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As CEO of King of Shaves, I aim to build trust on twitter, not to desert it | Digital Dialogue

22 Jan 2013

CEO? Build trust on twitter, don’t desert it! (IMHO)

Following Lara O’ Reilly’s article in Marketing Week on whether or not CEO’s should tweet, here is my full response to her question.  I hope you find it relevant, whether you are a CEO, consumer or simply interested in the #socmed #digitaldialogue #wordofmouseworld!

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CEO?  Tweet or not?

Confidence is in deep hibernation.  And whilst it is, three key words reign: Honesty, trust and reputation.  Right now, the world is in short supply of these.  Are politicians honest?  Do we trust bankers?  What do we think of the reputations of companies using strategic tax avoidance?  All in all, it’s not pretty.  As a CEO, you are the public (or not so public, depending how you play it) face of the company.  With my company, where my surname is part of the brand, doubly so.  So, should I tweet as a CEO or not?  IMHO (twitter shorthand for In My Honest Opinion) of course I should.  My products speak for my company each and every day.  People buy them long term because they are honest products, they trust them, and their reputation.

If someone loves King of Shaves, and tweets me @KingofShaves to tell me, of course I should personally respond.  Yes, it may take time.  Yes, people may comment that it is a waste of my resource. But I strongly disagree.  Personal interaction, in  a world of caution, disbelief and mistrust is critical for long term brand health.  Equally, if someone doesn’t like our Azor razor (this product seems to provoke rather ‘Marmite’ (love/hate) reactions, then I should respond.  Ask them to DM (private message me).  Give them my email, and direct them to our UI/UX team (customers & products).  Ask to be cc’d in on the response.  And follow up.

Now, can you do this if you’re the embattled CEO of BP?  Tesco?  RBS?  Lloyds?  Well, I’d say, if you go about it in the right way, yes you can.  Does David Cameron have a twitter account?  Yes. Barack Obama? Yes.  Is it likely they’re personally tweeting?  Moot, but I’m sure that what goes out/is responded to is implicitly approved by them.  We live, right now, in a world of instant, urgent, immediacy.  You only needed to see how quickly the Tesco #horsegate issue exploded online, at about 10pm last week, to see what the effect of a publicity point (horse DNA in beef burgers) plus social amplification (jokes & more across popular social media networks, especially twitter & facebook) could have on the company.  Personally, I felt Tesco handled it well.  They’re pretty good on twitter, as are O2.  And O2’s CEO is on twitter.  I think his company has 20m+ customers.  So, if Ronan Dunne can be on twitter, why can’t you?

If however, you use twitter “stupidly, inappropriately or in a reactive manner” you’re going to get into big trouble.  Especially if you’re a CEO.  But, in my experience, most CEO’s are pretty grounded.  Paul Lindley, CEO & Founder of Ella’s Kitchen is on twitter.  Of course, Richard Branson is.  Tony Hsieh, the CEO of online wonderstore Zappo’s is.  Many are.

Simply put, we now live in a world of #DigitalDialogue NOT #BrandBroadcast.  Gone are the days where what companies, brands told consumers would be unquestioningly listened to.  Now, it’s what customers say about brand, companies that matters.  Kia, in their latest TV advertising campaign understand that.  Others don’t.  And, if you’re a CEO you should be fully embedded into a world of Digital Dialogue.  For, if you thought a week was a long time in crisis management, nowadays it’s less than a day to determine the outcome of an iCrisis.

#justsayin

 Will King

By: Category: Twitter

Join our Sub! The King needs YOUR help to shave the world better, forever! Plus, win a chance for 4 people to stay at Kingfisher, Grenada West Indies for a week, expenses paid!

19 Mar 2012

Good Afternoon!

Thanks for clicking through via my 12pm twitter announcement – I must say, this whole social media thing is really rather good, when you’re planning on launching something ‘at scale’ and you can get people involved pre-launch! Firstly, if you haven’t already, please sign up to our holding page for our ‘Club’ here (this is not the site itself – it’s just a place where we are collating email addresses, to add to our 250,000 we have for our conventional King of Shaves Direct e-commerce site.

