5 things #FyreFest team could have done to save the day. (or make it less of a disaster).

#FyreFest

The Fyre Fest team nailed it.

They have checked every box to tick in the handbook of social media and online promotion.This was a very successful digital campaign until it actually worked.

Now I am not aware if Ja Rule was the chief digital strategist for this campaign however let’s take a look at this

• Interactive website with mobile friendly features https://www.fyrefestival.com/.
  
• Influencer marketing with credible reputation (@haileybaldwin - @ania000 - @iamcaseydiego  - @katebock  -  @BellaHadid - @HaileyBaldwin -  @kendalljenner).
  
• Build up posts from the ground before the event starts including the yachts, the models, tons of them and the private island sneak peek.
  
• Alignment of all the social activities, visual mediums user generated by influencers and branded by Fyre Fest ( Youtube video got more than a million views ).
  
• Finally lead generation. Keeping in mind that the event wasn't cheap or free. Some of the tickets went up to 250,000$ for a group rate and the whole event was sold out.
  
  
  

And that right there is the problem “ It worked”.

Social Media got great coverage with millions of followers and thousands of engagement and the tickets sold out. Perfect social media case study, perfect ending.

But wait it didn’t end happily ever after.

When guests arrived there was no music, no food and no shelter, the two weekend getaway that was promised turned to be a nightmare.

Bands cancelled, the food was just toast and cheese, guests were fighting over food the island was not private. Buses, private jets and transportation was not able to hold the number of people.

The infrastructure of the island couldn’t support either logistics or accommodations. Social media content was generated overwhelming from the ground and account under the name Fyre Fest Fraud was created.

In other words all hell broke loose. Social media horror.  

Before talking about the catastrophe that is Fyre Fest. Personally I don’t think those guys are not smart or intentionally wanted to scam people or it was a fraud act.

The campaign was supported by over than 400 celebrities  and influencers, the bands were already contracted, the partnership was strong. They understand the concept of over-promise and under-deliver, the YouTube ad started by saying “the on ground experience is unbelievable”.

The internet is now overwhelmed with articles saying why this campaign was a failure or simply stating the fact that happened from the New Yorker to Buzzfeed and everything in between.

While the failure of the campaign is visible, the numbers are clear and the damage done could be disasters. 

The question the comes to my mind is, how could they have fixed it?

Well that's not an easy answer, as there are more than one factor. However here are some practices that maybe could have enhanced the situation and prevented the social media outrage.

1- Setting up Social Media Command center:

Endorsed by Dell, Cisco and the American Red Cross. This practice has proven to be vital for crisis management online.

Social media command center is simply a dedicated area where a company’s social media team can monitor and engage social conversation around their brand and market.

The command center handles daily workflow and triage, and is poised to ramp up and implement a crisis management plan. The command center coordinates with other departments in the company: customer service, public relations, sales, marketing, and others.

According to the Red Cross Eighty percent of Americans expect that emergency

responders will monitor social networks, and a third assume that posting or Tweeting a request for help during a disaster will get them help within an hour. 

2- Social Media Functionality:

One of the main unique advantages of social media across all the platforms is being able to reach- update and engage with content instantly.

Where traditional media fall short in this specific comparison a bill board is both more difficult and costly to correct a typo than in a social media post.

One of the things that helped escalate the situation was the absence of online support even worse some of the influencers just deleted the posts which caused more panic and added the fraud pattern to the process.

Taking ownership of this situation by breaking it down to logistics - shelter and food, then directing those who are affected to solutions and alternatives.

3- Using influencers to actually influence.

Instead of deleting the posts one after another which looked to your audience as if it's rats escaping a sinking ship.

Using influencers to  actually influence the audience by alternatives and solutions. Posting updates as frequently as possible with notes of who is working on the problem?, how is it being fixed?, most importantly how safe everyone is?.

And dare I say if there are more than 400 influencers support one campaign then the situation might needed some boots on the ground.

4- Before the flood.

To have an honest well informed answer about what happened internally before and in the first moments of the fest might be difficult.

However hitting a wall with the speed of 120 m/h i way worse than hitting the same wall with the same car with the speed of 10 m/h. With the first signs of disturbance when the team saw that the buses cannot load more and the food is not enough and they know that more is coming.

Damage control should have been number one priority and try to slow the speed and rate of the crisis before it floods. For example informing the people that are yet to come that the event is canceled,  directing those who are in the airport to another hotel or a different island. Finally try to direct most of the on ground effort towards evacuation.

5- Anchors are the worst.

