Social Media can become the worst nightmare for a business in the time of crisis, whether there is a particularly disgruntled customer, a poor service has been provided, or even at a time when events outside of your control have caused some issue.

This can be said to be true for Airbnb, a startup business who allow their users to easily rent out accommodation for holidays, short breaks and other stays. Backed by some huge names, including Ashton Kutcher and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos it could be expected that they would have handled a crisis in a much better way than is being reported presently.

In their case, a customer “EJ” had her apartment ransacked by her Airbnb visitor, with almost all of her personal possessions being stolen or destroyed – a life changing event, made worse by the fact that “EJ” had reported that Airbnb were doing little to help the situation. Airbnb were also implicated in an effort to silence “EJ” by raising concern at a blog post where she described what had happened and asking her to take the blog down altogether because of the worry of negative attention.

This news hit the headlines, and the media widely reported what was going on, leading to many questions as to the viability of the Airbnb business model and it was clear that Airbnb were in trouble – only within the past few hours have Airbnb taken real steps to rectify the situation, issuing an unconditional apology and admitting to the mistakes they’ve made.

Airbnb have taken positive steps to protect their users, including the Airbnb Guarantee, which offers some level of insurance against such events as those affecting “EJ” and increasing and improving their customer service teams and availability.

This whole situation raises valid questions on handling crisis situations, especially where Social Media can escalate the situation by an order of magnitude because of the reach and speed a message can spread.

Here’s my top tips to dealing with a situation like this:

• Take ownership of the situation, don’t try to hide what’s gone on.
• Communicate quickly and effectively – remember, the message of any wrongdoing will spread and potentially reach millions causing real damage to your reputation.
• See the solution through, and follow up on actions you’ve promised – “EJ” was not contacted by the customer service team after their initial dialogue.
• Provide a solution – put right what has been wronged. Provide ongoing communication regarding any steps to a proper resolution.
• Learn – bad things happen, sometimes out of your control, evaluate how you could have handled things better and take practical steps to prevent similar events happening again.
• Don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made a mistake – you’ll be respected more for admitting your shortcomings.

This is the first in a series of ‘Social Media Success Stories’ where I seek to highlight the best or most imaginative social media campaigns I come across. Campaigns featured here are those that and offer valuable insight into using social media in new and successful ways and as such give me inspiration for campaigns I work on.

KLM is a Dutch airline, based in the Netherlands and believe strongly in promoting their heritage and staying true to their roots – their uniforms, tableware and even their meals are proudly created by Dutch nationals.

Their latest Social Media campaign, Tile and Inspire takes a step further to showcasing Dutch heritage, by inviting users to design a Delft Blue pottery tile with their photo and favourite saying on, with the potential that it will be included on the livery of a Boeing 777 aircraft in service for the airline. A special application was provided on Facebook, on Hyves (a social network in The Netherlands) and on their website, making it simple to create the tile in a suitable format.

4,000 entries were picked from over 77,000 that were submitted across the globe to be created into the final aircraft livery. The entries were judged on originality and each successful entrant was emailed a link to a photo of their tile on the aircraft and a behind the scenes video of how it all came together.

“With this Delft Blue aircraft, KLM is establishing a link between its history and the social media. The successful online Tile & Inspire campaign has enabled us to actively involve our passengers in relation to an age-old Dutch product: Delft Blue. Delft Blue is of course inextricably linked to both Dutch culture and KLM.”

The campaign was an incredible success for KLM, raising awareness and causing a stir. KLM gained 50,000 new fans on Facebook alone, with the accompanying video presenting the aircraft receiving over 440,000 views on YouTube.

Not only does KLM benefit from the immediate success of the campaign (the numbers above), but this aircraft is in active service and travels across the world – with its unique livery, it’s bound to get people talking at the many destinations it serves.

Have you come across a unique and innovative Social Media campaign or just want to comment on this one? – please comment below.

A topic that comes up often when debating Social Media is that of privacy – who owns our photos, posts and comments? I’m using Facebook in this example as it’s by far the largest social media network with more than 700 million users. The same applies however to most social networks. If you were to read the privacy policy of your favourite social website, you might be surprised about what you are allowing them to do with your data.