“The King needs YOU!”

In the past, companies’ like ours would launch something like this following “focus groups”, “modelling” – insight from “transactional behavioural analysts”. And all that BS. However, the world moves fast these days – and I want to ensure that what we launch is simply “Prestige” – a slang term that young kids are currently using for stuff that is awesome, according to my son!

If you’re following @KingofShavesSUB I have a few requests for you – and of course, helping us out will mean we help you out – not just in terms of site UX (or user experience) but also with the opportunity to A) get a prize money can’t buy and B) integrate closer into how we go about things at King of Shaves.

Firstly, we’d LOVE you to comment and give insight into our proposed “Join our Sub” website – and where possible act on your insight pre-launch. Please would you click here and then select ‘Message for Will King’ which will find me directly. Use #JoinOurSub in the message body copy please. In the next few days, I’ll then be in touch with a secret URL which will allow you to interact with the v1.0 version of our site – and then email me your thoughts so I can pass them on to the development team. We intend to ensure the site really is extremely simple to use, so your feedback in advance (rather than us second guessing) is critical. Thank You.

Secondly, later this week we’ll be shooting a little “something” to launch our site with in the next few weeks. Just prior to our site going live, I’ll be giving YOU the chance to shoot your own version (don’t worry, you’ll need little more than a smartphone to do it), which we’ll upload onto our YouTube channel (it’s only 30s long) and to then be voted on. The best (ie most views) will then win a WEEK for 4 people, all expenses paid (including flights) to stay at KINGFISHER, my villa in Grenada, West Indies later this year! There are a few t’s and c’s around this (mainly to do with availability) – but I will handle this directly in due course. Live like a King, in the Sun – for a week – Yay!

Finally, I’d really like to get a little bit of a buzz going around the launch of our ‘Sub’ in advance – so, if you are able to spread the word of mouse when possible out to your friends, and family, I’d appreciate that. We’re simply aiming to put the “simple” & “save” back into “shaving” so we can make life a little bit easier for you in these tough times. As you’ll know, we don’t have multi-million pound brand ambassadors on our books (we are delighted to be supporting Olympic sprint hopeful, James Ellington though) so the more help we can get from the “King’s Doms” (fans) the better! It’ be great to top 1,000 followers pre-launch!

I look forward to your email hitting my inbox! Thanks for “joining our sub” – be in touch soon!

Will King

PS – please remember to use #JoinOurSub in the body copy – thanks!

By: Category: "Shave & Save", King of Shaves, Twitter Tags: ,

King of Shaves At The Forefront of Smarketing & Product Innovation with King’s Speech, iPhone App & Azor 5 & SuperGels! What a Week – God Shave The King!

4 Mar 2011

It’s been an awesome week for King of Shaves this week.

On Sunday, we uploaded our parody of The King’s Speech onto YouTube, which has gone down a storm world-wide, becoming the 4th most ret-weeted/shared link on Sunday night in the USA, according to zocial.tv, and which now has over 6,000+ views and has been written up by a number of influential blog sites as ‘The’ way to do social media ‘smarketing‘ as I call it.

2375-iPhone_with_KOS_App_v1-thumb-292x571-2374.jpgOn Monday, less than 24 hours later – and in advance of Steve Jobs’ debuting Apples new iPad2, I launched our new King of Shaves iPhone app to the 150+ audience at smartaLIVE – a group of upcoming entrepreneurs, knowledge catalysts and forward thinkers. It’s a very KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) free app, that allows you to 1) Get a free King of Shaves Azor 4 XP razor, 2) Order our Azor Endurium cartridges at a significant discount to the UK RRP, and get them delivered to your door (over £30 can be saved when compared to ordering the equivalent number of Gillette ProGlide cartridges) and 3) It connects you into our Kingdom of Social Media, via links to our Facebook fanpage, our YouTube twitter account and my Twitter feed. It’s already picking up very nice reviews indeed!

