The Buffalo Blog

MEDIA ALERT – Mini cuts 850 staff in reputation ‘car crash’

Story: BMW’s Mini has announced it is cutting approximately 850 staff at its factory in Cowley, near Oxford. Employees were given one hour’s notice that they had lost their jobs, resulting in furious crowds, vegetables being thrown at management, unions becoming involved and wide-scale media condemnation.

Buffalo Communications MD, Kerry Hallard, comments:
“BMW has made a major mess of its reputation by completely ignoring the fundamentals of internal and external communication. Its ex-employees are rightly furious about this last-minute announcement making the company the villain of the day – a complete failure on counts of morality and business sense.

“For a company that spends tens of millions each year building its brand, quick-fire redundancies like this, without proactive communication, make no sense whatsoever and will be hugely damaging to the company’s brand goodwill. 

“Redundancies are coming thick and fast as businesses suffer the recession. But, even though they’re an unfortunate necessity of the downturn, they need to be approached with tact and caution and with the courtesy that loyal employees deserve. The Mini internal grapevine has been buzzing with talk of job-losses for weeks now but employees were still left in the dark until the last possible moment.

“Companies that have to make staff redundant should initiate early staff communication first using direct announcements, one-on-one meetings and Q&As before the news goes anywhere else. Staff should be given all appropriate information from the start and given help going forward in finding further employment. It’s also vital that staff are given ample time to deal with the news and provide any feedback to the company – one hour simply isn’t enough.

“Externally the company needed to communicate what it was doing, why, what it was doing to fix things and exactly what provisions had been made for staff, with a company spokesperson on hand to deliver the news.”

“If BMW Mini had observed a few of the simple laws of communication their employees would have been much more prepared for the news, able to understand why the company is making redundancies and hopefully be a lot more amenable to the news. The company’s reputation cache would also have been in much better shape.”

Ignore twitter at your peril

We picked up on a couple of interesting posts on Twitter over the last couple of days:

Guardian PDA
Twitter: a megaphone for the planet

and

Call Centre Focus

Tweet if you want better service, says Datamonitor

Both highlight some interesting points that are highly relevant to the communications industry.

The PDA looks at the makeup of the Twitterverse and the types of people that use it. For example ‘20% of users are aged between 25 and 34’ and the median age of users is 31. Most of the people actively involved with twitter tacitly knew this already and it has never been a turn-off for those actively involved in marketing. Companies with older target customers will inevitably see this as a reason for not engaging with the service, but they shouldn’t.

Yes the audience is young and very small in the grand scheme of things ‘no more than 6 million globally’, according to the Pew Internet and American life project, but a large number of these six million are the conversation drivers, the information sharers and opinion formers of the day. To ignore them and what they’re saying would be madness.

Due to the speed and ease of information sharing, Twitter is rapidly becoming a premier source for to-the-second news and information. The number of blogs, news stories and further comment that spreads from twitter posts is immense. Added to this, the fact that a large proportion of ‘twitterers’ are journalists and/or bloggers, means that interesting information within twitter will inevitably come out through blogs, magazines, newspapers and so on; like a great sieve filtering interesting happenings into the world.

What this means for companies and brands varies depending on their stature and leads directly to the post from Call Centre Focus. Twitter offers opportunities for succinct and non-intrusive communication directly with customers and with opinion formers and ‘gatekeepers’ (journalists, bloggers etc). Most importantly, however are the opportunities created for conversation monitoring making it an amazing reputation gauge tool, especially for larger companies. Finding out what thought-leaders are saying about your brand easily, is an opportunity too good to miss. From here you can move to engagement through addressing concerns and tapping into new ideas – the opportunities are endless.

If you’re a sceptic why not have a play with these services:

www.monitter.com

www.twitscoop.com

http://tweepsearch.com/

The list goes on and so does the conversation…

Mandarin Oriental - the online fire

My evening train-trip routine yesterday took me through the wealth of useful information that is the London Lite, happily happening upon another interesting story from that wonderfully interesting place called China

Why is it relevant to communications, well, because it’s about censorship, and the fact it’s getting more and more difficult to pull-off.

The crux of the story is in China Central Television’s organisation of a humungous firework display to celebrate the Lunar New Year – a noble pursuit no doubt. The trouble is, the fireworks promptly set fire to, and gutted, the unfinished Mandarin Oriental hotel, a US $731m development that was almost finished – oops indeed

The interesting part comes in that during the aftermath of the fire, the television station made absolutely no mention of the fire. The state-owned company has now made an apology, but it highlights some interesting comms problems.

 The fact is that the blogosphere, ‘twittersphere’ and rest of the online conversation, was filled with speculation, accusation and comment hours and hours before any admission of culpability or apology finally arrived. The message, that the broadcaster was responsible, got out anyway, and any anger was pointed directly at them

This is not a blog about the rights or wrongs of censorship but a simple example of the fact it doesn’t work anymore. As with any company in the

UK

that chooses to hold back potentially dangerous information, a product contamination, a financial fraud, the message simply gets out – we can’t stop it.

But we shouldn’t want to. The change being driven by the unstoppable online conversation is the need to communicate as well as or better than the people talking about you. Making sure your clear, truthful voice is heard above the chatter and that dissenting voices are listened to and engaged with, is vital to maintaining an organisation’s reputation online. After all, silence is deadly.

Out of sync, out of pocket

Good post from Mobile Technology Today on the launch of Google Sync for the iPhone and Window’s

Mobile allowing interoperability with Google contacts and calendar. This is great news for phone users who are enamoured with Google’s numerous services and ease of use.

I wrote a short post a while back on interoperability but can’t overemphasise the importance of making new technology work together. The age of proprietary programmes, OS and devices is ending and companies that don’t get out of this rut will inevitably face trouble. But a lot of companies are still stuck in the ‘rut’ so to speak, still trying to make ‘Intel Inside’ work for them. Fortunately for us, if not for them, things have moved on and will only get better in this respect.

I have to praise Google and their army of open source evangelists, as they’re the most visible players working towards this goal. Android is taking-off rapidly and its clear that the more easily useable, cross-functional and intuitive companies make their software, the more successful they will be.

Mobile Tech Today
Google Brings Sync To the iPhone and Windows Mobile
http://www.mobile-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=64578

Burger king viral

tasty

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Just picked up one of these in Leicester Square. Good viral-esque wallet dropping exercise by Burger King. £2 and a 'spending license' exhorting me to buy a cheeseburger.

Not sure I'm actually going to get one but I am blogging about it...and we all know there's value in that!

Snow snow snow :0)

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Communicating outsourcing

Amid strikes and predicted mass industrial action there has never been a worse time to be outsourcing work abroad in the public eye. The old Labour slogan of 'British jobs for British people' is rearing it's head again and it won't be long until the media spotlight falls on upon an unsuspecting company. Sending jobs abroad when the UK's workers are marching in the street is highly dangerous reputation-wise. But if a company's simply has to cut costs in this way to survive, they should be prepared.

Buffalo's MD, Kerry Hallard, discusses the ins and outs of communicating when conducting outsourcing deals.