HMV's Disgruntled Employee

Well here we are, reaching the end of my first dabble into blogging and exploring social media. From posting my first ever blog, to researching companies social media strategies, until finally taking a look at a companies social media fail!  While having a look around to find a company for this weeks blog it really was interesting to see just how many have actually failed and not just small companies either.  Taking a look over other students blog entries there have been some pretty monumental fails over recent times by big companies who either haven't hired properly trained social media personal or have had existing staff set up an ad hoc twitter accounts with the company failing to implement and track its use.  Which leads me to the topic of this final blog post which is HMV failing rather badly at controlling its twitter account.

HMV Overview 

Before I get into the social media fail in question, I'll briefly give you all a run down of who HMV are and if you would like to read their full story check it out here.  HMV are a retailer who sell and distribute music, moves, Tv series and some technology products and is based in the UK with around 120 stores, but also has outlets in Canada and Ireland.  Obviously however in this modern era of digital distribution, HMV has seen a decline in the retail side of its business and in 2013 went into administration only to emerge a few months later under new ownership.  Which brings us conveniently to the social media fail and this weeks topic.

HMV's Social Media Fail

The picture of HMV's twitter account the day of their failing is shown below with the original image being found in an article written by Gibbs, S (2013) found  here.  This such day ties in well with when the company went into administration and where obviously many employees were about to and did loose their jobs.  One such employee who ran HMV's twitter decided to blog all about his experience.

Now this obviously isn't very good publicity for HMV, as a rouge employee who is disgruntled at losing his or her position is venting their frustration in a very public and inappropriate way.  This is clearly unethical on behalf of the employee in question who is breaching what could be seen as confidential information but also possibly tarnishes HMV's reputation.  Almost comically however is the fact that there was a the clear lack of management of the twitter feed itself.  By having one individual responsible for the account with no clear management authority or guidance is a clear over site and one would think a mistake HMV would not make again.

Now it is unclear to me if in fact HMV did have any Social Media Policy in place at the time of this fairly nasty fail.  Dundas Lawyers state that a social media policy is:

"A Social Media Policy (SMP) is a document that suppliments a contract of employment to be legally enforceable by an organisation on its employees. The aim of an SMP is to clearly communicate what is acceptable conduct on Social Networking Sites by an organisations employees and contractors and what conduct is unacceptable and would make an employee liable to dismissal."

Now if HMV did have a policy which outlined appropriate social media behavior it was clearly either forgotten or deliberately disobeyed.  It is also hard to determine if the employee in question faced any legal consequences of their actions, but clearly as they were being fired anyway dismissal wasn't really a motivation for not going through with the tweeting rampage.

Consequences?

Unfortunately I can only make assumptions on the consequences and outcomes HMV faced after this social media fiasco. While there may have been some fallout of public relations and loss of revenue, the company was going into administration anyway thus the general public may have just viewed this just a failing of HMV internal security.  One outcome however is that no doubt they will be monitoring and managing their social media department more closely in future.  There is an old phrase which comes to mind however and that is "There is no such thing as bad publicity" and HMV definitely had their share of publicity from from this social media misuse.  While other companies that my fellow students have listed may not agree with that phrase (Malaysian Airlines and the "Bucket List"), I believe that HMV has escaped relatively unharmed by this social media outburst.

Summary

That about sums up my final blog post for Enterprise 2.0. To finish with I'll leave you with my usual tall person joke.  I've read and investigated a lot of interesting things over the course of these 7 articles and I hope this blog in at least some part has been interesting.

 

References

About HMV. About HMV , Accessed 23/9/2013 from http://www.hmv.com/about

Gibbs, S (2013), HMV's Twitter Account Goes Rouge. Accessed 23/09/2013 from  http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/01/hmvs-twitter-account-goes-rogue/

Dundas Lawers (2011). Do Organisations need Social Media Policies?. Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/do-organisations-need-social-media-policies/#more-932.