Reading the Terms of Use for Facebook, for example, states:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

In other words, Facebook may use your content however they wish, subject to you allowing them to in your privacy settings. Of course it is not that simple, or straightforward to prevent Facebook from using your content – there are privacy settings littered across the site, under a number of titles and Facebook’s recommended settings make your posts public – as in anybody can find and read them. Not very supportive of your privacy really.

Privacy for the Young and Vulnerable

Many of us rely on websites such as Mashable to dissect and tell people as to the information that is being shared and steps to take to rectify this. As a user who is relatively tech-savvy and keeping up with current affairs, I was aware of the Facebook privacy shakeup that occurred and proactively took steps to prevent them from exposing my personal information.

Young and vulnerable users may find it difficult to understand the implications of online privacy, and Facebook do not make it clear to users, unless they specifically are looking for help, what information is available and who it is available to.

There are sites such as Thinkuknow in the UK that cover online safety, preventing cyber-bullying and touch on privacy settings, but they don’t give specific steps to take to secure your profile, more an overview of the sort of settings you should be applying.

Privacy and the Job Hunt

Social Media is now being used by potential recruiters to screen candidates for job roles, and information that is publicly available could affect the chances of success, especially if there are examples of posts with bad language, stating opinion on political/extreme matters or even embarrassing photographs – it could be argued that this is unethical from an employer’s point of view, however if this information is in the public domain, it could be considered due diligence on their part.

Privacy and your employer

The terms of every contract of employment in the UK are implied terms, among these, a duty of trust and confidence between employer and employee to support a healthy relationship.

A breach of trust and confidence is grounds for dismissal, and increasingly, employees use of Social Media can play a part in the breach of trust and confidence in the workplace.

As it has been mentioned, unless strict privacy settings are enabled, information posted becomes public – have a moan about a bad day at the office, mention that you are unhappy in your job or even something more innocent like announcing you’ve resigned, can all be taken as grounds for action.

Is privacy the price of entry when using social media sites?

There is certainly more that Facebook and other social media sites can be doing to make sure that users select the correct privacy settings for their needs, but it can be argued that the views of the site owners and the marketers using the platform rely on the openness (whether intentionally or not) to make money.

As responsible internet users, we should all play a part in helping those more vulnerable to make sure that information they share stays private – whilst we wait for our respective governments to take steps to make this part of compulsory education.

Have you been subject to action from your employer because of your use of Social Media? What steps do you think need to be taken to improve the education around issues of privacy online?

A noticeable change has been demonstrated over the past few years where the rules of Friendship have changed, in part due to evolving communication technologies and the way Social Media has invaded our lives. Communication amongst friends traditionally took place through face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, but now these conversations are increasingly happening through virtual channels, through Social Media networks, instant messenger services and text-based mobile communications – networks of friends are expanding over countries and continents.

Conversations have arguably now become less social, contrary to the purpose of social networks, it’s possible to spend hours in front of a computer screen interacting, whilst potentially losing valuable social skills only gained from face-to-face conversation.

Boundaries

Boundaries for friendships and relationships have also been challenged – what was previously highly personal and sensitive is now in the public domain and amongst friends when it comes to disagreements, arguments and the making and breaking of relationships. People are encouraged to publicly get involved in the conversation and therefore have the opportunity to influence situations – sometimes this is positively influencing the outcome, but often personal politics becomes involved.

Privacy

Privacy is becoming non-existent and a small price to pay for the ability to converse with friends, see shared photos and the myriad of services now offered to enhance interaction. With giving up your privacy, it enables corporations to build strong and complex demographic profiles and target advertising based on interests, age, gender and location – information you have freely provided. On the flip-side of this is the privacy concerns amongst friends – relationships are incredibly complicated and simply being pictured in certain places or within certain company can cause tension and put stress on friendships.

Is social media destroying conversation?

With photos, comments, events and status updates – we can pretty much see everything our circle of friends have done, or are going to do. Does this provide fuel to start a conversation, or does it negate the need for a conversation altogether?

