Ideas, Rule

I am doing some research for a service around Twitter, and stumbled across Kingfisher Airlines twitter account. What I saw was instead of Kingfisher saying “What they were doing?”, they are solely using Twitter as a CRM tool. Saying thanks for customer who have left them thank you note, or in some cases asking sorry to the angry customer who were not satisfied with some service.

Well, it’s all fair to use such social networking tool — but the downfall is, you are wasting time or may be turning off those customers who want to follow you to understand your promotions, flight announcements, last minute schedule changes, some critical security updates. Personally I feel, using Twitter for Saying Thank you, visit us again will flatter “that one” passenger, however will turn away several potential passengers who want to follow the business/ enterprise and gain more out of their tweets.

It indeed is an art how to distribute your tweets between tackling customer complains, building rapport by saying thank you on their good experience, sending our promos, delighting travelers with useful announcements etc. Well I feel the sooner an enterprise learns this art, the more useful such social tools will be — after all it is all about ROI.

Sometime back I came across this article in Economist. Here is a paragraph from it.

“On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.”

While talking to a friend, I was telling him a possibility of Social Policing. With several hundred online social networks around, with several million working professionals, there is a high chance of one “uttering” something not meant to be. The concept goes like this.

Height of the internet-age would be registering the user name of an unborn child and creating his social profile.

There are hundreds of applications, thousands of enterpreneurs and young talent and resulting in millions of users of the world wide web. Applications connecting people — yeah, the so called Social Networking phenomenon has impacted everything from selling car to sharing music to reviewing movie.

I am neither an environmental speaker nor tend to become one. These are few suggestions I would like to make to these social data crunchers, about what they can do.

1. Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Orkut should make sure to have atleast 5% of their space/ advertisement devoted to some social message.

2. These platform should encourge and promote the vendor apps, which can make a difference for the environment or carry a message in their business model.

3. This can be a little tricky — Sublimal message — it does work, right? Now if used in the right way it can do wonders considering the number of users looking at these messages.

4. Hammer the users with some low hanging suggestions/ inputs — e.g. Switch off you laptops/ computers when not in used. Don’t just keep them running.

5. Build functionalities and promote them which are around car pooling, sharing a ride

6. Build functionalities which allow users not only share just music and pictures, but also share information about things they want to re-cycle or give away non-degradable items so some other friend can use it instead of being thrown away.

7. I really would like to see an application which comments on industries, factories and organizations which cause huge pollution and doesn’t get caught. Users should know about these culprits, so their products/ services gets boycotted. After all you believe you friend on his movie review, why can’t you believe in him if he comments about someone screwing the nature.

8. Collective intelligence - Obama has already done it. Why can’t these platforms and entrepreneurs do it — create placeholder where every user has to contribute and act.

Frankly, I am thinking about a body which can make sure that every internet social user is paying his or her dues/ taxes through these platforms, which are part of our lives now.