To capitalise on the massive amount of conversation online, ad agency Mullen and monitoring company Radian6 kicked off Brand Bowl 2010 (which resulted in over 98,000 tweets containing the hashtag #brandbowl) to track which ad had the best response online. USA Today held focus groups that tested viewer’s reactions live and pretty much every major news outlet and marketing trade mag has covered the story.

Pepsi, General Motors and Fedex all pulled out of advertising deals surrounding the Super Bowl this year. And though there wasn’t exactly fear that the game’s power to influence had diminished, the decision from some brands to shift spend from traditional television to social media for some had set tongues wagging.

However, there’s been no shortage of buzz around the big budget, often controversial ads. Jay Leno and David Letterman, with Oprah Winfrey as referee, stunned viewers by joining forces in an ad for CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman”, Golden Girl Betty White was physically knocked to the ground on behalf of Snickers and Denny’s strange protesting chickens all polled well. Surprisingly, Google also stepped up to the plate, apparently by accident. CEO Eric Schmidt explained via his blog; “we didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search,” Schmidt wrote. “Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience.”

Ads are social events now, but it’s still surprising how one event that’s not really that culturally relevant for those outside the US can still capture so much attention. Suddenly TV, once considered to be ‘old school’ or scattergun, is starting to become the perfect compliment to social networking as the 2 Screen effect starts to ramp up speed.

Just like the X-Factor and American Idol, the Super Bowl naturally drove people online to discuss what was going on. And while the Super Bowl is a huge sporting event already,  the ads resonate further around the world. If ads can still command such audiences, with brands such as Google vying for attention, is there anything similar in the UK that commands the same creativity from advertisers? Honda has shown a spark of real imagination through its ‘event’ ads, such as the live skydive, but who else out there is bold enough to step up? If an audience is online when they’re watching an ad, what are brands doing to encourage them to talk to each other?

Magnus Boyd, a director at somewhat infamous media law firm Carter Ruck, talked to the crowd about how bad things can really get, and considered how appropriate is it to use the law to protect your brand. One of the most interesting aspects of this was the growing reluctance by the Courts to view search engines such as Google as ‘publishers’.  This in effect, removes liability (as was demonstrated in the case of Rosemary Port, who unsuccessfully tried to sue Google for revealing her identity). Plans by all search engines to include personal content from social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook make them an even bigger risk in terms of digging up negative comments and making them extremely visible.

In this respect he mentioned that 92% of journalists use the web for investigating and researching stories. He referenced the case of the policeman quoted as saying that “sh*t happens” on his Facebook profile, following news that a G20 protester had died.  In what Boyd called a complete misinterpretation of what the law should and shouldn’t be able to do, new legislation allowed papers to take this information and print it. Scarily, this is because the PPC ruled that “it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from social networking websites, even when the material is originally intended for a small group of acquaintances and not publicly accessible.”

Eddie Bensilum, a director at reputation management firm Regester Larkin, took to the stage to present a crisis management 101 checklist. She encouraged brands to think about the audience first when responding to an issue online, and that the message and the medium must come second. An underlying message was that of appropriateness; in language, planning proactively and aligning any activity to overarching communications objectives. A brand that prides itself on being transparent shouldn’t shut up shop the moment something bad happens as it jars against the perceived personality of the company.

She was joined by Regester Larkin client Georgina Wald, corporate communications manager for Domino’s UK, who presented the company’s experiences in dealing with the ‘nose picking’ video. Two employees decided to film themselves doing unspeakable things to a pizza, and it hit the brand badly when uploaded to YouTube. One of the things that saved the company was the speed in which it dealt with the criticism. Within 24 hours, they’d identified the team members and franchise involved, distributed still shots of what had actually happened to those that needed clarification and contacted the Health Department. Within this period, Domino’s also reached out to YouTube to get the video removed (which didn’t happen), communicated extensively internally and entered into dialogue with those talking about it online. Referencing the need to speak to people in their own language, the message that went out was not filled with marketing jargon, but simply read ‘Two idiots with a video camera, and a bad idea’.

