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Social gaming is a hot topic here at SXSW. The industry has been growing at an incredible rate and traditional gaming companies have been caught unaware by a flurry of new market entrants.

Playfish was one of the 2009 success stories. Within two years of starting the company, they are attracting 60 million monthly players and are selling 90million items a day (virtual goods and unlockable gameplay). It’s also been a huge personal success for the founders, who sold the business for £240 million last year.

I noticed that Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, was speaking on a panel this morning so I went along. It has been one of my SXSW highlights so far. Here are a few notes (NB comments are paraphrased).

How are social games different to what’s gone before?

SdH: The design of the games is the main difference. Rather than an immersive story-telling experience designed for gamers it’s a social experience designed for non-gamers.

ET: Story’s have endings so are not as scalable or well suited to social gaming platforms.

OA: It’s like going back to how we used to play board games with friends. From faceless gaming back to connecting with real people. There’s also a massive shift for the gaming industry; the economics of gaming is driving business model changes.

JD: Social has brought gaming to the masses. Facebook has also had a profound effect on what people are prepared to share online. People are open about their identity and that’s helped drive the big shift.

ET: The difference is that games can now transmit themselves through invites and gifting. So the opportunity is for a game to pass through recommendation not through marketing. As a result you don’t have to be a big brand or established business to have success. Just focus on creating good games.

Lessons you have learnt and surprises

ET: It’s useless to predict what will work in the future (social gaming) from the past (traditional gaming). For example, who would have thought a game about farming would be a runaway hit. You have to try a wide variety of things. Find a success and then drive hard into it.

SdH: Speed of the industry has evolved. Don’t even think about a change from time cycle in years to months to weeks. We think in evolutionary cycles – EA has published 17 versions of FIFA in 17 years, and our Pet society game has already been through hundreds of evolutions. It is constantly evolving with continuous feedback into each step.

JD: We’ve learnt that social games are living, breathing services. They are not stand-alone games or products. If you launch one, you are committed to it. The volume  of feedback, and the emotion behind it, is incredible.

ET: We’ve learnt that gameplay is there as a delivery mechanism for the content, or as a facilitator for social interaction. It’s not the reason for being

SdH: Launch early. We launch at a 10% completion milestone. We launch unfinished products and that’s fine as early feedback helps you get the game right.

Monetisation of social games

SdH: In-game micro-transactions are key. The game is free and we create emotional incentives that make people want more of the game. Audiences are ready to pay for good games, but in small chunks. Just don’t get fooled into believing that you need large ticket transactions. Try not to think in terms of a business plan based on: Price x Quantity. Instead, think about Distribution x Engagement x Lifetime User Value.

ET: we’ve found that there are two things that can have a disproportionate impact on profitability:

• Creativity / self-expression – allowing people to be creators makes them care more and increases their life time value.
• Competition – player vs. player conflict drives a willingness to pay for competitive advantage.

What’s the place for gaming brands in social?

There was some disagreement on this one.

OA: brands will take over this space. For an example, look at the success of Dante’s Inferno, an average game that got traction thanks to the brand.

SdH: The value of brands in a retail world was huge. It helped them fight for shelf-space and increased trust at the point-of-purchase. But there is no shelf space in social games [not sure I agree with this as we all look at the “top 25”]

Social gaming is driven by invitations from your friends. Direct emails into your inbox from people you know, alleviate the need for brands as a purveyor of trust.

But brands will be have a role especially in their ability to make you care more about a game by mixing offline with online. E.g. FIFA. There is a huge opportunity to innovate here as we move towards games with 1Bn players.

When it comes to other brands taking part (e.g. Coke) advergames do not work well as people see through them. However it is possible to create engagement models where brands add to the experience.

How will mobile gaming integrate with social gaming?

SdH: mobile is difficult to integrate. There are so many issues to balance if someone starts a game on the web then wants to continue playing on a different platform like iphone.

