.

Here’s how it all began. Yesterday, they created a Facebook page called “Twogirlsandapuppy” and posted a message.

“Hi, We’re two sisters and we desperately want a puppy. We have three little brothers, too. Yes, we have five kids in our family.

We lost our dog several months ago to cancer. We really want another one but our parents are reluctant.

Then the other day we saw a brother and sister on facebook post a picture saying that their dad would let them get a dog if they get a ton of likes. We got our dad to agree to it!

He said if we get 1 million likes we get a new puppy. He doesn’t think we can do it.

In our original post we had a link for donations, but that was partly because mom and dad didn’t think anyone other than close friends and family would actually see this page! We removed that link when we saw how many people were coming to this page.

We don’t want to ask strangers for money, only likes.

Thanks for your likes!”

The profile image and a separate image have now almost 2 million likes in about 24 hours. Now, that’s a viral story.

Good luck with the puppy, kids. And parents, don’t make a promise you are not prepared to keep. Getting a million likes might not be that difficult.