Finally, we heard from Jonathan Macdonald, co-founder of this fluid world, about the dangers of a brand not getting involved when a crisis hits. In this instance, how the video he took of a TFL tube worker being aggressive to a passenger became a huge issue. It’s a fantastic example of how news travels, and trickles through the media space, with peak mentions on Twitter happening first, and then a knock-on effect spreading to YouTube, blogs, comments on blogs and finally, national press. With TFL input remaining at zero throughout, he encouraged brands to sometimes looks at instances like these as an opportunity to show how committed to ensuring good service they are. The tube worker in question could have become the face of a new training programme, instead of being hung out to dry.

If you missed it on Friday (and you must be a Twitter-hating Luddite to have missed it, given the diluvian volume of retweets), someone used the official @VodafoneUK account to profess a sort of mission statement that one generally doesn’t expect a major consumer brand – or any civilized person – to evince. You can click through to see a screen shot of it here – it may be not safe for work where you are.

Vodafone’s reaction was to delete that tweet and spend about an hour @replying people who had tweeted about the faux pas with a series of near-identical, but obviously not copy-and-pasted messages, over and over and over again. It evoked a penitent scouring himself, or (better yet) a chastised Bart Simpson condemned to copy his resolution to better behaviour on the blackboard ad infinitum. One single, generally addressed apology tweet might have been a little better, but @VodafoneUK went back to business as usual pretty quickly. Vodafone’s spokesperson reassured the press that it wasn’t a hack and that the employee responsible for the tweet had been suspended.

That might be the end of the story, but today we’ll see if the Monday-Friday blogging crowd decides to jump in. Mashable haven’t had their go yet (at the time of this writing), and a high-traffic commentator like that could start a second round of criticism.

So what can Vodafone do? Public relations isn’t algebra. There’s no perfect, mathematically arrived-at answer, and there’s a strong argument to be made for doing exactly what Vodafone seems to be doing: letting the story die. Twitter streams move fast and pretty soon the even the awkward string of apology tweets will be buried under Vodafone’s cheerful customer service missives.

The problem that Vodafone faces isn’t that people will think that Vodafone is run by crude homophobes (a few people might look at the tweet and come to that conclusion but that’s probably equal to the number of folks who think that Dick Cheney is a bipedal lizard). The big problem is that Vodafone might not appear to be in complete control of their comms.

That’s not fair – what happened to them might have happened to any company. A couple of similar cases from last year spring to mind: the Domino’s Pizza “nose pick” video, and Habitat’s Iran hashtags. In both cases, some disgusting actions appeared on the Web and embarrassed the employers of those who committed them.

When Habitat’s then-nascent Twitter account had attempted to use the trending Iran elections protests to raise visibility of an in-store promotion, Habitat used a spokesperson to throw an intern under the bus and washed their hands of the problem.

Contrast this response with that of Domino’s Pizza. When a couple of employees posted a video of themselves doing awful, biological things to food, Domino’s online response wasn’t to distance themselves from the violators from the safe remove of a press release. Their CEO J. Patrick Doyle posted a straight-talking YouTube response (removed in the months that followed) to the offending video, clearly demonstrating that the buck stopped with him. The kids were fired (and good riddance, too) but Doyle showed that Domino’s took ultimate responsibility for what had occurred. Stand-up stuff.

This is where Vodafone finds itself now on Monday morning, waiting to see who writes about this. If it’s someone with a big reach and a formidable PageRank posts about that tweet this morning, then they’re going to want to look like they’ve got positive control of their communications.

1. Get someone with a name and a face to talk about that tweet.

The brilliance of Domino’s response was the quick, no-nonsense reaction. Vodafone UK  has a YouTube channel – here’s a perfect chance to use it. Put somebody – the CEO maybe, but the director of comms or whoever was in charge of the Twitter account would probably do great as well. Vodafone has already told reporters that the person in question was suspended, why not put someone forward to personally tell everybody? Taking charge of the story the way Domino’s did might earn them a great deal of positive press.

