Dear clients. We know that you’re hearing all about Twitter and it sounds very exciting. It’s great. And you want to get involved. Which can also be great. As long as you think carefully about why you’re using it, how you’re using it, as long as you actively engage in the conversation and don’t use it as a broadcast medium, as long as you dedicate real human resource to it, as long as you’re nice, as long as you think carefully about the implications of partaking in the social space. As long as you understand that you don’t control the conversation. The crowd does.
And as did Starbucks.
They launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign which included posters in six US cities, and attempted to “harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters … and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter” – with the contest rules stating that participants should use predetermined hashtags.
Mr. Bruzzo said Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. “It’s the difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”
Yes. Except that you can’t control what people are going to say about your brand. When you encourage a conversation, you have to be prepared for the fact that you might not like what the other party has to say.
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s documentary about Starbucks’ unfair labour practices debuted the same day as their Twitter campaign. Which he then hijacked, to spread the word about Starbucks’ treatment of its workers.
He encouraged people to “tell Starbucks to stop screwing workers” by taking pictures of themselves holding signs criticising the company’s labour practices, and then tweeting them using the “official’ campaign hashtags. Within hours, dozens of people had taken up the cause – getting the anti-Starbucks video over 30,000 views, a front page mention on Digg, and 10,000 signatures for a petition to urge CEO Howard Schultz to allow workers to unionise. Admittedly not as public nor as widespread a FAIL as Skittles, but nevertheless not great news for Starbucks.
Starbucks forgot – or chose to ignore – the fact that how a company or organisation behaves says just as much about the brand as its marketing activity. Everything communicates. They forgot that social tools are democratic. Designating the hashtags as ‘official’ doesn’t give you ownership of them, and you can’t stop people using them how they please. Social tools give people a voice to have their say – you can’t just issue a set of instructions and expect to control how users behave. It’s not a campaign – it’s a conversation. And you don’t control it.
I’ve joked about the sadly all-too-common ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief – the brief which asks you to consider how the brand should be using social media- ‘e.g. Twitter’. 3 years ago this would have been the ‘e.g. SecondLife’ brief. 2 years ago the ‘e.g. Myspace’ brief. Last year the ‘e.g. Facebook’ brief. This year it’s the ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief. It seems Starbucks got so excited about the idea of using Twitter that they failed to consider that it might not just be fans who would want to join in.
Did Starbucks take the feedback on board and respond to users – either to defend their labour practices, or acknowledge the criticism and explain how they planned to improve things? No. They were caught with their pants down and closed the competition.
Social spaces are transparent and democratic. So not a good space to play in if your organisation is neither of these things.
[ via boing boing ]
A-frickin’-men
The dinosaurs that are steering these corporate ships will soon realize that the “we control everything so tough shit” mentality is no longer a meal ticket with the way people are consuming their media.
How they react (if indeed they do try to change) may well determine how their company’s future unfolds.
Great great post.
The End.
It’ll be interesting to see which brands can truly ‘make a go’ of using social media in the longer term.
It seems to me that a lot of the appeal of these networks for the people who use them is the fact that they are beyond corporate control. So attempts by brands to infiltrate them are always going to be in danger of backlash. And how many organisations are even close to being truly ‘transparent and democratic’?
I think the problem occurs when the greed of large organisations gets in the way of the real purpose of communications. Don’t get involved with something unless it is going to create real value for people.
Because of its spreadiability the power of social media is appealing to those organisations who want to take on its power for their advantage. But this is a not a business tool it is a conversation tool!
If it does not serve members as a useful tool its ability to spread in the wrong way can be devastating for a company.
I suppose the above cases are two great examples to highlight the fact that ‘harnessing social media’ as you mention is clearly an almost impossible task. It’s an attempt to ‘harness people’s opinions’ in a space where opinions have a truly free reign – impossible!