End of Day 3 Summary: Where are we now?

Well after quite an eventful day there is quite alot to talk about. The experiment has been up and running for three days now so here is a quick recap.

For those of you who are unaware of the purpose of this experiment, what am i trying to achieve?

The original story can be summarised as follows. I am a discruntled customer of Finnish insurance company IF who has had his travel insurance claim turned down. This was after having been told by the company's emergency telephone number's customer service person that it was covered and that the insurance company would pay for flights home and additional hotel costs in particular. I therefore based my behaviour while still abroad on this information and bought expensive flights home the very next day. IF did not pay for this claim. After exhausintg the existing channels i decided to try handling the claim publically through social media.

I am trying to use social media publisise this case and to gain support. I am also attempting to test and evaluate my own methods as i go along way through a series of related blog posts that i am writing about social media channels, performance and their evaluation. I want to know whether an individual customer can leverage social media to empower themselves. Companies have time and time again been shown to succesfully leverage social media but can a single individual overpower the might of an organisation using the same tools?

I am reacting to the situation as it happens and trying my best to adapt. This is totally adhoc and still ongoing now!

Where are we Now?

Where are we with IF Insurance?

Today we had our second response from IF today via their Facebook Group Page. See the thread here. Read the related blog post. Up until this time i have simply posted to IF's own facebook page to query them on this issue and have merely asked for customer service.

I wanted to see does the fact that the case is now being handled publically affect how the case is being handled.

In short communicating with IF has not resulted in overturning their previous decision not to pay out the insurance claim.

This has been desipte my best efforts to show them why a quick positive response from them would be in their interest. Read more here.

However IF have admitted that they should have done things better and that they consider themselves to be at fault with regard passing on incorrect information to us their consumer who acted upon this.

For me this is as good as accepting liability.

As this is how it appears to me i have asked them. Do IF expect their customers to be held accountable for their own errors?

I am waiting for a response. Show your support for Social Media Customer Empowerment by liking the thread.

How are we doing with Raising Awareness about this Issue?

On the blog

In terms of generating traffic to the blog we have been gaining traffic steadily over the three days. In fact today will be the record for the number of hits so attention is growing. I hope to pass 750 visitors today which i think is not at all bad for a 3 day old blog.

Also the blog has been republished a couple of times on other sites thanks to @leighdow and @Nwstd for that. This helped generate additional traffic to the blog site and i appreciate that.

I am still lacking comments on my blog though although it is being tweeted and shared via Facebook farely regularly.

On Twitter

Today has been a very good day on twitter. We managed to double the number of followers we got in the first two days so there is a degree of viralicity (is that a word).

I also attempted for the first time to direct message persons whom i felt could help raise awareness of this experiment. Read the blog post here. Not sure if this will work out let's see.

On Facebook

There are two issues here. My own group and IF's group. Based upon some analysis and discussion in this blog post i concluded that;

"It is easy for a company to ignore an independent counter productive kind of group when it is not visible to their stakeholders and the group itself needs to be found by people who are looking for it. Even if this kind of group is found it seems to me that in all likelihood the group has already been discontinued and is not actively managed or promoted."

"Facebook groups are not good for promoting individual causes that are not widely known about. This is because they need to be searched out and known about. They are not easily found when you do not look for them or at least expect them to exist"

I have concluded that to put pressure on IF the best place to do so is on their own social media.

Currently the support i recieve is disjointed across several sites and medias. I have drawn alot of attention in particular to the Blog and Twitter but i need to translate that into action and particularly on IF's own media. I am currently still lone wolfing in terms of actions despite the amount of passive support and interest. A few exceptions, you know who you are thanks especially @jukkan :-)

I need to focus on hitting them where it hurts and drawing traffic not only to my story but to theirs. I especially need to find ways to activate those persons who are drawn to my experiement. Suggestions are always welcome BTW!

So what is in store for tomorrow?

I will again await the next response from IF and i will base my next behaviour upon their response. I still have some surprises up my sleave. This experiment is totally adhoc and freeform the method and the strategies are evolving according to the situation.

I will continue to try and self analyse the use of social media in this experiment and will probably start to publish more statistics.

I am also considering expanding the scope of the social media i am currently employing so as to broaden the discussion base, to raise awareness in other medias and to exploit certain characteristics of other social medias other than, blogs, twitter and facebook. These media will not necessarily be my own.

Tomorrow is another day and let's see what it brings...........

IF's Second Response: Am i Surprised?

So i just received a rather lengthly response from IF regarding the claim. I was happy to receive the response but disappointed that IF's first objective seems to get me off their social media by directing me down other channels i have alread tried and failed with. I want to settle this very publically and in my channels as the customer.

Remember one of the major goals of  this experiment is to see if we can use social media to overturn an insurance claim decision by a major insurer in Finland.

Well unfortunately i think if missed their opportunity to demonstrate excellent customer service see the previous blog post. Obviously they did not read that post ;-) However it seems at least to me that they seem to at least accepting some responsibility for the error. But is that enough for me, hell no. Currently i am not their customer as i left as a result of this. With this kind of response allthough clearly very nicely written it is not at all enough to placate me.

I will once again wait for their response and based upon this may have to up the anti. It may very well be that despite all of my best efforts that IF will not agree to pay this through "Nice" communication.

In any case i have added my comments already to the blog. I find it very hard to accept that IF accept responsibility for their customer service error but are still refusing to settle the claim. What do you think? Comment directly on http://www.facebook.com/ifvahinkovakuutusyhtio If's own facebook group please.

Upping the Anti: Trying to Muster Support On Twitter

As part of my strategy to increase interest in my story and experiment I have been trying to follow people who are in Finland and may have an interested in following the story on the blog, twitter or facebook.

