Author Archives:

Britain’s Got Talent – The Masterful Use OR Abuse Of Social Media?

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

Around comes February again and with it the latest dose of reality television – in this case it’s Britain’s Got Talent 2012. These shows have now become so regular that you can pretty much add them to your calendar at the beginning of the year. They are extraordinarily successful at bringing in the viewers and humanising the struggle that individual acts have to make it & become known in their respective industries (lets face it, it’s mostly the music industry!).

So this year the makers of Britain’s Got Tallent have decided to up their social media participation by giving one space on the live shows to youtube entrants. This involved a live stream on youtube last Monday evening to showcase 24 entries that were uploaded to youtube.

Get this – Over the following week each of the contestants have to get as many votes on their video as possible and the one with the most votes by the end gets a slot on the live shows – simple!

So is this a masterstroke by the BGT producers or is it exploiting 24 young & talented artists for the TV show’s gain? One could argue that the whole show does this! All of these 24 acts have to share the BGT youtube page all over their twitter & facebook pages & plead with their friends & family to do the same & get as many votes as possible so that they stand a chance of getting in front of Simon Cowell and the other judges. This means that before the show even airs that the website & youtube channel will have had tens of thousands of facebook shares, tweets and hits which creates a certain amount of buzz to get the viewers to turn on for the 1st show.

The reason this concept is so great is because the content for the show is organically created by the people themselves. Simon Cowell has truly mastered this to make the most watched TV shows consistently over the last decade. This is a step further to help the show dominate word of mouth on the social networks with the viral aspect being driven for free by the 24 acts themselves. If each act has say 200 facebook friends that are close enough to the act to share the link on facebook & each of those friends has an average of 200 friends……then in just 1 step the Britain’s Got Talent link has been exposed to 9.6 MILLION people. Remember that this show hasn’t even aired yet!

So what do you think? Masterful use of social media OR abuse of the willingness of acts to do whatever it takes to get onto the show?

I am most definitely in the “masterful use” camp. Remember that all of these acts are currently searching for their big break so they have been done a huge favor by BGT just by being selected to be in the final 24 youtube uploads. All of the buzz created within their personal networks will count for something and should benefit them for some time to come.

So why have I blogged about this? As it turns out my best friend is one of the aforementioned 24 acts!! His name is John D’ambrosio and he’s a great guy who deserves to be (at least as much as all of the others) on the show & take his chance with the viewing public. Please click here to go to the youtube channel and find his video called “John D’ambrosio – With Or Without You” and just login to youtube & click vote. You can vote up to 5 times per 24 hours so if your keen then please help further by coming back tomorrow & doing the same.

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on this type of leveraging competitions to create social buzz? Do you have any other examples of this working well or maybe not so well. Please share in the comments.

You May Hate The Weather But We Don’t!

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

My Facebook & Twitter feeds are full of people moaning about the cold & snow.

People order more stuff online when the weather is rubbish, not only do they order stuff online more they also eat more! This makes ordering food online literally the perfect industry to be in at this time of the year.

So whilst everyone else is probably hoping for the cold snap to end or the sun to come out I’m sat in our office every day praying for the coldest winter since records began.

Sorry folks, I’m just not with you on this one :-D

Blogging – One Year On

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

Its coming up towards 1 year since I started this blog mainly as a personal diary interspersed with my musings on various topics. Since the first post I’ve churned out 25 posts at irregular intervals with a mix of video blogging, advice, and diary format content.

Over the last 11 months the blog has received a fairly modest 4000 unique visits with the most popular page understandably being this one explaining the E-resistible story.

The next most popular post which sends a steady stream of google traffic is the one on how to combat credit card fraud; I’m glad that I started the blog just for writing this post. Clearly there are many other merchants  out there with small ecommerce websites suffering from fraudsters and I’d like to think that my post will have helped them to deal with the issue.

Aside from that this post seems to gain interest from people looking to find out how much Pizza Hut pays per hour!

So blogging is fun, its nice to have somewhere to put your thoughts. I wouldn’t say I was particularly good at it but I know friends & colleagues like to read & catch up on what I/we’re up to.

So thanks for reading :-)

My Encounter With Wagner From X Factor!

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

Some of you know that my best friend John D’ambrosio made it through to Bootcamp for X Factor 2010. This is backstage at the 1st audition, a man came over and sat next to me asking if he could sing for us!