We are running a service. Running a service on the iphone is hard as they are built for application download. There are workarounds, but microtransactions in games are difficult (iphone does not allow individual item purchase, nor do they allow gifting). The factors that drive success on the web are difficult to replicate on mobile.

ET: The trick of getting social mobile to work will be hitting the union (think Venn diagrams) not the intersection of iphone and Facebook. There needs to be a synergy of multi-platform, not just a replacement.

Mobile is more like a way of making money out of what we already have.

Then it got controversial.

OA: we want Xbox and Facebook fully connected. Games will become fully transferable between the web, mobile and your TV screen.

ET and SdH: this has been forecast for years, but will not happen.

Things to watch

• The frictionless monetisation of Facebook credits is exceptionally powerful
• Location aware games like Gowalla and Foursquare.

Abbreviations:
SdH Sebastien de Halleux – Playfish co-founder
ET – Eric Todd, Playdom
OA – Omar Abdelwahed, Ubisoft
JD – Jon David, PopCap Games
GD – Gareth Davis, Facebook (moderator)

Read all our posts from SXSW

At FreshNetworks, we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in February.

1.The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

2. Vodafone, Twitter and the challenges of managing your brand in social medial

An interesting afternoon at Vodafone in the UK saw a tweet on their official @VodafoneUK account that was clearly not the kind of message the brand intended to share with its customers. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

3. Facebook’s redesign shows how important search is for social networks

In February, Facebook rolled-out a redesigned homepage and navigation to its users. There four main areas where the site had changed: improved use of space n the main panel, made messaging easier, put notifications together in one place, and moved the search box. It is the last of these improvements that is, perhaps, the most significant. Facebook did more than just move the search box, they increased its importance on the site and showed the importance of search for Facebook, and indeed all social networks and online communities.

Facebook is huge, but to many of us feels very small. We mainly access content through feeds, messages and notifications. Training us as users to make search an integral part of our Facebook experience will make it a much bigger and more useful tool for us all.

4. The Matthew Effect – linking and how things become viral in social media

The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In this post we discuss a great presentation and video from Torsten Henning Hensel that explores the power of linking online and how the Matthew Effect can help us to understand how things become viral and spread online and in social media.

5. Russia: the fourth largest social networking market in Europe

In a post from almost a year ago we look at data showing that Russia was the fourth largest market in Europe for social networking behind the UK, Germany and France.

A useful survey from global PR firm Burson-Marsteller this week looks at the ways in which the Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media. The tools they are using and how they are developing a social media strategy. The survey looked at 100 firms in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and examined how these firms are using social media.

The summary presentation is below, and is Required Reading here at FreshNetworks this week, and the full report can be downloaded here.

The survey highlights the ways in which these firms are using social media and is also insightful in terms of the tools and platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or a corporate blog) they are using. It is interesting to compare the use of the different tools – Twitter is the most popular and blogging the least. And to compare how behaviour differs by regions – particularly the differences between Asia-Pacific and the US and Europe.

Summary findings

• 79% of firms are using at least one of these social media platforms – this figure is higher in Europe (88%) and lowest in Asia-Pacific (50%) – and 20% of them are using all four
• The most popular platform is Twitter, with 65% of firms using this. Facebook and YouTube are next (54% and 50% respectively) with corporate blogs the least used (just 33% of firms surveyed)
• For companies that use Twitter the average number of accounts they are running is 4.2, with some companies (notably AT&T and Nokia) having a large number of accounts – 15 people in the case of these two firms
• For those companies who are engaging, their activity levels are mixed. 82% of those using Twitter have tweeted within the last week, whilst only 36% of those with blogs have added a new post in the last week

Twitter

• 65% of Fortune Global 100 firms have a Twitter account. In Europe and the US this figure is over 70%; in Asia-Pacific only 40% of firms have an account
• Firms are tweeting and average of 25-30 times per week
• Only 38% of companies are using Twitter actively to respond to other’s comments and questions
• In general companies are being followed by many more people than follow them. Typically they have about 1,500 followers and are following about 700 people

