FINN

Researching our upcoming webinar about reputation management in the social media era, I was struck by the stark difference in sentiments expressed about two mobile operators: Mobile Vikings and Mobistar.

Mobistar is the second largest mobile carrier in Belgium, and has been active for about fifteen years, serving about 4 million customers. Mobile Vikings is a start up, serving just 5000 customers at the start of 2010, about 50 000 at the time of writing this. (Disclosure: I’ve never been a customer at either operators, nor do we work for either Mobistar or Mobile Vikings).

Now check this out. The screenshot is from “Twitter Sentiment”, an online tool that tries to gauge whether Twitter communication is positive or negative.

It’s obvious that sentiments about Mobistar are not only negative and rather outspoken to, with words like ‘FU’ (fuck you), ‘hate’, ‘fail’. But what intrigues me is that Mobile Vikings is actually cc’ed when talking about Mobistar. It’s almost like Mobistar customers are complaining to Mobile Vikings about how badly they are treated at Mobistar. This is weird, to say the least.

Delving a bit deeper into Mobistar and Mobile Vikings’ social strategy, it became clear that they are on opposite ends of social media adoption. Mobile Vikings seems to ‘get’ social media, while Mobistar seems to lag a bit to define a clear social strategy – which is understandable, given the company’s respective scales.

Mobistar:

• Offers no after sales service on Twitter
• Has separate Twitter channels for press and customers (the customer channel was ‘under construction’ at the time of writing this)

• Failed to communicate timely when faced with a service interruption at the beginning of May 2011

Mobile Vikings

• Is very active on Twitter, offering after sales service and responding promptly to customer questions
• Communicates in a personable, chatty way with customers
• Gives rapid updates when faced with outages, even when reasons for the outage are not yet clear.

Building online trust and credibility

In an earlier blog post, I explained what bloggers (and microbloggers) ought to do to increase credibility. Basically, online presence requires

• Transparent
• Dialogue
• On equal footing

Mobistar falls short on all three of these requirements. By not communicating when customers are faced with service outages, they are not transparent. By not offering after sales service or interacting directly with customers, they fail to set up a dialogue. By differentiating between journalists and customers, they give the message that some stakeholders are more important than others.

I can’t but wonder whether part of the strong negative ‘social sentiment’ against Mobistar has less to do with the actual service or products of the company, but more with the fact that the company is not as active on social media as some social media users would want. In other words: what infuriates some of these Mobistar customers, I think, is partly the fact that they can’t get timely answers on Twitter. They seem to be trying to ‘bully’ the company into getting more active on Twitter.

Being 'one of us' is important in social media

Mobile Viking on the other hand offers answers fast, not only from the corporate Twitter channel, but also from the Twitter channels from individual employees like ‘Hanssim’. Mobile Vikings is considered ‘one of us’, and hence one of the good guys. Call it a ‘social literacy bonus’ – or handicap. Companies that are seen as ‘good social media citizens’ get more credit than companies that aren’t as active.

Organisations that are contemplating a move to social media should take note. Often, clients approach us to start a social media presence, but ‘only to listen initially’, they say. I think the Mobistar example shows that there are risks attached to a mute presence. When joining the conversation, it seems wise to actually jump in to cash in on the social literacy bonus.

Last chance! Register for the webinar on Reputation Management 2.0 on June 22, 2011:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/937449776