Now there were a fair few crazy people who the producers had clearly put through to the live auditions for entertainment purposes. I thought that this guy was one of them. It was very awkward and I didn’t know what to do.

You can see me trying my hardest not to laugh out loud, he’s now on the live shows. Amazing!

Vote Wagner.

The Importance Of Communication

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply


Today as I work I’ve got the ongoing rescue of the miners in Chile on BBC News in the background. It’s pretty captivating and an amazing good news story. I do feel sorry for the miners though, as if being trapped underground for 69 days wasn’t enough they have to be put into the most claustrophobic cage to be winched 700 metres through a narrow bore hole to the surface. Seriously, I’ve seen coffins with more space inside!

One of the things the rescuers are worried about is the risk of someone having a panic attack inside the cage, so far things are going smoothly although if the cage gets stuck inside the tunnel for a long period of time I think that this situation may change. What the rescue team have done to cater for this eventuality is give each miner a headset so they are in constant communication with the team at the surface. This will enable the team to reassure the miner that things are being taken care of and inform them of the likely wait time & reason for the delay.

Just having that line of communication open could prevent huge levels of stress being placed on the minor which may bring on a heart attack or other serious condition. For many people the thought of being stuck in the lift of a sky scraper is their idea of absolute hell and you can imagine having no communication how the awful feelings would be compounded.

This translates into much less dramatic situations too like the ones we deal with every day at E-resistible. Being the middle man between customers & takeaway restaurants isn’t always the easiest position to be in because we can often be held responsible for something that is out of our control. If a customers food is late arriving we aren’t risking a panic attack however we can get an equally emotional response in the form of anger and frustration that the service a customer was expecting hasn’t been delivered on time. One of the things that we try to do is always keep the customer as informed as possible, often if we are giving restaurants a great deal of orders we can anticipate that delivery times will become longer than the restaurant are estimating. A quick email or telephone call from us to the customer to reassure them that the delivery is still on its way but that it may be slightly longer than expected is nearly always met with gratitude and approval from the customer. By being pro-active and keeping an open line of communication between ourselves, the customer, and the restaurant we can avoid issues further down the line.

When things go wrong it is also very important that we react swiftly to correct them, we know that other websites simply tell the customer to contact the restaurant if they have an issue. We have found that by taking ownership for any issues and working to resolve them on behalf of the customer we are reducing their stress levels and managing the situation to ensure the best outcome. This usually ends up with a happy customer that we will retain to place future orders, sure our customer service costs are higher but we thing thats a price worth paying.

Its not a problem when things go wrong, in our business its an inevitability and we have to plan strategies to deal with all situations. It is how you react that matters and communication is the number 1 priority. If you can get that right many issues are avoided altogether and problems are solved faster and with greater customer satisfaction.

No Time To Blog :-(

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

Really sorry to those people who have been checking back to this blog. The honest answer is I really haven’t had any spare time in the day to blog (poor excuse I know). I’ve planned loads of posts but they just never get written because too many other things have to take priority.

So in short:

LEJOG went very well, we had an amazing 2 weeks and raised over £1500 for cancer research

On the back of the bike fitness I ran the Bristol half marathon in a time of 1h 49.

I’ve moved into a new house with my girlfriend.

E-resistible is progressing very well with some large strides made operationally recently.

So thats the basics folks, I’ll try to put some more flesh on the bones via more posts but no promises. Thanks for checking back.

Steve

My University Is Officially Good!

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

This is just an unashamed bragging post. Yesterday the Guardian released its university league tables for 2011 and it turns out that my degree is now officially the number 1 in the country for Business & Management.

The University of Warwick is now ranked as the number 3 in the UK behind only Oxford & Cambridge.

If only I wanted a job this would be handy!

Its Nice To Be Nice

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
Reply

Hi all, first I need to apologise for the lack of posts recently, we’ve been super busy on the site signing up record numbers of restaurants throughout May & June so everyone has been pitching in to get these online. With the cycling training too I’ve had little time for blogging but I’ll make a promise to post at least once every 2 weeks for the next few months.

*****The contents of this post has been removed on reflection, the gist of it is summed up in the last paragraph below*****

Its nice to be able to help someone in a situation like this and I’m a great believer in Karma so if you take the stance of wanting to help people where you can then quite often it will pay you back many times over in ways that you least expect.