More and more companies use social media and in particular Youtube to apologize to their customers and as a key tool in crisis management.

The latest example was the video below from KLM’s President and CEO Peter Hartman about the unprecedented ash crisis in Europe:

And the below video from Toyota commercial director Jon Williams explaining just how sorry he was about all the drama they have been having over the last couple of weeks with recalls of their cars:

The Domino Pizza incident where two of its kitchen staffs deliberately contaminated the pizzas and posted the video in YouTube created a huge drama in the media, including the social media. The CEO apologized via the social media:

Short URL & Title:
YouTube as a key tool in crisis management — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/kam

It’s amazing how fast the world of social media moves!

Top 30 stats from the video:

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
6. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
7. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
8. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
9. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
10. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
11. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
12. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
13. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
14. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
15. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
16. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
17. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
18. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
19. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
20. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
21. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
22. Only 14% trust advertisements
23. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
24. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
25. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
26. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
27. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
28. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
29. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
30. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

The numbers are running fast. You can filter by now, day, week, month, year. Leave this tab open and come back in 10min. You’ll be surprised (Gary Hayes at Personalize Media)

Short URL & Title:

Growth of social media — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/zfc

BP actually seems to be using its website and traditional means of communication quite well, given the circumstances of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But in social media they are the proverbial lame duck.

The @BP_America account has a total of 52 tweets, one per week, since its inception in April 2009.

Not one of those tweets has an @ symbol in it, meaning they have replied to no one, ever. Apparently BP’s idea of social is pure monologue broadcast. Consistent with that approach is the fact they follow only one other account.

And there is a lot out there that need response from BP:

And the link on the @BP_America Twitter page leads to a classic corporate “brochure-ware” page that has no information on the spill until you click into the “Press” section.

Finally, when you look at how BP is listed by other Twitter users, it is often categorized by the words “oil spill,” whereas previously it was listed under “energy” and even “green energy.”

And BP’s Facebook page is silent:

BP is being hammered by critics all over the web, with thousands of posts on Twitter and Facebook slamming the company for its failure to prevent the disaster and its inability to stanch the flow of oil from their well nearly two weeks after the accident.

This spill is going to stick to BP’s image like oil to a pelican’s back, in some measure because BP is unable to contain the reputational damage through efficient digital communications and preparation.

Could that have been mitigated? It’s hard to say given the scope and scale of this incident. It certainly couldn’t have hurt to have fans, followers and plans to communicate.

Maybe BP can learn from some of the airlines during the the Icelandic volcano eruption:

• Social media as a crisis communication
• How to use social media during a crisis

Short URL & Title:
Social media and the oil spill disaster — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/sop

Last year, T-Mobile introduced a well-branded viral video featuring a massive cast of dancers performing a spontaneous-yet-choreographed dance routine in London’s busy Liverpool Street station that have scored more than 20 million views and collected more than 17.000 comments.

Like many other successful guerrilla/viral campaigns, the “making of” was part of the buzz, to generate more discussions about it:

Flash mob mission accomplished!

Short URL & Title:
Flash mobs in viral video advertising — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/son