Properties of Tall People shirts [img], Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://whyworldwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/funny-properties-shirt-triangle-tall-people.jpg

Dude [img], Accessed 23/09/2013 from http://memeguy.com/photos/images/friend-dropped-this-bomb-when-he-forgot-the-word-tall-22911.jpg

Capcom Case Study!

Welcome to this weeks Stretched Report! This weeks challenge I did find a little daunting if I'm honest, but needless to say over the coming blog post I hope to enlighten you all as I reflect on and analyse a ROI case study by Gigya on one of the gaming industries long standing developers (found HERE)

Ill keep this company overview short and sweet so we can get into the juicy stuff! Firstly many of you may not know much, if anything about Capcom and my first experience was as a younger (much shorter) lad playing a game called "Street Fighter" in a gaming arcade.   Capcom is a video game producer that began making video games back in 1983, and has created many well known video games across many gaming platforms.

Overview

Capcom was set to relaunch one of its biggest franchise games, Devil May Cry (DmC) and wanted to increase the anticipation of the player base for the new release as well as drive awareness to the broader market.  Capcom teamed up with RDA International and Gigya to create a mobile application that connected via the users Facebook or Twitter account. The user would log in using their social platform of choice, find a new "Mission" the proceed to scan real world objects to complete missions to "reveal the truth behind specific triggers".  The user would then be rewarded for completing each mission with game currency with they could redeem in the new DmC title.

ROI of the Project

The case study did not provide raw data on the expenditure of Capcom to implement this system.  It can be presumed however that the exercise wouldn't have been a cheap one due mainly to the "hiring" of two other company's to help collaborate on the project. The possible addition of the applications cost ontop of this also would heavily impact the ROI. 

The project itself however was seen to be a success as firstly application adoptions. The graph below (taken from the case study) shows the number of individual users logging in and using the mobile application in the days leading up and and following the games launch.
 


With each user logging in Capcom was able to collect valuable permission-based data on these users via their social login.  Gigya believes that this application helped to boost game sales to over 1million in the first month following the applications release.  Capcom and Gigya also state how they were able to engage users and continue to engage them with the application after the game's release.  They mention in the case study how on average each user logged into the application on average 6.1 times. 

These are all very tangible benefits as Capcom can firstly collect and analyse a swathe of user data to help identify and target marketing material to users. Secondly it gains very valuable data in relation to usage of the social media platforms that its users frequent.  Thirdly (according to Gigya) a boost in sales due to building user anticipation and "sharing" of missions via the social media to reach a wider audience.

Which brings me to a few of the possible positive and harder to identify intangible benefits. Whilst the figures of the application adoption were very positive and no doubt built user engagement, it is hard to track or identify if the sharing of mission completions lead to increased sales to a broader market. The case study fails to mention comparisons to previous title releases and make comparisons between the success of those strategies as apposed to this newer form of social marketing, which makes evaluation a little tricky. 

As the graph above shows though the application on release date did see a massive spike in individual users logging into the system.  However in the days after release there was a steady drop off until what could be perceived as around only 500-600 individual users logging in. This could be interpreted as a lack of engagement on Capcom's behalf as this was an effective tool prior to release and should be utilised long after the release date to help boost consistent broader market awareness and possible game sales.

Summary

Well that about finishes up this weeks edition of the Stretched Report, hopefully it was an interesting one! Last but not least this weeks tall person meme!

 

References

Gigya Case Study: Capcom Levels up with Gamification, Accessed 16/09/2014 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/150571388/Capcom-Case-Study-Gamification

Capcom. Capcom History and Capcom Logo[img], Accessed 16/09/2014 from www.capcom.com

Tall People [img], Accessed 16/09/2014 from http://ct.perceptionvsfact.com/ol/pf/se/i51/5/5/3/frabz-Tall-People-What-my-friends-think-I-do-What-my-mom-thinks-I-do-W-36535a.jpg