Relationships have also changed – the ending of a relationship is always a difficult and sad situation, and some level of dignity is required so as not to burn bridges or humiliate – Facebook has changed all that, and relationships can be as disposable as changing your relationship status to ‘Single’ – with or without consulting the other party.

Being deleted on Facebook has been linked with depression and even suicide – psychological studies have identified just what actions can cause some degree of hurt amongst friends.

Have you noticed a significant change in the rules of friendship because of social media? Comment below…

Klout touts itself as a standard for influence, showing you who has the most power to make people take “action” across a variety of social networks and for a myriad of topics.

It does this through some very clever calculations, including the amount of responses your posts get, the amount of times these posts are shared on to others and the likelihood that your posts will be shared. (Full details of the way that Klout calculates your score here).

Klout have also teamed up with a number of businesses and offers ‘perks’ to particularly influential users – some of these perks have included tickets to early previews of a new movie, gift vouchers, laptops and most recently, invitations for accounts to the much coveted launch of Spotify in the US.

Whilst Klout claims to be a standard for influence, it can be manipulated

Klout calculates your score based on numerical factors, therefore is based on simple mathematics equations at its core. If you try hard enough you can manipulate your score – either through increasing the frequency of your tweets, or targeting your tweets at bots so that they will be retweeted. It’s also based on time – if you have a few days where you do not tweet, your score will drop. If someone with the influence of Charlie Sheen doesn’t tweet for a week, when he returns, will he be any less influential?

Read More: ‘Klout… and how it can be manipulated’ by Jillian Ney (Link)

Klout is broken

Raak, a social media consultancy asked the simple question “Can I improve my Klout score, just by tweeting more?” and set about proving this theory. They created some Twitter bots that would tweet at varying intervals quotes from a simple command-line application.

Over the course of 80 days, the bot that tweeted every minute amassed the largest following and commanded the highest Klout score, and elements of the calculations fluctuated inconsistently from day to day. Klout state that they filter out bots and other accounts that are not human, however a large number of the followers of the bot created for this experiment, were bots themselves.

Raak managed to prove their theory – tweeting more often is enough to improve your score.

Charlie Sheen, who holds the world record for the quickest person on Twitter to have a million followers, commanded a Klout score of 57 without posting a single tweet – for a service that encourages connecting, engaging and sharing, this can’t be right… surely?

Read more: “Klout is broken” (Link) / “How Charlie Sheen Broke Klout” (link)

Klout is a status symbol

Whilst providing a valuable metric in the difficult-to-measure field of social media, Klout allows you to place a widget on your sites and social media profiles displaying your score, as well as offering comparisons against your contacts – this encourages the “Look at how important I am” type of user onto the service, and encourages the manipulation of the flaws already mentioned and widely spoken about and so should not be taken as a true authority on how influential a user is.

Conclusion

It’s not all bad for Klout, there are certainly weaknesses, but plenty of positive features too. It should be seen as a tool amongst your arsenal to measure engagement across social media, and not relied on as the sole authority.

As someone proficient in HTML and CSS, and having dabbled a bit with customising some stock WordPress themes – I found that the prospect of writing a theme from scratch as something incredibly daunting. Conveniently, my home town Portsmouth was hosting WordCampUK – an informal conference for WordPress users, designer and developers.

I came with great expectations that I would learn about theme development and go away with a clear understanding of how it all worked – unfortunately, the conference didn’t quite live up to the expectations, but offered a far greater insight into aspects of web design I thought I knew pretty well and has challenged my own abilities and thinking ever since.

I came away with a greater understanding of  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in particular and some prominent speakers were kind enough to share with them some real-life stories of their own business experiences.

Here’s a run down of the sessions I found to be most helpful:

WordPress in the Enterprise

This panel discussion went over the issues and barriers to getting WordPress into enterprises – a lot of blame pointing went on at Microsoft, because their infrastructure makes it difficult to integrate with WordPress, but it transpired some developments have occurred that would make it much easier – namely the WebMatrix software which can help to configure all the software needed to get WordPress up and running.

It was also noted that a big issue with adoption centres on the authentication methods for users – there is currently not a great solution to allowing WordPress to authenticate via ActiveDirectory or a similar single sign-on providers.

