As more and more companies start to integrate social media into their every day business operations, it’s only too understandable that some are doing it better than others. This can mean the way in which companies interact with their customers and involve them in the brand’s growth and also the way in which they respond to situations. We’ve picked three mini case studies on companies going about their social media ventures in very different ways to each other.
The Good- Starbucks
MyStarbucksIdea was created in order to get people to suggest ideas for the giant coffee corporation. The site allows people to post ideas, read other people’s ideas and get involved in a global conversation. Rather like Facebook’s ‘Like’ button with the thumbs up logo, MyStabucksIdea lets people choose whether they like the idea or not and then it displays the amount of points that idea gets. A recent idea was for introducing a coconut drink for the summer, which received 5,230 ‘thumbs up’. This couldn’t be a more powerful and shiny example of social media. So what are they doing right?
Letting the customers power the venture just with their voices? Check
Interacting with their customers and understanding what they really want? Check
Facilitating a platform whereby their customers can communicate with each other and bring them closer together? Check
Constantly introducing new ideas and products? Check
Building a community of Starbucks aficionados? Check
Having a focus on corporate social responsibility? Check
Starbucks’ twitter account is also a hive of activity continuing the general chitchat and idea focused flow of the MystarbucksIdea. And the best part of it all is how they’ve created a mass community of happy customers by simply involving them and letting them come up with the ideas.
The Bad-Vodafone
Vodafone experienced a bit of a hiccup earlier in the year, where one of their employees posted a homophobic tweet on their twitter account. Suffice to say it didn’t’ go down well and the phone network was inundated with posts from very unhappy, offended customers. At first it looked like it must have been a hacker, but shockingly enough it was actually a Vodafone worker, someone representing the company.
At this point senior management at Vodafone must have realised it was a bad situation to be in and the only thing they could do was respond appropriately. In all credit to them, they did. They posted an apology and said that it was a breach of rules by staff and it was being looked into internally. But unfortunately, the damage had been done.
Now this could be looked at in one or two ways. One: Vodafone were truly unlucky and that an employee had a personal vendetta against the company and acted out in a despicable manner. Or two: there was a serious lack of core values and customer centricity running through the company from upper management down.
But this seems quite an incredulous reason to accept. Perhaps the worker thought it would be funny and never took into account the serious repercussions and their probably doomed employment at Vodafone. Either way it is a good example of how crucial it is that all employees follow and operate under the same ethos and central mission, especially those that have the responsibility of managing the company’s twitter or blog.
Yes, Vodafone is a large company but it demonstrates how quickly news and comments travel and the bad ones always spread the quickest. So when you gain more followers and subscribers, which you will, be absolutely clear with all your employees what your core values are and how they should be adhered to. For a company as successful as Vodafone to let something like this happen has only marred their reputation. This incident also demonstrates the power of social media.
The Socially Inept-Nestlé
Now we’ve picked this as the crème de la crème of social media disasters. But some might view the Vodafone incident as worse, and we certainly ummed and erred over it. We’ve chosen the Nestlé vs. Greenpeace case as an example of what can happen if you choose to ignore something and try to cover it up. Big no-no.
Greenpeace made a video showing an office worker munching into a KitKat in the shape of orang-utan chocolate covered fingers. When he bites into it blood oozes out onto his keyboard and all over his chin, to the horror of his colleagues. At the end of the video the famous red and white logo is shown but instead of KitKat it says Killer and with the tag line ‘give the orang-utan a break’. Nestlé uses palm oil from Indonesian rainforests, where they have to clear vast areas and destroy the endangered orang-utan’s habitat in the process.
The video quickly went viral and the environmental organization made a microsite for the campaign. It was posted on YouTube but Nestlé swiftly took it down. Video platform Vimeo then quickly got its hands on it and that was it. Nestlé had exposed itself for what it really is and had completely ignored the strength of social media, especially powerful viral video campaigns like this one.
The video had been seen by less than 1,000 people when Nestlé took it down, giving Greenpeace the extra ammunition to re-post it onto Vimeo, posting along with it on twitter the confectionary giant’s suppression of the video. Many people said that they probably wouldn’t have heard of the video had Nestlé not taken the video down.
What essentially materialized was a massive social media attack, which will now be logged as a top case of social media crisis management. And not to mention the damage it has done to Nestlé. But it certainly worked as Nestlé have now said they will start to use sustainable palm oil by 2015.
The campaign was backed by Greenpeace’s 440,000 fans on Facebook and 37,000 twitter followers. They even used Google ads to promote the campaign.
Nestlé’s fundamental error was first of all removing the video and then trying to cover it up. They received a massive increase in Facebook fans all defaming the company on its wall posts and then bizarrely enough reacted to them rudely, where they had to eventually apologise for being rude. It was a total disaster.
The point is that brands and companies shouldn’t turn their backs on a conversation that is being said about them. Nestlé suffered a PR nightmare and lacked serious understanding of what viral means, how social media will surge on no matter what, and then to top things off responded in a sarcastic and arrogant way.
Did they not realise how crippling the video alone was to the brand? If they’d stood up and accepted the situation immediately and operated in a polite manner it would have been infinitely better for them. It also supports the rise of corporate social responsibility and how important it is for companies to think about, particularly if your business produces food.
But make your own mind up which one you think is potentially worse for a brand.
We’re pretty sure that Nestlé made the biggest blunder here.
