Apparently we’re in a recession, everywhere belts are being tightened, costs pruned and price wars starting, which means for businesses the small things matter even more.  When two items cost the same, you’re going to chose the company that you believe gives you something better, like great customer service. Unfortunately giving great customer service in itself can be costly, so its nice to see a couple of examples of how two very different companies are using different approaches to enhance their reps in a cost effective manner.

The first is Virgin Atlantic. During last week a copy of a letter of complaint to Richard Branson started circulating. From a chap called Oliver Beale, it was sent to Branson on the 17th December 2008 and covered, in some detail with images, Beale’s less than pleasant trip from Mumbai to London two weeks earlier. Obviously a company the size of Virgin Atlantic get a lot of letters of complaint. The majority of which, I would assume, never make it to Branson’s desk.  However the email that I received said that it had, and not only that but Branson had phoned Beale  to say saying “he and his family had been laughing all weekend about it as it was the funniest letter he’d ever had”.

I must admit, I thought it was a hoax. I doubted that someone had actually seriously written the letter and if they had, then the bit about Branson calling was definitely not true.

Seems I was wrong.  Yesterday the Telegraph, along with a few other papers, ran the story, having confirmed with the press office that Branson did indeed call. Apparently  “He was incredibly nice about the whole thing but I haven’t received any compensation since talking to him.”. The Telegraph also quotes Beale as being ‘uncomfortable’ about his new interweb fame. Not sure if that was before or after Virgin publicised that they’d asked him to help shape the catering on future flights.

Its unconfirmed as yet if he will take them up the offer, but that really doesn’t matter. The industrial press, the news sites and blogs that covered the original story will update with the latest installament and future searchers will see that Virgin takes positive action on complaints. It also goes to show how a nifty PR department can turn something potentially negative into a positive, quickly and effectively. Although to be fair Branson and Virgin have been the masters of news hijacking and publicity stunts over the past few years.

The second example comes from a much smaller company that claims to have doubled the size of its customer base through the power of Twitter.

The operations manager, J.R. Cohen, CoffeeGroundz Cafe in Houston, Texas, joined Twitter after a customer told him about it.  As @coffeegroundz he started following the local twitterati, then in October 2008, a regular sent him a message via Twitter asking if he could pre-order a breakfast wrap to speed his way through the drive-through  The answer was yes and now customers pre-order on a regular basis via a direct message (DM).

Which is an excellent idea in lots of ways.  Pre-ordering is great and in order to DM someone you need to be following each other, so instantly Coffeegroundz has a reason for people to follow him and they get something that not every customer can have.   Creating exclusive groups within your customer base can be divisive if it is too difficult to move from the group of have-nots to the haves. In this case the entry barrier is incredibly low and the benefits to both sides quite high.

Obviously using Twitter for customer service could end up being quite time-intensive but there will be some geographic limitations on how many @Coffeegroundz followers use this service and in the USA it is still possible to receive twitter updates by SMS which would make it easier to track the incoming orders.  I’d be interested to see how well it would work in the UK or for a company with a larger customer base with few or no geographic limitations. Please do let us know if you know of any other businesses using twitter in other groovy ways.

Hat tip to MrTweet for the CoffeeGroundz story.

With the newspaper industry desperately treading water, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the solution might just have to be a creative one. While we all try to figure out how to build the newsroom of the future, effectively monetize newspaper websites and bulk up their ad revenues to compensate for the death of (some) newspapers, some bright sparks are busy trying out their more cunning ideas.

One such bright spark is Joshua Karp, founder and publisher of The Printed Blog, an enterprising attempt to merge the worlds of the newspaper and the blog by printing blog posts into a newspaper format and distrubuting it for free.

According to NYTimes.com, The Printed Blog aims to eventually put out free neighbourhood editions twice a day in as many cities across the States as possible.

So what are the pros and cons of the Blogspaper?

Pros

The decline of newspapers has everyone worried about making money. The Printed Blog allows local content to be produced online and printed – this means that it marries blog production with the more advertising-friendly method of distribution provided by print. But it also answers questions about the physical artefact, enabling readers who enjoy the feeling of paper in their hands to consume content which might otherwise disappear.

The Printed Blog should also be cost-efficient. It saves on the cost of reporting, and there are also plans in the pipeline to reduce the cost of printing by avoiding large central printing presses. This, of course, means that the newspapers could be distributed for free. As we see in London, well-executed free newspapers remain popular, causing problems for the likes of the Evening Standard, forced to compete on an uneven playing field.

It would make the bloggers involved feel appreciated. Deep down, we all want to see our stuff in print.

Another nice touch is an element of ‘editing by committee’. Karp hopes that users will be able to log into the website and vote for which blogs they want in their local edition. As a result, a “city the size of Chicago could have 50 separate editions tailored to individual neighborhoods”. Now that is hyperlocal.

Cons

But this is by no means a perfect model. It does not adequately address the possibility to comment. Comments would feature on the following day, thus the immediacy of the blogosphere is lost and a more traditional form of “readers’ comments” is employed.

It also seems that Posted Blog papers would be laid out like a blog (i.e. a continual linear stream of posts). Why? One of the main reasons that this project is interesting is that it allows cost-cutting and modernisation while retaining the feel of the physical artefact. I think it would be more appropriate to lay the blog posts out in columns. After all, it’s not going to be an ongoing stream from one blogger. Presumably it will be more that the day’s news and views are lifted from a selection of bloggers. There is no chronological element.

All told, while I’m not convinced this will solve all our media woes, I will be watching with interest. I think The Posted Blog is an admirable project and a clever idea.

What do you think? Would you read a free mega-local newspaper made up of blog posts?

Every brand wants good reviews, and lots of strange people are willing to sell their integrity for the princely sum of 44 pence.

It makes sense to many companies to pay folk to place positive reviews on websites like Amazon. After all, the sites provide the function – why not use it to your advantage?

But the social media world is a weird beast which has developed its own social mores, based in part on openness, integrity and authenticity. It’s also capable of a vicious backlash, so abusing it by using money (no matter how small) to create false testimony is not only frowned-upon, but incredibly unwise, as hardware manufacturer Belkin discovered recently.

Astroturfing is the act/art/crime of disguising an orchestrated campaign as a spontaneous upwelling of public opinion (Wiktionary), so when Belkin offered $0.65 per review for positive 5/5 write-ups of its products on, among other sites, Buy.com, it was kindly providing us with a handy textbook example.

From Bit-tech:

The evidence comes in the form of a posting on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site – which offers “artificial artificial intelligence,” allowing companies to pay small sums of money to hire individuals to perform mundane or repetitive tasks – from Belkin’s Mike Bayard asking for people to “write a positive 5/5 review for [a] product on [a] website.”

Having been caught red-handed, Belkin issued an apology (correctly, in my view, posting it to its website and sending it to the storm-bringing blogger) and added that it did not endorse Mike Bayard’s astroturfing tactic.

Belkin’s response seems to have been receieved positively in the blogosphere, but The Responsible Marketing Blog asks at which point a company becomes responsible for the actions of its representatives.

So, there are outstanding questions but that’s the end of that for Belkin, barring residual criticism. But Bayard’s reputation is becoming increasingly cloudy, and without the support of his employer, riding out accusations of even more direct astroturfing is going to be a challenge.