2. Make sure we can find that response.

Once we’ve gone through the trouble of making that video, publicise the bejeezus out of it. Vodafone doesn’t have any active blogs that I could detect, but posting a link to it on @VodafoneUK is a good start. If traditional outlets like the London free newspapers run the story on Monday morning, that will turn into increased search traffic, so buying “vodaphone twitter” and “vodaphone [toothy, tree-loving rodent]” as AdWords for a couple of days wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

3. Introduce us to the people running the show.

One of the things I love about Twitter accounts like Microsoft’s Bing is that you get to see exactly who’s running the show. Their visible, accountable Twitter wranglers are identified with mug shots in @Bing’s background image and they sign off each individual tweet. Vodaphone’s Twitternauts are friendly and helpful – but anonymous. If Vodaphone has suspended the guy behind that tweet, that’s all well and good, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the Twitter feed.

Good luck to Vodafone today. We’ll be watching.

Fernando is head of digital media for Ketchum Pleon UK.

Disclosure: None of the brands mentioned in this post are Ketchum Pleon clients, and the points of view expressed are those of Fernando Rizo and not necessarily those of Ketchum Pleon.

The Good

As reported on the cover of NMA this week, Coke has followed in Pepsi’s footsteps, shifting digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010.

In the 1980s and 1990s the battle between the two dominant brands intensified to such an extent that the term ‘cola wars’ was used to describe the feud. Numerous advertising and marketing campaigns have been rolled out over the years in competition, but it seems that Coca-Cola will position its official Facebook and YouTube pages as the lead online channels for upcoming international activity for its Coke Zero and Fanta brands

The Bad
This afternoon, Vodafone has been left red-faced after its UK division’s official Twitter account tweeted an offensive and potentially homophobic message to its 8,000 plus followers. The tweet has since been deleted, but it’s still accessible here.

The majority of the Twittersphere had put it down to a hack until the company tweeted again saying; “A severe breach of rules by staff in our building, dealing with that internally. Please keep your faith in us.”

By next week, this will probably be old news, but in terms of accidental tweets, it’ll go down as one those high-profile examples of what can go wrong.

The Ugly

Following reports of an extra-marital affair with the ex-girlfriend of international team-mate Wayne Bridge this week and an overwhelming amount of calls for his resignation online, John Terry was stripped of the England captaincy.

According to the Football Association, the move followed a meeting between Terry and England’s head coach, Fabio Capello, at FA headquarters at Wembley. Max Clifford, who is representing Terry, commented on the BBC’s breakfast show this morning that he did not believe fans would be that bothered by what Terry allegedly got up to. However, the forums and fan sites are fairly united is dismissing his behaviour as unacceptable.

The organisation has created a video promo to show how beneficial the cookie programme can be, which is in stark contrast to last year’s approach to the digital space. Just 10 months ago the Girl Scouts banned one enterprising girl from selling cookies online after she created a YouTube video appeal, yet this week, the movement’s own attempt has been viewed over 21,000 times in just under a week.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“With the technology era and the different ways to communicate, we decided as a troop to capitalise on those technologies,” said Monique Lazzarini, leader of one of Northern California’s successful groups. According to San Jose Mercury News, her scouts are using Facebook, making ‘mass phone calls’ to doctors’ and dentists’ offices and writing letters to members of Congress asking for their business.

As the Girl Scouts are still not allowed to sell cookies online, but can use the Web as a promotional tool, the video’s purpose is not to create revenue. Instead, it’s to convey how the cookie proceeds are used to support worthy causes, and most important, how being a Girl Scout helps girls develop critical business and leadership skills.

Porter Novelli hosted a session this morning as part of Social Media Week to discuss the fact that not everything is about online. One of the key points raised was that a company that does bad things will get found out no matter what they do online, which Nestlé might do well to remember. However, when you’re transparent, ambitious and do a bit of good in the process, people respond well – just like they have in this instance.

Though Loft’s president, Gary Muto, insisted that; “We don’t incentivise the press, we would never do that,” it seems that the invite to the exclusive blogger briefing to launch Loft’s summer 2010 collection came with some rather specific small print.

“Please note all bloggers must post coverage from our event to their blog within 24 hours in order to be eligible. Links to post must be sent to [address], along with the code on the back of your gift card distributed to you at the event. You will be notified of your gift card amount by February 2. Gift card amounts will vary from $10 to $500.”

