Many businesses are keen to engage in social media. This was very clear at the Institute of Directors event last week where I was speaking on Creating Value through Web 2.0, with Silvia Cambié and Giles Colborne. From what I have noticed in real world discussions as well as online, this interest reflects the interest of business leaders generally. Many have an awareness of blogs and Twitter and Facebook and there is a huge curiosity about how to best use these social media tools in a business context. But alongside that curiosity is also a sensible concern about how to engage appropriately in this new medium. One of the delegates at the event, Roy Graff of ChinaContact sent me a tweet via Twitter suggesting that that I discuss the Habitat case as a study in how NOT to engage in social media.
Habitat and Twitter
Habitat is a well-known upmarket furniture retailer in the UK. I first heard that they had started using Twitter via the Social Media Today site. One of the conventions in Twitter is to use “hash tags” ie too add a hash symbol # to keywords to make it easier to identify other tweets about the same topic. So, for example, if you are tweeting about the elections in Iran, you would mark your tweets with #iranelection. Habitat appeared on Twitter using all kinds of popular hash tags to mark their tweets — but their tweets had nothing to do with the keyword topic and were, instead, blatant hard sell copy pushing their furniture. The Social Media Today site sets out some great screenshots of Habitat’s Twitter feed - an example is “#iPhone Our totally desirable Spring collection now 20% off”.
Social media as a cross-cultural space
This kind of communication on Twitter showed a complete ignorance of social media culture. The best way to explain social media culture is to think about it as a cross-cultural fourth space — like another country you might visit. If you were to do business in China or India, you would take the opportunity to learn about the etiquette and cultural norms for business people in those countries. For example, you might take the time to find out what the etiquette is for taking someone out for dinner or whether it is appropriate to bow or shake hands etc. Similarly, you need to approach the social media space as a cross-cultural experience and take the time to learn about the nuances of communicating within that context.
Authenticity
So, one of the most highly prized values in the social media space is authenticity. If you are going to use the hash tag #iPhone then you need to be tweeting about something relating to that mobile phone device. To use it as a way to “spin” people intp reading your sales advertisement shows a huge disrespect to those around you. Twitterers were outraged by Habitat’s forcing their sales pitch into their conversatiaon space. Think of how infuriating it is to receive junk phone calls with recorded messages selling you stuff just as you are sitting down for a meal. Or your home fax machine ringing and churning away in the middle of night with junk faxes till they’ve used up all your paper. Twitterers felt the same sense of violation. I believe that at one point Habitat was even using the #iranelection hashtag. The furore in the Twitterverse was palpable. It was like being door-stepped by someone asking for your help in a good cause who then suddenly switches to trying to sell you Viagra. Habitat had become a spammer without even realising it.
Habitat blames the intern
On 24 June, Social Media Today posted an apology from Habitat, which said, “The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to. This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat.”. On 25 June, Brand Republic reported that Habitat was now blaming an intern, quoting a spokesman as saying, “The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.”
I’m not sure that Habitat has really extricated itself from this mess by this “blame it on the intern” message – and, in fact, I think they’ve dug themselves deeper into the doo-doo. Many others seem to think so too. Check out the Twitter hashtag #habitatfail for the reactions of Twitterers. In my view, for a big corporation to blame a hapless intern shows a great moral cowardice.
Assuming there was an intern…
Let’s give Habitat the benefit of the doubt and assume there really was an intern in the first place. What is implied to the world by this simple blame statement: It wasn’t us, gov - it was the intern’s fault”?
An intern, as one of the most junior members of any team, needs to be - and should have been – properly supervised and trained, as well as mentored appropriately to do their job well. For the big corporation to dump them into any role with no training and say, Get on with it and if you screw up, you’re out on your ear, is bad business and bad ethics. Even if Habitat had given him clear initial instructions about the appropriate way to engage on Twitter, they should not have walked away and left him to his own devices without checking back to make sure what he was doing was “authorised”. How difficult is it to check your own Twitter page? The intern’s supervisor could have done that without even getting up from his computer!
A leader of a team is the responsible for how his / her team behaves and the quality of their work. He/ she is also responsible for the team’s well-being. If anyone is responsible, it is the intern’s supervisor – and that supervisor’s line manager and so on, all the way up to the Head of Communications. Because if that intern’s supervisor isn’t doing their job properly in managing that intern, there is an issue there that they themselves are not being properly managed by their line manager, and so on right up to the top.
At another level, the question that comes to my mind is: How much respect does Habitat have for the millions of people who engage on Twitter if they leave their Twitter communications strategy to an untrained, unsupervised intern? The message seems to be: Our Head of Communications is much too busy and important handling TV and traditionally respectable communications channels to even spare a thought about all those people engaged in the social media space - let alone a carefully thought out strategy - so let’s just put this junior onto it and that’ll be good enough. So, Twitterers, that’s all you’re worth to Habitat – the cost of a cheap intern’s time.
I’d be interested to see how Habitat’s recruitment figures pan out in the next little while, too. If you are a young person looking for an internship after this fiasco, would Habitat the kind of company you want to work for? Even if you’re in middle management or some other more senior level than an intern, would you want to work for a company that shows this level of inauthenticity.
But do we believe there was an intern?
My views above work on the hypothesis that there was really an intern. But, given Habitat’s performance so far in the Twitterverse, can we even be confident that they are being authentic in even claiming that there was an intern? It sounds to me as believable as, The dog ate my homework.
Practical tips on how to avoid becoming a spammer
How might Habitat have done things differently? In my view, there are some simple steps to take if your business is considering extending your communications opportunities into this fourth cultural space:
• Take the time to scout out the way that people are already behaving and communicating in this space
• Engage some professional guidance from someone who is a native of this space.
• Draw up a strategy for how you can start engaging in a phased way, with opportunities to review and adjust your strategy along the way. The key is not to rush in waving your banner wildly but to slowly build up relationships and trust before making more assertive moves.
• Put in place a proper team, with all the usual tools that you would use to manage a team working on a real world project - objectives, supervision, appraisal, milestones, end date and so on.
You will notice that you could easily apply those four steps to a cross-cultural project where you were aiming to expand your business into another country. Read through the bullets again and this time picture China or India or another region that is culturally different from your own. Taking the time to understand and respect another’s culture is the best way to avoid giving offence - and to avoid becoming a spammer.
Photo: thanks to david on flickr.com (CCL)
Neville Hobson, over at his blog the other day, asked 
For the last year, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I have been using the working title 
