by Shaun | Aug 4, 2015 | social media
Politicians. They’re a funny bunch. I don’t mean funny ha ha either. I mean funny odd. From the weirdos who play student politics at university to running the country. And we, the people, let this sorry state of affairs continue.
One thing about politicians is that their biggest concern is re-election. When opinion polls are bad, they might trot out old cliches like, “the only poll that matters is the one on election day” and the like, but they do take notice.
Recently in Australia we have had the situation where the speaker of the house, Bronwyn Bishop was forced out of the speakers’ position because of an expenses scandal. You would have to have been hiding under a rock if you were in Australia and didn’t know this, but for the benefit of people reading this who are not from Australia (I’m talking to you Indian web developers) here’s a recap.
Rather than go the 70kms from Melbourne to Geelong by car for a party fundraiser, Bronwyn saw fit to bill the Australian taxpayer five and a half thousand dollars for a helicopter flight. It shows, politicians rorting expenses is a common problem, no matter where you live. At least she didn’t get her moat cleaned like one British politician, though I’m sure if she had a moat she would.
Not surprisingly, the Australian public thought this was a bit beyond the pale. And in this day and age of social media, they did what any right thinking, apathetic population would – they took to facebook and twitter. No marching in the streets for this generation. It’s too damn cold; it gets as low as 12 degrees celsius outside in the middle of winter here. Yes I know the English are saying.. 12 degrees.. it’s warming up, but not us. It’s cold here when it’s 12. We even have to wear socks.
Memes started appearing. When you choose to take a helicopter rather than a car it’s just too easy to poke fun.
Memes like these.
Now with most political scandals, politicians just like to tough it out. Give it a couple of days and the papers get bored , or some famous dies and they are onto new territory. Not this time. It wasn’t helped by more and more revelations of her extravagance, but I contend that without the social media backlash, it would have been easier for it to go away.
The thing is, the memes brought this to the attention of people who normally aren’t interested in politics, and kept it there. I contend there is no worse sin for a politician than this. Once people who normally go, “Don’t talk to me about politics, it’s boring”, say, “what about that idiot, Bronywn Bishop?” it’s all over.
The media outlets kept running with the story for 3 weeks because it wasn’t dying, and the reason it wasn’t dying, I contend was meme after meme.
It’s got to the point now where media outlets are no longer first in telling us what’s happening in the world. The media outlets are turning to social media such as twitter to find out what’s actually happening in the world.
When Bronywn Bishop finally went, writer and comedian Catherine Deveny made this comment on twitter:
Pretty much summed it up. We have entered an era where social media can give politicians direct insight into what the people are thinking. It would be nice to use this power to shape the decisions more substantial than whether or not a politician travels by helicopter, but unfortunately I don’t think we have progressed that far yet. There is always hope though.
The scandal has it’s own hashtag #choppergate (please, when are they going to give up on adding a ‘gate’ to the end of every scandal?) and even made the UK papers – the Daily Mail’s coverage.
And recently I wrote about how social media can bite the unwary.
by Shaun | Jul 24, 2015 | social media
We have all heard over the past few years stories about the perils of social media posts when it comes to employees. An inappropriate comment can affect people’s employment prospects. Company HR departments have been known to check the Facebook profiles of potential employees prior to hiring. I believe there are instances where people have also been fired for careless posts.
Personally I find this utterly outrageous. What a gross invasion of privacy this is. OK I’ll grant that a post derogatory to an employer is not a wise career move for anyone to make, but as a general principle it seems that often the bigger a corporation, the more right it seems to have to exert control over aspects of an employees private life. If an employee can perform the work required and do it to a high standard, isn’t that enough?
But anyway, that’s by the by. The beauty of this social media thing is that there is a flip side. Social media can also bite corporations as well. It is almost mandatory for every company to have a Facebook presence. If you transgress what your potential customers see as fair play, instead of a nice publicity channel for your business, you get caned by the public.