As reported on Jezebel earlier this week, hardly any of the bloggers disclosed their financial relationship or turned down the giftcards, flaunting recently tightened FTC regulations. The update – which we discussed on Reputation Online last year – states that a blogger is eligible for a fine of up to $11,000 for failing to mention that they’ve been given goods or monetary reward that may have swayed their opinion.

Loft also pointed out in a statement that blogger relations was a whole new world to the brand, so perhaps it could be forgiven for making a mistake. But sticking its head in the sand and flatly denying that it ever attempted barter its way into favour online is no way to repair the situation. This would never (hopefully) happen with ‘traditional media’, so what led to the company think that it would be ok online?

During the Eurostar incident when thousands of travellers were left stranded – worried that they would not get home to their families before Christmas – the brand quickly learned how damaging ineffective communication with its customer base can be. Eurostar’s Twitter profile was flooded with unanswered questions which rather than being picked up by Eurostar’s communication department, were instead quickly spotted by the media and every major news channel covered the brands failure to engage with its customer base. So there is reason for travel brands to take engaging with customers via social networks very seriously.

Many travel brands are now setting up effective online campaigns to not just communicate to, but also with their consumer audience. International airline Icelandair has recently created six targeted campaigns including social media engagement, newsletters, frequent flyer updates, pre-flight informational messages and post-flight surveys using software and support from email and one-to-one marketing specialists, ExactTarget.

“Email and online communication provides Icelandair with an unparalleled channel to build loyalty with our guests and create a buzz around our products that drive repeat purchases,” said Katrin Erna Gunnarsdottir, web marketing, project manager at Icelandair. “The web-based software which we use provides us a flexible platform to power all of our communications – both external guest communications and internal communications to agents.”

Social mobility

Icelandair has a set up a Facebook group and Twitter account which allows the brand to engage in two-way communication with consumers and it uses an informal friendly tone, for example tweeting ‘Thanks! We are in love with you too!’ in response to positive feedback from consumers. It also uses the medium to announce deals and competitions, but the profile seems more like a conversation between friends than an exchange between a corporation and a customer. Gunnarsdottir explains: “We are engaging with social media audiences to strengthen our brand and develop our current image so our customers feel that we are easily approachable online and quick to respond when the need arises.  The long term goal is to translate this increased positivity into our customer loyalty clubs.”

“The power of social media is something we are well aware of, we closely monitor how our brand name is discussed online; using specially designed monitoring tools, we are able to respond quickly to any issue that may arise in the online landscape.  Our strategy is to address all issues on a personal level and correct misunderstanding or direct potentially unsatisfied customers in to channels that enable us to resolve any situation with ease.”

We wish you a safe flight

Icelandair also sends daily emails to its customers one week before they depart using ExactTarget’s ‘Dynamic Content’ capability to personalise content, providing a variety of information from rental car information to flight departure details. This is sent in eight European and Scandinavian languages using ‘International Sending Technology’ which allows marketers to control how their email marketing is encoded; the airline is able to send its messages in the appropriate format for each country as well as the correct language. Also, using ‘Enterprise Edition’ which allows centralised control of its one-to-one communications and triggered email technology, Icelandair automatically sends its suite of email communications to clients in ten countries throughout Europe and North America.

Thank you for travelling

500-600 personalised emails per day are sent out to customers to thank them for their custom three days after they have returned home. This is a two-way communication, enabling the brand to engage with any unsatisfied customers and pass on positive feedback to staff, although a certain number of requests for the brand’s young CEO’s hand in marriage have had to be filtered through.

Keep coming back

Newsletters are sent to the airlines loyalty club (‘Netclub,’) providing information on discounts and offers which are available; increasing traffic to the website. The first nine weeks of the campaign have been successful, the total number of visits to the site reached 200,000, and once consumers logged onto the site they viewed more pages, with the rate rising to 9% above the site average.

This particular email campaign gradually increased Icelandair’s ‘Netclub’ conversion rate from 0.34% to 0.97%. In addition, at least 77% of the people who clicked on the site during the last six months are return visitors.

Planning for the future

The airline plans to continue to expand its use of ExactTarget in the coming months by integrating data from its Web analytics provider Google Analytics to build automated email campaigns to customers based on their browsing of Icelandair.com.  The company also plans to integrate its existing social media strategy into its email efforts using ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology to enable customers to share email content with up to 50 social network sites.