Facebook

• Facebook Fan pages are less popular that Twitter, with 54% of Fortune Global 100 firms having a page. They are significantly more popular in the US where 69% of fims have a Facebook Fan page
• Only 59% of companeis with a Fan page are actively using it with an average of only 3.8 posts per week
• The number of fans is higher than Twitter followers, with an average of 41,000 for firms with a Facebook Fan page

YouTube

• Half of all Fortune Global 100 firms have a YouTube Channel. Again firms in the US are more likely to have a Channel and those in Latin America least likely (59% and 33% respectively)
• 68% of firms with a YouTube channel are using it actively, with an average of 10 new videos each month
• Typically, firms are getting 40,000 views of their videos each month and over half of all Channels have comments

Corporate Blogs

• Whilst only a third of Fortune Global 100 firms have a corporate blog, these figures are much higher in Asia-Pacific (50%) and low in Europe (25%)
• The average number of posts per month is 7 (but again much higher in Asia-Pacific: 14), and almost three-quarters of blogs have comments

So the first FreshNetworks breakfast briefing has just finished and we had some great insights into how not for profit organisations (NFP’s) can use social media for strengthening their membership offering.

Breast Cancer Care Case Study

First up to speak was Bertie Bosredon, Assistant Director of Services (Information & Multimedia) at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie has been busy changing Breast Cancer Care’s social media strategy to utilise other social media platforms and contribute to overall integrated structure. More importantly changing the way they use social media to start listening and conversing with people online.

There were some key messages that resonated from his presentation, these were:

1. Have an integrated approach

Breast Cancer Care realise that a lot of conversations that were happening online were not necessarily happening in their space but through working with key influencers on other platforms supplying them with packaged information you can increase your presence online and collaborate with a lot more people.

2. Involve your members in planning

Bertie has been getting members involved in the planning of the current and future use of social media asking them what they would look for when engaging with Breast Cancer Care and how they could work this into a strategy that would best fit their organisational aims. Although a simple concept many companies forget that members and users usually know more about your brand then you do and can deliver some great insights.

3. Aligning all channels of communication

Breast Cancer Care have made sure that the social media strategy that they have been using is aligned with their offline print material so that it doesn’t matter where members go for the information. This means that they can use the channel that they prefer and the message will be consistent.

A popular point from Bertie: it doesn’t matter about the traffic to your site; care about how many people interact with your content even on other sites.

Social media marketing for not for profits

The next speaker was our very own Charlie Osmond from FreshNetworks. Charlie was speaking about how social media can be used for marketing and with specific reference to NFP organisations. Engaging people online is not about going for that quick win viral campaign but to successfully engage people online you need sustainable engagement.

Some key points to take away from Charlie’s presentations are:

1. The importance of the community manager

Engaging people online especially for sustainability requires a good community manager. They need to be able to reach out to people and facilitate discussions on a multitude of different platforms.

2. Know your tools but don’t let them drive your strategy

In order to be able to know what channels are available to you, you have to have a grasp of what’s in the vast social media environment. To create a successful strategy you should be looking at the aims of the business and the needs of the people that you want to engage.

3. To drive word of mouth for a certain cause take the ‘believe, belong and bear witness approach’

A great way to get people involved in a cause is to find people that believe in it, help them become involved in it and then help them bear witness to what they believe in this will help spread the message of the organisation through yours, and their own networks.

Steve Bridger on social media in charities

Finally but by no means least was Steve Bridger. Steve is a social media consultant and has some great (and extensive) history in community management for various charities. One of the more prevalent points of Steve’s presentation was the importance of putting people at the heart of your social media strategy

Some great points from Steve:

1. Help your advocates to amplify their voice

A lot of member organisations were using their current strategy to try and control conversations and go against ‘the flow’ of what people were online to do. They had a clear goal that they wanted to achieve and member organisations should be “enabling and empowering” these people to help deliver your message.