In their apology on the website the Fyre Fest team tried to promote #fyrefest 2018. This creates a cognitive anchor with the audience that Fyre Fest is associated with disaster and that 2018 event won't be any better.

The human brain uses cognitive anchors as a mental heuristic. So we remember situation when we hear songs or remember people in specific location or places. We simply anchor and promoting the coming event while the first event still going viral as a not so good event. Is just an anchor for failure.

My final thoughts are that this campaign is a very interesting case study for social media and another reminder that offline presence and delivering value that services a need to the target audience is still  vital for any social media campaign.

As digital storytellers we are always reminded that part of writing a good story is managing the expectations of the audience. What do the audience expect from your protagonist, from the plot , from the story and most importantly from the storyteller.

Reference for this article can be found here

http://bit.ly/2oYLEBk  

http://bit.ly/2qthnej

http://bit.ly/2pkCCRH

http://bit.ly/2pHitXy  

http://bit.ly/2qtAHIc 

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company or start-up

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company
or start-up

90% of start ups fail and 80% of product launches are not successful, and in this article you will know exactly how to join this number and fail your own start up as well.

In his book why do good companies go bad , Donald N Sull was able to determine what he called a dysfunctional mechanism or what we can call dynamic of failure.

The first approach to failure is strategic approach:

As human being we tend to have mental short cuts or cognitive schema in which we use to classify and categorize the world around us and business owners,

leaders and startup managers are no different than the rest of human beings, the way a start up or a business view the market and their own company is through mental schemes which are called strategic approach.

one of perfect examples to showcase such a concept is Firestone

“After seven decades of uninterrupted growth, Firestone reigned supreme in the U.S. tire industry in the 1970s.Then Michelin introduced the safer and more economical radial tire.

Firestone competed with Michelin head-to-head in Europe, but was blind to the threat to its core U.S. market, and so continued to produce conventional tires only. Firestone lost significant market share and was acquired a decade later.”

This is not just an example of business strategies this is an example of human thought as well, this methodology represents the fixed mind set process which deceives the human mind through ego-centrism that there is only one strategic approach to solve every problem and it’s  the only survival approach.

The second tip of startup destruction is the process:

At this stage you need to stick to the idea of transforming the process into rigid routines machine like and highly optimized a good example of this is McDonald’s.

“McDonald’s built its success on standardized processes, all dictated by headquarters. By rigidly following these procedures into the 1990s, McDonald’s lost market share to Burger King and Taco Bell, who were much quicker to meet customers’ changing desires for healthier foods.”

People in general are afraid of change let that be a change of situations, people, thought, change of hearts and for sure very afraid of change of process. Because when we as human know the sequence of things or the norm of specific process this gives us the illusion of control.

The fear of change is adaptive cognitive mechanism in itself; the fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Since times immemorial, man has liked routine. Our internal predispositions (heredity and genetics) teach us to resist change mainly to ‘always feel in control’. 

That’s one of the reasons people and businesses tend to stick to a specific process.

The main obvious downside to that these days is that we are living in a very dynamic environment and our ecology changes almost in a daily basis some of these changes are revolutionary to us as individuals and to our businesses.

I am almost certain that some of VHS, CD player store had a perfect process in terms of cleanness of the stores , customer care maybe loyalty programs yet this is all what it was. Just another process.

The third tip for the ultimate destruction is values:

I think this is self explanatory really how many times had dogmas or rigid beliefs destroyed companies, start-ups, life’s or a perfectly good cards game?

Bureaucracy  is a perfectly good example of a very important set of beliefs and values. The main idea is documentation of important events and rules that can regulate the work place to reach optimum efficiency,
yet what bureaucracy  has become is more of paper worship and it became a tool of destruction more than a tool to regulate and monitor.

By definition values are “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

So the values o a company or an organization is regarded as useful when that specific institution has started after all they were put in place for a reason and these values contributed to the institution process of the institution,

however values can be solid and rigid as much as you can yet the trends , the tools or the whole ecology of an industry or a business changes in a consistent basis.

Companies that stick to rigid values are sticking to destructive code.

The fourth tip for you companies doom is relationships:

Now in general relationships can form some kind of shackles that will tie you in and hold growth. This could be relationships with constituencies—customers, suppliers, employees. When conditions change, however, these relationships can restrict flexibility.

The Example that was given in the book I am referring to here was apple

“Apple’s vision of technically elegant computers and its freewheeling culture attracted the world’s most creative engineers. Once computers became commodities, however, the company’s health depended on cutting costs and speeding up production time.