2377-photosoft-thumb-248x186-2376.jpgToday, our new Azor 5 debuted in-store in Tesco (2 weeks early – they are very quick off the mark) along with our latest in shaving software, the SuperGel – more details on this coming soon. All in all, a most excellent week – despite Gillette spending squillions on ‘tugging and pulling’ people towards the hyper-expensive Fusion ProGlide, our sales are standing up well, and have grown over the past few weeks.

I’m off for a few days R&R next week, back on the UK Shave Grid w/c 14 March, but will be ‘tweetdecking’ off a ‘yacht deck’ next week, as I continue to plan out the continuing globalisation of King of Shaves.

Big respect to our partners in the USA too, Spectrum Brands (Remington) – they’ve had some most excellent news this week with regard to our King of Shaves launch there…

By: Category: King of Shaves, King of Shaves #socmed, King of Shaves Azor 5, King of Shaves Software, The King of Shaves Company Ltd., The King's Speech, Twitter Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

King of Shaves | Important Announcement | 6pm UTC Sunday 27 February 2011 | Digital Dialogue

25 Feb 2011

I will announce it on twitter

By: Category: King of Shaves, King of Shaves #socmed, Twitter

King of Shaves. Brand Royalty?

16 Feb 2011

Earlier today, I somewhat cryptically sent tweets along the lines of 15.15 16/2/11 – One small step for #shaving. One huge leap for #ShavingKind. Along with references to #endgame & #SunTzu. For those of you who follow my somewhat random tweets, you’ll have worked out, down the line, there’s a method in my apparent madness.

Apart from the two days, many years ago now, when A) I shaved with oil and “it worked” and B) changed the name of Sunrise to King of Shaves, today was absolutely the most important day in King of Shaves history.

Why? I’ll hear you clamour. What happened? Well, only one other person was there to record what happened, he knows who he is, and in his inimitable way, knows how to react to my “passionate enthusiasm”. But, he also knows that what he saw today, means that – if we get it right – King of Shaves has the brightest, most fabulous future ahead of it.

It was the ‘moment’ when, perhaps Steve Jobs said to someone “Look, we’ve been making pastel coloured computers for designers for too long now – Apple’s a great, zag brand – how about we mix music up with mobile phones on a razor & blade business model and see what happens…?”

Um, Apple’s now the USA’s most valuable business (or #2).

It was the ‘moment’ when, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg said to himself “Look, we’re using this TheFacebook website to rate female hotness. But, how about we make it something bigger than that, and connect people globally…?” 500m users and a valuation of US$50Bn later, well – that KISS statement makes sense.

Facebook has the highest valuation of any pure dotcom business ever.

Was my ‘moment’ quite as big as these. To be frank, no! But, in its way – in its ramifications for hundreds of millions of men and women world-wide, absolutely, YES! Why? Well, you’ll have to wait and see – hence the title of this blog – King of Shaves. Brand Royalty? But, for those of you who’ve heard me talk, or met me – you’ll know a number of things:

- Product is King.

- KISS.

- I’m passionate & persistent.

- As being CEO of King of Shaves is like playing an addictive game on the PS3or XBox – Call of Duty – Assassins Creed – well, it’s addictive and fun, and well – you know – I want to win it.

- Finally I’ve got the consumer both in my heart, and in my mind. I want to shave people closer, for longer, for less – on a global basis – and change the face of shaving (from essentially a monopoly – sorry – duopoly) – for better, forever.

Will I, will we succeed? As I’ve blogged before, “Where there’s a Will (and team) there’s a Way!”

15.15.16.2.11 I will remember those digits for the rest of my life.

Don’t just shave. King of Shaves!

By: Category: King of Shaves, King of Shaves #socmed, Twitter Tags: ,
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