I have also started to retweet my blog posts more than once at different times as each tweet has been shown to result in a spike in Interest.

Above: Basic Blog Stats from http://myifinsurancestory.blogspot.com/

I think that this has been going quite well considering everything started from scratch a couple of days ago.

We have now over 500 visitors on the blog.
Have gained about 40 followers on the new twitter account.

However in alot of social media stories there is often talk of an explosion of growth of interest. Social media spread virally. This experiment to be succesful is going to be on a very short time line. We need to strike while the iron is hot.

As such i have done something that i really wasn't so happy about. I have direct messaged people in Twitter who i think are better able to enable a viral explosion of interest in this story against IF insurance. I have left these under the twitter account at the risk of annoying my followers and others in twitter. In retrospect i should have thought a little more about the content of the message particularly but there you are. I am flying by the seat of my pants on this experiment and making it up as i go :-)

Below is the quick overview of some of the people i feel can help. These are generally classic media in Finland TV and Newspapers and people who tweet about social media who have a very high number of followers. If just one of these works then it was worth it. Sorry for those i may have annoyed!!

Again we wait and see what happens......

What is the value of a Facebook group?

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At this point in the blog I thought that I would start to evaluate the performance of some of the channels I am trying to utilise. In particular the Facebook groups that are in play here. First there is my Facebook group which i created for the purpose of enabling debate by people who did not wish to comment on the blog or whom wished to get information via Facebook about updates to the blog experiment rather than Twitter. Social Media on the visitors terms, not tied to the blog, RSS, email or Twitter. So how has this performed?
My Own Facebook Group
	Well as you can see my Facebook group has not been that succesful. This does not mean i will give up on it yet :-) There are only 2 members including myself Only content comes from me with the exception of 1 comment
Well what can the reasoning behind this be? Well how have I promoted the group? Firstly I promoted the group through my own Facebook profile. I have also added the information on to the blog where the main content related to the experiment is being held. I have also started very recently (1 minute ago) to publish twits specifically related to the Facebook group.
IF’s Facebook Group IF’s own group as below has a little over 5000 members. Concidently it was about 4800 before my little endeavor started a couple of days ago. Of course I have no way to verify what affect my actions had because I cannot see the historical trend data in any case there has been a moderate increase in numbers there recently.   This has been in the absence of any visible actions by IF on their Facebook group at least. Of course other media may have had an effect. IF are currently utilising television advertising in Finland. So what content is on IF's Group Now?
	Marko wants to get a reward for being the 5000nth member. Then my post and social media experiment.
	Kai is someone complaining about the wait times for customer service Sini is telling her customer satisfaction story of being rescued off the motorway
Interestingly this is all on the first page of the Facebook group mixed in with the usual company communication and PR articles which I won’t bother mention here.
Well what do these examples teach me about Facebook groups? People only find groups when they are actively looking for them. Facebook is not good at making it easy to find groups you may be interested in. Users need to know they exist or at least think they may exist e.g. in the case of a large company’s group. Secondly these people need to have a reason to want to join the group. Joining a group is a way of showing support but is generally passive and if you are not really that interested can potentially bung up your own Facebook home page. This in itself may hold you back from joining. As such the content has to be very interesting to you and you will probably want to have a vested interest in participating or at least following. In the case of small to medium size companies an investigation would almost certainly show that a high proportion of people who are member of a Facebook group either work for or have worked for/with the company in question. They may also be other stakeholders such as shareholders who have a vested interest in following what is happenning with the organisation. Other members are ones who wish to communicate with the company and generally want or expect something. They join the group to win something or because they want to actually place negative information about the company onto the group wall. In my opinion these are the only real group members or the ones that have real value. What is the benefit of a Facebook group to an Organisation? If you are a company therefore you want to get as many members as possible (sorry obviously) but why? Well this depends on the industry but based upon IF’s wall. Simply the organization should be trying to  show how great their customer service is and be showcasing their success stories. The main benefit of which is brand enhancement, allowing customers to get service via Social Media (if they want). If you wish people to be more active then there needs to be content that your stakeholders are interested in. This depends upon your brand and your market but in the Financials and Insurance segment perhaps content that Coca Cola would add to their Facebook group is not the type of content that your group members want. Currently IF have a competition running on their Facebook group to sing their “marketing jingle” and win 100 euro gift coupon. It would be nice to know how successful this has been for IF. Not something I would usually associate with the insurance industry. What are the benefits for Individuals to start groups? Coincidently: In this experiment I have also found a Facebook group (in Finnish sorry). The groups purpose is to try and get people to boycott IF Insurance. This group also has only two members. This group however at this point is not open so you cannot comment without joining which somehow defeats the object of the group. I guess this occurred as a result of yet another facebook update but indicates also that an individuals interest waivers over time and of course this is expected. An individual trying to draw attention to his or her cause will have a limit where they stop believing they can make a difference and give up. This is of course true also in this experiement. Let's see where my own limit is? In the case of a company the company will always have an interest in preserving their brand and presence in social media (unless it is just a fad?) and hence over time the group gains members and content even if the content is only provided by the company itself. Often once you join a group it is quite a rare thing to leave those groups so the overall trend is upwards. That is unless something external (like this experiment) has an affect on individuals desire to participate in the given group. If you consider the boycott  IF group and the performance of my own independent group then it seems clear to me that if you want to cause pain or influence a company then the best place to do it is on their own social media and try and garner support there. It is easy for a company to ignore an independent counter productive kind of group when it is not visible to their stakeholders and the group itself needs to be found by people who are looking for it. Even if this kind of group is found it seems to me that in all likelihood the group has already been discontinued and is not actively managed or promoted. As such to make this experiment more successful and to help show that we as consumers have power anyone who wishes to show support or finds what I am doing interesting please like my comments/posts on IF’s own Facebook Group.