Recently the Australian burger company Grill’d found this out, very much to their detriment. They recently fired a young lady for the heinous crime of complaining to the company because they were paying below what they were mandated by law to pay her and her fellow workers. She went to the union about this, and suddenly was sacked for “bullying”.
Unfortunately this young lady did not just go away, like most people in her position. She complained about unfair dismissal and sought her job back, which she was entitled to do under Australian law.
Then a really bad thing happened for Grill’d; the media got hold of the story. People found out. And people weren’t happy. Now this is where the beautiful side of social media comes in. It can’t be controlled by those who are so used to controlling the image of their company so perfectly in all other ways.
A social media backlash is a terrible thing. You have a corporate page to highlight how wonderful you company is and instead you have hundreds and hundreds of comments saying, “I’ll never eat at your establishment again”.
Then of course the inevitable press release from the CEO, saying things like, “misreported” and the inevitable “Our people are our most important asset”. But it’s too late by then. People are onto the company. They know that it’s simply spin and a slick PR company is trying to make this go away.
As one comment on their Facebook page said “In my experience, any company these days who commences a statement with “Our people are our greatest assets……..” usually, in practice have utter contempt for their staff. It’s the corporate version of “I’m not racist but………..”
There is even now a new area of – well I guess it falls under the banner of PR – social media reputation management. Personally I think the easiest way to manage your reputation on social media is not do things that a reasonable person might find socially unacceptable.
And this shows the beauty of social media. A many edged sword, I’ll grant you, with the ability to bite all areas of social strata but one where a company that transgresses gets absolutely caned. Are we going to see a new era where the bosses have to tread warily in case they incite the ire of ordinary people? Where treating workers fairly becomes the norm because if you don’t the resulting social media storm is toxic to your brand? I for one hope so.
At the time of writing you can still see the hundreds of negative comments on Grill’d’s Facebook page
by Shaun | Jul 15, 2015 | social media
I am a designer. I am a web strategist. This also makes me a perpetual student of design and of web strategy.
When I was a kid, the world was a simpler place. Of course everyone can say that. We are in a world where new technologies are emerging every single day. Of course life was going to be simpler back then – whether you grew up in the 70’s, 80’s or 90’s.
One of the things that was simpler was how a business publicised itself. It was easy really. Three options only. Newspaper.. actual paper, radio or television. In Australia television was where it was at to really make an impact. Three commercial channels. A population that didn’t really do anything in the evening other than stare mindlessly at the box. If you advertised on the telly you had a large, captive audience.
Times have changed dramatically. The internet.. it’s effectively infinite. How many years would it take you to travel from one end of the internet to the other?
One of the things about the internet is that because it is so vast, it is hard to stand out. Hence the importance of great – exceptional even – headlines in any page you create, in any blog post you write.
This hit home to me as I started to learn how to use Twitter. For a long time I avoided Twitter. Why? Well my perception was that it was full of celebrities telling the world about themselves and frankly I wasn’t interested.
Lately I have been revising my view. As I said I am a perpetual student of digital strategy. I leave no stone unturned when it comes to understanding web strategy. I realised that, like it or not, Twitter was a major part of the internet landscape. Just as it’s essential to move up the Google rankings, a presence on Twitter is almost mandatory for any business wanting internet visibility.
Anyway, I go onto Twitter and look at the hashtag #webdesign. It’s kind of relevant to my business. I see a bunch of posts. Everyone is doing it. I click on a few. But of course only a few. And which ones do I pick? Well the ones with headlines that look interesting to me of course. There could be other articles that are better. I’m not ever going to find out, because I won’t be reading them. It’s obvious really. If you don’t have a great headline, you may as well not write your article because it isn’t going to get read.
That is the beauty of Twitter. Getting a message across in 140 characters or less. That headline really needs to stand out and it needs to be brief – you have to have room for your url and your hashtags as well as your headline.
I recommend if you haven’t looked at Twitter before and you are looking to build an online presence, have a look at Twitter and see what I mean.