2. It’s about relationships not transactions

Member organisations and more specifically charities are currently set-up for transactions and are very ‘me’ focussed, there is greater value for charities if they position themselves for conversations and engagement.

3. You have to be in it to win it

A lot of companies are hoping for a win in social media what ever that may be but they don’t have a social media policy or ban social media access completely. A restrictive approach rather than a guided one causes bottlenecks at many organisations and restricts valuable internal knowledge.

It was great to see the focus on relationships and emphasis on the value rather then how much money can be made. There were lots of interesting perspectives and too many to write all in this blog post. A big thank you to all the people that attended there were some great discussions and insight from lots of different organisations and another big thank you to the speakers involved.

This week we have been looking at social media for small businesses. Ways in which they can use the social media tools that exist to build their brand, engage their customers and learn about their brand, market and competitors. It is as important for small businesses as it is for large brands to build a social media strategy. And there are many different ways that you can start to use social media to get these benefits.

And social media strategy should be based on what your brand is looking to achieve. Only when you have established this should you start to experiment with different social media tools and will you be able to measure the success of what you are doing. This need not be an expensive and elaborate implementation, some great tools exist for small businesses to use to help achieve their aims with social media and this week we looked at four of them:

1. Social media monitoring and buzz tracking: Any social media strategy should start with a thorough process of social media monitoring. Listening to what is being said about your brand, competitors, market and customers. There are a range of free buzz tracking tools available and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do.
2. Twitter and targeting customers: Twitter is a very flexible tool. Some people think that it is most useful when you are following and being followed by very large numbers of people. But this is not always true and it can be particularly powerful with small groups. You can build a small community of people online who are interested in the same issues and use this to engage customers or potential customers. Better to target and engage a smaller group of people than to try to appeal to everybody.
3. Blogging and brand building: Blogging is a great tool that any and every brand should consider. For many small businesses, blogs are a tool that can help them punch above their weight. The content, themes and information that they share can lead them to be thought of as much larger or much more established than they really are. Blogging provides an easy way for organisations to share their thoughts and their content. And people will respect you for this.
4. Foursquare and customer engagement: Foursquare is just one of a number of mobile-enabled and geo-location social media tools that are being developed. They allow people to connect and share information based on where they are. Foursquare in particular offers great and exciting opportunities to brands. You can find out who is visiting your shop, store, cafe or building and then work out ways to engage them and turn them into loyal customers

These are just four ways in which small businesses can use social media tools as part of a social media strategy. They are all free tools to start using and the posts linked to above contain more details about each of them. Using and experimenting with social media tools need not cost money. The important stages are in the thinking and planning about what you are looking to achieve and so which tools are most appropriate, and then in how you manage and grow your activity in any tool you choice.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from a social media strategy. Plan what you are looking to achieve and how you will measure success, and then experiment!

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Imagine if you could know who visits your cafe or shop on a regular basis. You will, of course, recognise many of these people. The man with the glasses who comes in most mornings for a flat white (that’s me by the way). The two women who always have lunch on a Thursday. Or the family who bring their children on a Saturday. You will recognise some regulars and you will no doubt speak to them and start to get to know them. Social media can help you do this more, and can, perhaps importantly, help you target people who visit sometimes but not yet regularly. This is where geolocation-based social media tools such as Foursquare come into play.

Foursquare is social media tool that lets users say where they are by ‘checking in’ at locations. You earn points for doing this and can see who else has checked-in here. If the location you are at is not yet on Foursquare then you can add details about it and plot it on a map. You earn points and get badges (status) the more times you check in and the person who visits somewhere more regularly becomes its Mayor.

I have been using Foursquare recently and, for example, might check in to the Fleet River Bakery just round the corner from my office when I get breakfast in the morning. Or I might check into Selfridges on Oxford Street in London when I’m shopping at the weekend. I am not yet Mayor of anywhere, but could become the Mayor of any of these places if I visit it most regularly. This is a small but growing tool, and it being joined by more and more geolocation-based social media tools that can be a real benefit to businesses.