Advanced SEO with WordPress – Nick Garner

Nick told a fascinating and engaging story about Mr Whitehat, a website owner with aspirations to make lots of money from his site. The story follows his transition through normal and quite acceptable methods of SEO through to questionable and unethical methods of manipulating search engine listings – the lesson was clear: Push the boundaries, but only do what is sustainable.

Ten Proven Steps to the top of Google – Mark Adams

Mark talked about areas of SEO where he had proven experience and built upon and reinforced Nick Garner’s points. He gave clear and concise examples and tips to improving your search engine performance and easy ways to gain footing within the listings.

Our Biggest Mistakes – David Coveney

Perhaps one of the most interesting of all the talks, it was also the most personal. David Coveney told the story of Interconnect IT and the mistakes it had made throughout it’s growth. He covered negotiations with procurement teams, business relationships that didn’t work and the pitfalls of being too nice. Amongst the 10 biggest mistakes they made, he delivered some sound advice and guidance to aspiring business owners in the hopes that they take at least some of the points on board.

Portsmouth had the honour of hosting the annual WordCamp conference – well, I call it a conference, it’s all rather informal – but a fantastic opportunity for WordPress developers, designers and users to meet, network, socialise and learn.

The event was broken into 50 minute sessions, with a number of prominent and well respected speakers talking about their areas of specialism across a variety of topics.

With a turnout exceeding 200 – the University’s WiFi couldn’t cope with the demand of the tech savvy delegates and the myriad of wireless devices were not able to get online at times throughout the event – that being said, a number of those who were well prepared brought with them their own wireless access points and 3G devices, and were kind enough to share access as well as they could with the other users – a true sense of community.

Events covered such topics as SEO, Theme Development, Starting your own agency and using WordPress in the enterprise.

Information about WordCamp can be found on their website.

Google, hoping to learn from it’s previous mistakes (Google Wave and Google Buzz) is going all out to try and launch a successful Social Media product that rivals the 750million user behemoth that is Facebook and it’s smaller but equally brilliant competitor Twitter. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s certainly got potential.

One of the best features, which tries to differentiate itself from Facebook is ‘Circles’. This innovative function allows you to separate your friends into a relevant ‘Circle’ so you can share content with only those who are in that group. This can mean great things for collaboration amongst teams, as well as discussing things amongst small, close-knit groups – just like real life social habits. The use of these ‘Circles’ ensures that the flow of information is controlled so that it can only be seen by those users specifically granted the privilege.

One could argue that Facebook has this feature already, in the form of lists – but this was a feature added to the network after it launched, and as such has not been widely embraced.

Google+ comes into its own with the Huddle and Hangout features – the first is a text-based group chat designed for use on a mobile device, with all the fine-grain control of Circles to ensure your group chat is only accessible to the Circle(s) you define. Hangout is a video based chat facility, allowing you to have a simultaneous video chat with up to 7 others. The interface allows you to carry out a voice chat by muting the camera, and also allows text-only by disabling sound too. This feature brings Skype-like video calling to a group – something Skype themselves only offer as a premium feature – since Google+ launched their initial offering, Facebook have announced a similar feature, partnering with Skype.

The service can’t even be described as a ‘beta’ product (something that’s not quite perfect, may have bugs and needs further testing)  - which is something Google often do when launching something new, it’s actually in ‘Field Test’. This mean’s it’s early days for Google+. The best is still to come.

I’m currently looking for work. I have vast experience in Web and Graphic design with a comprehensive portfolio and testimonials to back this up.

More recently, I’ve taken an active role in Social Media and can demonstrate sound understanding of using Social Media effectively to communicate, broadcast, and more importantly, engage with a captive audience. This, together with knowledge of tools designed to measure the effectiveness of Social Media campaigns as well as working more efficiently gives me an excellent skill set to advise and implement campaigns across social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in conjunction with strategic marketing plans and strategies.

Feel free to contact me should you be interested in working with me, or I’d be most grateful if you’d pass on my details to someone who might.

You can find details of my skills and experience on LinkedIn.