“Icelandair is able to better serve its global customers by harnessing data to build and send personalised, relevant messaging,” said Peter McCormick, the co-founder and general manager of ExactTarget.  “The gains Icelandair has made are exemplary of an international marketer who is using technology to build customer loyalty and drive sales in an exceedingly tight market. The brand is successfully engaging with its social media audience taking a personal approach to inspire loyalty and connect with its consumers.”

Peter is General Manager and Co-founder of ExactTarget.

Playing on the advice that an integrated approach is the way forward, Gartner suggests that IT departments will struggle to successfully deploy social media until they develop a more “calculated approach”. In fact, the findings show that a massive 70% of IT-led social media initiatives within a business will fail, and that the majority of IT teams will struggle to make the switch from traditional technology platforms such as email, web conferencing and instant messaging, to implementing community-based communications systems like microblogs.

The scale of the issue is such that Gartner also predicts that social networking will replace email completely for one in five businesses across the world by 2012. Its suggestion is that organisations that allow business departments to lead the way in terms of social media, rather than IT, will have a significantly higher success rate of around 50%.

Though taking responsibility and deciding who’s going to lead the charge is important, it’s also vital that internal teams work together to ensure that any social media activity is kept consistent, relevant and useful for all of those involved. If teams can’t sort out internal communications together, anything externally is doomed from the beginning.

Following the release of specific details surrounding several crashes and deaths linked to the problem, the site has been set up to provide details about the technical issues, as well as a customer relations helpline number for those concerned.

It seems that the brand is getting better at using the online space to say sorry as well, as Toyota’s US president Jim Lentz has also posted a video on the its website including an apology  for the situation. However, the serious nature of the recall is having a dramatic effect on global sales. Toyota is trying to limit the  slide, but some lawyers believe the accidents may have been caused by faults unrelated to either the floor mats or the pedal – the only two causes identified by Toyota – which becomes a much bigger issue potentially.

Toyota’s reputation has been burned in a much more superficial sense in the past, as late last year its Toyota Yaris ad called  ‘Clean Getaways’ had to be withdrawn from the brand’s Australian website following fierce criticism. The short, which won the online ‘Clever Film Competition’ organised by Toyota in conjunction Saatchi & Saatchi (as part of a live pitch for the Toyota account, that saw four other agencies run campaigns at the same time), showed a father and his daughter’s boyfriend talking in strangely-placed and rather crude double entendres.

Somewhere along the line, a jury (made up mainly of Saatchi employees) decided that the ad in question was the ‘best of the bunch’, and posted it as the winner on the brand’s Facebook Group. Unfortunately, as Toyota endorsed the clip in question, this not only reflects poorly on Saatchi’s social media credentials, but also the car-maker itself.

Now we see that the company’s car sales in the US fell by 16% year-on-year in January, as consumers switched to domestic manufacturers Ford and General Motors instead. This has been predicted to have continued and increased throughout February, with similar patterns applying to the brand’s reputation as the world’s highest-quality car maker as well.

As reported in The Recruiter, 41% of HR managers have rejected a candidate due to their online profile and almost two-thirds (64%) believe it is appropriate to consider personal online reputational information while evaluating potential employees.

To coincide with Data Protection Day 2010, the study, which surveyed consumers and HR managers, examined the real-life consequences that online reputation has for job-seekers. As Neville Hobson pointed out in his coverage of the study, the report shows fantastic insight into the effect online behaviour has on offline opinion.

As a candidate, failing to be aware of your online presence clearly has serious implications. But despite this stark warning, just 37 per cent of job hunters believe that the responsibility for protecting their online reputation lies solely with them.

Cliff Evans, head of privacy and security at Microsoft UK, said: “Ignoring your online reputation is no longer an option. Reputation and information sharing as a privacy issue should be a major concern for individuals, particularly in a challenging economic environment where jobs are scarce.”

This is an issue that rises to the surface every so often (most recently, the case of the girl that posted negative comments about her boss on Facebook and got fired for it), but is becomingly increasingly important. The secret lies with education from the beginning, and needs to be treated seriously by those responsible for introducing students to the wonders – and dangers – of technology.