Let’s take the Fleet River Bakery as an example. As a small bakery and cafe in central London they face a lot of competition (there are probably about ten similar venues nearby) but they are very popular with queues round the corner at lunchtime. Some people will be regulars and other will visit from time to time. On Foursquare, Fleet River has a profile, whether they set it up or not, and people who go there can check in – putting their details on this profile. For the guys at Fleet River this could be a powerful data resource. If they can attract people to visit them and check in on Foursquare then they can start to see who is visiting them, how often and when. But it can also be a powerful peer-to-peer marketing tool. On Foursquare your friends are told where you are. So when somebody checks in at the cafe their friends will learn where they are and so learn about Fleet River, where they are and what they do. They will also know that their friends go there and, as we know, peer-to-peer recommendation are much more important than anything a brand can say.

Using new and growing tools like Foursquare can be really powerful for small businesses. And if you work with these tools you will get even more out of them. Perhaps on the boards outside Fleet River they should say who the Mayor currently is, and perhaps even offer him or her a free coffee when they next come in. Or maybe offer exclusive discount, or a free cookie, to anybody on Foursquare who checks in.

There is a lot you can do to help people market your small business for you. Much of it free and just making use of the social media tools that are out there.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Twitter is a great way to reach and engage people online. Many people think that Twitter is a number’s game. That the more people you follow, and the more people that follow you, the better. This can sometimes be true, it very much depends on what you want to achieve with social media. For many small businesses, Twitter can be a great way to engage niche or smaller groups that you might never otherwise have been able to, or been able to afford to, reach.

Twitter works well with large groups but it can be particularly powerful with small groups. Imagine you are a small firm of accountants in a large city. You have a certain set of potential customers but there are people that are never going to be right for you – either because they are too small, too big, too spread out or for other reasons. Any business knows its target customer base and then wants to find ways to reach out to them.

Twitter lets you target these people via shared content. Taking this small accountancy firm as an example, their customers will all share some things in common. They are all likely to be in the same region, of a similar size and potentially in the same industry. They are all facing some of the same issues and our accountancy firm will help them all in similar ways. Twitter lets you bring people together who share similar issues like this.

Small businesses like this can start using Twitter, not to tell us what’s happening in their office (to be fair there is only so much of interest to the outside world there) but to talk about these issues. Provide a small but powerful resource of links to news stories, events, discussions or pieces of advice on these topics. Then start to promote it. Run your feed of your tweets on your website and in the email signatures for all your employees, put the details on your business cards and your notepaper and other marketing touchpoints. And talk to people about what you’re doing. If you meet potential customers tell them you bring together issues that might be of interest to them on Twitter and send them your way.

Slowly but carefully you will start to build a following of people who are interested in these issues. And if you have chosen issues that are of interest to and unite your target customer base you will be beginning to engage new customers. You will be providing  a real service to them and have a reason to speak to them, in our example, about your accountancy services too.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as it is expressed in the Gospel of St Matthew, from which the effect takes its name:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

So what does this have to do with social media? Well this great presentation and video from Torsten Henning Hensel explores the power of linking online and how the Matthew Effect can help us to understand how things become viral and spread online and in social media. As Hensel explains:

Thanks to the Matthew Effect, the already famous get more famous, the often quoted get more and more quoted…

It is easy to see how this transfers into social media – the more something is spread the more it will be spread even further by word of mouth. Imagine two pieces of content of equal quality, interest or importance. It is the content that has been linked to, retweeted, forwarded or otherwise referred to that is more likely to become viral. For Hensel, “Social media is a linking machine” and the more links you can get to a piece of content the more likely that content is to become viral when compared to a similar piece.

This is an interesting theory and a great attempt to deconstruct and to understand what makes something go viral. The presentation is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks as it reminds us all of the importance of links.

