The online campaign is about getting people talking
Companies are just not used to the idea of not controlling the message, and in a soon to be released Gartner report, that point is hitting home, and hitting hard. Welcome to the world of social networking, half of you are going to fail.
The reasons for failure on this one are going to be because the company did not really engage. There are people who will love the product or service, and there are people who are going to hate the product or service. Rather than finding out why there was hatred, the company will either blow them off, not engage, or do some kind of DMCA take down for one reason or another. I have sat in more than one meeting with more than one company over the years where the first choice of management was to issue the DMCA take down for information that was clearly protected, all in order to maintain the brand.
The problem is that with the internet the brand really isn’t the companies anymore. Sure the company can restrict the use of their logo, they can try to control the message, they can drown out bad news with a fleet of bloggers with higher page ranks that will drown out the bad news, they can take down proprietary information, they can fire people who are blogging about the company negatively if they are employees, there are a ton of things they can do to try to control the message. But that is not working on guiding the message, that is taking a cannon to swat a fly. That is drowning out the negative in favor of the positive; it does not engage the differences or the problems with the product or service.
The real answer, and this is where social media really works is when the company engages, the problem is that this is hard, it is person hour intensive, it requires that people understand the company so well that they can take on just about any debate intelligently. The social media campaign, even if it is flogging ads on Facebook has to have a component to them where people can engage in the conversation. This is the kind of conversation that customers would like to see, and that what the starbucks sucks site is all about. As a way to keep tabs on the message, management at starbucks could not have a better source of information.
Starbucks sucks, or I hate starbucks is a company’s golden ideal, one place, one key place where people can talk about how horrible their starbucks experience is. What a better way to engage customers, corporate readers have one place to go, and can track the conversation through the web based on the information on this site. This is where the company can realistically find out what is happening, what people are thinking, and then work out ways to fix them. When it comes to a site like this, the value to starbucks and to the customers can not be understated. The interesting part is when management engages on the issues, and then work on the social media campaign talking about the issues that customers and workers bring up on the site.
So while you are planning your social media campaign, working out the ads, working out on the message, and spending a lot of money to make something like this look and feel great. The realistic problem is that without working out a way to engage both the good and the bad, any social media campaign that the company is going to build is doomed to failure. Many of these failures, probably most will simply fade out as a “bad way to spend money”, realistically though, if you can work out how to address the good and the bad, the happy and unhappy customer then the campaign does not have to fail. This also means that the company learns that they do not control the message; they can merely guide the message, and work out a way to engage the unhappy customer to make them a happy one. Of course not all customers will be happy, but sometimes being smart pays off.
Tags: social media, engage, customers, money, time, advertising, doom, failure, news
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