But Apple’s engineers refused to change, and the company’s relationship with its “star” employees damaged its ability to respond to market changes.”

This is not the only case or the only form of shackling in terms of relationships for example it might make sense now if you’re a marketing or digital agency to partner with an offline events company, they make the events and you make the online marketing buzz.

However on the long run when you have different demands from different clients alignment between let’s say telecom corporate (your clients) and wedding planners (their clients) might lead to an un healthy relation.

And there you have it these are the 4 amazingly granted tips or your own start up destruction

1-      Turn your strategic approach to a solid frames of thinking

2-      Turn process into rigid routines

3-      Turn your values into dogmas

4-      Turn relationships into shackles

Can you add more points to the list ?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment and we can always talk more on

Twitter : @fouad_khafaga

Google + : +FouadKhafaga

There is Nothing New Here (2016 resolutions & trends)

There is Nothing New Here
(2016 resolutions & trends)

With the arrival of a new year and a departure of an old one social media tends to be filled with business and personal resolutions , new year goals , analytic of the past year and sometimes we can see “I told you so “ articles.

In their very important report  training industry magazine did a great job looking at the top trends in the training world for 2015, let take a look at the top 4 trends:

1.  Story telling.
2.  Use of big data analytics.
3. Formalization of mentoring and coaching.
4. Work force readiness.

This could be great from a business or training prospective yet what interest me the most while reading the top 5 trends is that there is nothing new here, in terms of human thought.

The art of storytelling is as ancient as the human existence, the neurological effects of storytelling can make new neurons connections through combining both logical and metaphysical thoughts, it makes connections between reality and fantasy and between metaphorical and direct communication. Yet storytelling as a practice has been with humans as old as they can remember.

The second trend mentioned in the report was the use of big data analytic, in his book the organized mind DanielJ. Levitin mentioned a story of a Romanian student that visited the states to do her studies.  Daniel mentioned that he meet that Romanian student and she was overwhelmed by the choices of pens , she said that back home you had only 3 choices and most of the time there was scarcity of them yet in the states the choices seems to be overwhelming.

What happened to that student happens to companies and corporate daily they get overwhelmed by data to either outsource or keep the services in house, to spend more on certain kind of actives or to be conservative this year. Because by the end of the day companies are just the collective minds of the individuals working within them.

Our ancestors suffered the same overwhelming big data dilemma during the agriculture revolution around 12,500 years ago, which crops should they plant? , where should they plant them? How deep should they dig? And which crop to plant first?

The third point of the report was the formalization of mentoring and coaching actually Wikipedia did a good job on the history of the same topic and here is the quote.

“The roots of the practice are lost in antiquity. The word itself was inspired by the character of Mentor in Homer's Odyssey. Though the actual Mentor in the story is a somewhat ineffective old man, the goddess Athena takes on his appearance in order to guide young Telemachus in his time of difficulty.

Historically significant systems of mentorship include the guru - disciple tradition practiced in Hinduism and Buddhism, Elders, the discipleship system practiced by Rabbinical Judaism and the Christian church, and apprenticing under the medieval guild system.

In the United States, advocates for workplace equity in the second half of the twentieth century popularized the term “mentor” and concept of career mentorship as part of a larger social capital lexicon—which also includes terms such as glass ceiling, networking, role model, and gatekeeper—serving to identify and address the problems barring non-dominant groups from professional success. Mainstream business literature subsequently adopted the terms and concepts, promoting them as pathways to success for all career climbers. In 1970 these terms were not in the general American vocabulary; by the mid-1990s they had become part of everyday speech”.

Coaching has been embedded in most religious teachings and it’s a cross cultural practice that is certainly way older than 2014.

Finally in the list of 4 we have the readiness of the work force which is a question that was asked repetitively. We can track business school of thought back to the 1880’s to what is known as the scientific school of management In the late 19th century, management decisions were often arbitrary and workers often worked at an intentionally slow pace. There was little in the way of systematic management and workers and management were often in conflict.

Scientific management was introduced in an attempt to create a mental revolution in the workplace. It can be defined as the systematic study of work methods in order to improve efficiency. Frederick W. Taylor was its main proponent. Other major contributors were Frank Gilbreth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Henry Gantt.

There are some questions that are un answered. Is these topics of such an importance that time doesn’t affect its virility?

Could it be that with every new management generation we ask the same questions that were asked before and we have a slower learning curve than we think?
What makes things trend and why do topics become viral?
I will attempt to answer this question in part 2 of this article.

Twitter : @fouad_khafaga