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments with social media is that it allows anybody, from a large global consumer brand to an individual to build their personal brand online. To some extent some of the same rules apply – decide what you want to do and why you are using social media and then make sure you are using it in a way that helps you to achieve this. For individuals, of course, the most important thing is acknowledge in the first place that by using social media you are building your own brand, whether you intend it or not. The main advice is that only you can be in charge of your brand online and in social media, and so you should take control of it.

This is important – especially for job-hunters. I recorded a podcast for Guardian Careers last week talking about the importance of owning your personal brand and building your network online in social media. We also discuss:

• what a social media agency is and what it does
• why it’s best if a brand manages its own presence online (but why it usually needs expert help to do this)
• how you can network and build your connections online
• the best use of LinkedIn (and how this is different from Facebook)
• why you need to be aware that people are able to find information out about you even if you haven’t told them
• that you should take control of your own brand and use privacy settings sensibly to help you do this

Oh and you’ll also find out how I got from a degree in French and Russian at Cambridge to be where I am today.

You can listen to the podcast on the Guardian website: Careers Talk: Job hunting using social media

The podcast is also on iTunes

It’s been an interesting afternoon for Vodafone. Their VodafoneUK Twitter account has attracted a lot of attention after one Tweet in particular stood out from their usual customer service conversations online. In between the Tweets resolving network coverage and other queries one stood out. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

The official response from Vodafone (as you can see from almost every message they have sent since on Twitter) is that it was a breach of rules by an internal member of staff and that they are dealing with it internally. This is the kind of PR that any company doesn’t want, and as it was done through Twitter it will no doubt be held up by some as one of the downsides of social media and of engaging with customers online in this way.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone today. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

Managing your brand in social media

We’ve posted before about how to write your firm’s social media policy and, perhaps more importantly, what to do once your firm’s social media policy is written. The basic principal is that it is the quality of your staff and the relationships they make with customers that will make all the difference. Not the technology you use or any technological solutions you put in place. The general principal is that if you trust your staff to represent your brand in traditional media, then you should be able to trust them in social media.

Of course, Vodafone may not today be able to empathise with this and there are some differences. Notably that anybody with access to a Twitter account will be able to say something that is immediately and directly communicated to customers. This is a huge responsibility and one that people should not take lightly. But it is a responsibility that brands should give to their staff and one that is most important when building your brand online and in social media. Whilst there are many agencies out there who can help to manage your brand online for you, with the appropriate training and support (which may need to come from a specialist social media agency) the best person to represent your brand online are your own employees.

The key things here are:

1. Have a culture where social media is acceptable. Encourage your staff to use social media so that they become comfortable with it and that is becomes part of your culture. This is a big shift for many organisations and one they are often nervous of.
2. Have ongoing social media training across the business. Things change and they change quickly in social media. A firm that wants to position itself best online needs a regular and ongoing set of training and ideas and knowledge share. Try things out and share what works and what doesn’t for your brand.
3. Trust people but have a very clear policy in place. You should trust people to interact with your customers online but be aware of what they are doing. It is not one-to-one communications, nor is it always one-to-many. You are talking to one person but in a very public environment. Recognise this and have policies and processes in place for this new way of communicating. But make these policies simple and clear to understand.

And whatever happens you need to be aware of the risks and have processes for dealing with them. Social media is growing and changing rapidly and as such can be a very forgiving place if you approach things in the right way. Everybody is experimenting and will often forgive you if things go wrong and you handle them in the right way. For me this is what Vodafone got right.

What we can learn from Vodafone’s response

When things go wrong the way to respond to it can be simple. Vodafone did two things that all brands can learn from. Whilst there will be discussions, debate and probably some negativity about what was said this afternoon for sometime, fundamentally, Vodafone should not suffer too much damage, because:

1. They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.
2. They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

So lots that we can learn and lots that they got right. But no doubt a challenging day for Vodafone today.

Some more reading

• Vodafone suspends employee after obscene tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Top five Twitter gaffes (guardian.co.uk)
• Vodafone suspends employee over obscene Twitter update (telegraph.co.uk)