Raconteur

Managing Information Online (Sukhoi Tragedy) by Hanny

Our hearts went to all the victims from the recent Sukhoi Tragedy—it was a tragic incident that shocked a lot of Indonesian onliners. Links and information were being updated and shared via different social media channels.

There were several individuals who provided informative tweets about Sukhoi and the air traffic around Mount Salak a few hours after the accident. One of them is Gerry Soejatman:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later on, he was also being contacted by conventional media like AFP, ANP, BBC, and Jakarta Globe to share his knowledge in aviation related to the incident.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This fact reminded us of our findings in Indonesian Journalists Technographic Report 2011/12. When journalists are trying to find out information about an issue related to a specific company, the first thing they’d do is to visit the related company’s website. If they can’t find any information that can satisfy them, they’ll go to other news site or go to other channels, including social media. The question is, how prepared is your company in managing information online? Will journalists find useful information in your website? How accessible and how prepared is your “internal experts” to the journalists who are racing with deadlines?

 

J4k4rt4 Governor Election & the 4ll-Fours by Daniel

What’s with the fours? It’s actually the election number for Hidayat & Didik (@HidayatDidik), the candidates from Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (@PKSejahtera) for the upcoming Jakarta governor election. Last week, the political party @PKSejahtera with more than 25,000 followers on their Twitter account, started to change letter “A” with number “4” to promote the election number of their governor candidates. This style of writing is also known as “4l4y (Alay) mode”—that includes changing letters with numbers. The “4l4y” style of writing is quite popular among Indonesian teen crowd—and at the same time, has been strongly criticized by more mature groups that degrades such way of writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, combined with funny and creative rhythmical poem familiar to Betawi culture (Betawi or “people of Batavia” are the descendants of the people living around Batavia—the colonial name for Jakarta; from around the 17^th century), the party’s 4L4y tweets generated lots of attention and didn’t receive that much negative feedback. Most people were commenting on it, replying with some rhythmical poem as well—changing all A into 4. Tactically, this move has helped the party to socialize the election number of their candidates via Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To increase people’s awareness about the election number 4, this approach might work. Whether people will actually vote for number 4 is another question. This rings true for many cases, especially for corporations or organizations. You need to know the specific objective for a specific campaign. Is it only for raising people’s awareness? Then the measurement is to see whether there is any increase in the awareness level (before and after). Just because they are aware of your services, your products, or your brands, it doesn’t mean that they will actually buy or use your services/products/brands. You need different strategy and different vehicle to achieve different objectives.

 

#RAN to the Trending Topic by Yuma 

This might not be the first time for the band RAN to top Indonesia’s trending topics, but surely #RANlovesRANers and ‘RayiAstaNino’ (the personnel of the band) had steadily appeared on the trending topic chart all day on May 11th.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was triggered by an online quiz, TGIFPrize (the name was taken from one of their single, TGIF) with prizes ranging from merchandise giveaways and opportunities to meet Rayi, Asta and Nino in person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With more than 92,000 followers, @RANforyourlife had succeeded in creating a huge online buzz around them. Only a few minutes after the winner announcement, they also spread the news about an offline gathering that would be conducted the next day (#RANersDay). The offline gathering was actually sponsored by a sport apparel brand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These days, brands/organizations should look at these factors when choosing an online brand ambassador: 1) the ambassador’s personality matches the brand personality, 2) they have a huge online presence, 3) their target audience is similar to yours, and 4) they have a solid community, both online and offline.

 

“I am trending” #tshirtprint – by Daud

T-shirt never fails anyone—especially T-shirts with cool and trendy writing printed on it. This week, #tshirtprint had reached the second place of Indonesia’s trending topic list. Using this hashtag, Twitter users were composing and showing off their own “creative” lines they’d like to see printed on T-shirts.

This is the kind of “Twitter-game” that people love. They can show off their creativity to come up with some funny, clever, or sarcastic lines—encouraged to produce the most interesting line for #tshirtprint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For corporations or organizations that are active in social media, this case shows you that Netters love to play an active part. They want to be a part of something and create something (co-creation) instead of just doing some passive watching or reading. From the #tshirtprint spontaneous ‘game’, what’s stopping you from choosing the best 3 lines, print it as a limited-edition T-shirt and give it away to Twitterers who came up with these chosen lines? People love random act of kindness.

 

Maximum Cinema with Minimum Service by Atri

The Avengers, this summer’s most-awaited blockbuster, was planned to be played together with the launch of the first IMAX studio in XXI Gandaria City early May. By high demand, IMAX tickets were sold only via M-Tix—XXI online ticketing system, one week earlier. But on Monday (7/5), due to the ticketing system’s failure, the enthusiastic audience turned furious when their online tickets were double-booked with the regular tickets. This means, one cinema seat was being fought over by two viewers.

One of the audience, @arknsh, shared his disappointments on Twitter, that was soon being commented and replied to by other Twitter users.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To make things worse for IMAX XXI, apparently on the very same day, there were also several viewers from digital agencies and online influencers who were also got caught up in this ticket-fiasco. Their complaints on Twitter spread instantly like wildfire.

When @SolehSolihun, stand-up comedian with more than a hundred thousand followers tweeted about this incident, things became even worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not only that the brand got scrutinized online, people were also started comparing their online ticketing system with other competing cinemas—that are more trusted and more advanced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some lessons to be taken:

1. Testing is important. Either it’s online ticketing system to Facebook/mobile application, when you’re dealing with technology you’re also dealing with bugs and crashes. It’s important to check and recheck and making things work. Even when you’ve tested everything, there are chances that you’re unlucky and things can go wrong. You need to anticipate and plan how you’d handle things that could go wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. During the chaos from late afternoon until later that evening, @cinema21—the account for IMAX XXI, only tweeted once to respond to this incident. It said: “Thanks for your inputs. We’ll fix this for our future show.”

 

 

 

 

 

And that was it. They didn’t apologize, they didn’t say sorry.

As mentioned by @SolehSolihun before, customers would want to know the explanation on why things happened. If the brand made a mistake, they needed to address it, apologize, explain about how these mistakes could happen, and how they would fix it in the future. If they can compensate the loss experienced by the customer, that would be a lot better.

3.  According to the onliners who were present on the venue, they had to wait for hours until they got the confirmation about what happened with their double-booked movie tickets. This caused them to be even more furious.

 

 

 

To tell the long story short, @cinema21 promised that the audience would be getting another movie screening and a refund. However, the bad experience had cause people to leash out their rage on Twitter, Facebook and blogposts—and no matter what IMAX XXI do, all these ugly records will stay on the Net forever.