Social media networks are a silent yet one of the most powerful, not to mention deafening, platforms the world has ever seen.
It has given everyone in the world the freedom of speech, in the most literal sense, along with the ability to be heard and make an impact amongst billions of others.
While using social media networks is probably one of the easiest ways to engage with your customers and augment your brand’s presence, it is also one of the trickiest tools to use. Where one social media post can go viral and give you the much needed exposure within seconds, the same post can backfire and ruin years of goodwill and branding.
There is no exact science for using social media networks; however, there are definitely some ways to ensure that you do not use it incorrectly.
The first thing you need to understand, as a marketer, is that social media networks belong to the consumers. No matter how hard you try and no matter how many resources you put to your marketing strategy, in the end, it’s all about how the viewers perceive it.
This is the case with traditional marketing too; but with social media marketing, you have less time to act and the need to hop on to an ongoing frenzy is too tempting. Therefore, in a hurry, you often fail to realize how easily your marketing campaign can be hijacked and/or backfired completely.
Take a look at some of McDonald’s Twitter campaigns. The international fast food chain is undeniably one of the most popular and at the same time, the most controversial brand to date. While there is a plethora of diehard McDonald’s fans, there is an equally huge amount of scandals linked to it. Be it for the use of harmful ingredients or bugs infested food, McDonalds have been in the news for the wrong reasons more often than they would like to admit.
So what happens when a brand such as McDonalds, who is continuously under fire, starts a social media campaign? The marketing campaign gets hijacked.
While McDonalds intended its #McDStories and #RonaldMcDonald hashtags to allow people to talk about how awesome the brand is, people hijacked the same hashtags to tell horrible stories related to the fast food chain. From getting food poisoning to using inappropriate ingredients, the world broke the internet with literally everything they could find against McDonalds. The stories were already out there, but what McDonalds did was provide each and every person online, a perfect outlet to get their story heard.
An easy way to rectify such a situation is to have a backup plan ready. If you know you are going to receive more than your fair share of negative responses, be prepared for it. Think of ways to avoid having your campaign hijacked, treat the reviews as constructive criticism and offer consumers some sort of compensation.
Moving on, brands need to realize that the best thing about social networks is the two-way communication that it proudly boasts of. The main aim of networking is engagement. Having a ton of followers at your networks is good, but it’s really useless if the level of engagement is low or worse, non-existent.
The success of social media networks is not measured by the “number of Likes” but instead by how often your followers engage with you and how successfully you respond back to them.
You need to realize that a human element is compulsory even in the online world. You cannot just set a social media management tool to send out tweets and picture updates for you and automate replies for the people who take the time out to talk to you.
As a brand, no matter how big you are, you not only need to reply to everyone personally but also send out thank you notes every now and then. Again, if you fail to do so, you will not only alienate your consumers by ignoring them but also, allow haters to take over your campaigns and turn it against you.
A good example of the same problem is the recent Coca Cola’s #MakeItHappy campaign. What Coke did was create a campaign to demote negative messages that so often grace the internet. The brand created hashtag #MakeItHappy and automated it to turn negative tweets into positive, cutesy cartoon pictures and re-tweet them. While the idea was excellent, Coca Cola failed to include a human element to it.
Since it was a bot operating the campaign at the backend, someone hijacked it and made it tweet quotes from Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. Within hours, Coca Cola’s CSR campaign turned into a hate campaign and the brand had to suspend it immediately.
Not only are brands expected to engage with their audience on a personal level, but they are also required to keep their tone positive in light of negative criticism. With the introduction of these networks, the PR responsibility of brand falls squarely on the shoulders of the social media team.
Any amount of effort and resources put into advertisements will all be rendered moot if your tone at social media networks is anything less than polite. Traditionally, you could get away with compensating or even ignoring a disgruntled customer quietly but with online marketing, every bad review and the smallest of the response to it is not only documented but it is in plain sight for the world to see.
The biggest mistake that brands make while handling negative criticism is that they ignore and delete negative comments or worse, reply in kind. One of the leading multinational brands, Nestle, made the same mistake a few years ago when it was criticized for using Palm Oil.
Not only did Nestle threatened to delete any comments with profile pictures of their altered logo but continued to be rude and offensive throughout the day to anyone and everyone who commented on their Facebook wall. Within a matter of hours, the comments went viral and they were documented at every news outlet, only to further damage the reputation and goodwill of the brand.
On the same note, we have some of our local companies like Ufone and K-Electric, which in spite of all the issues are available on media networks almost throughout the day. Whatever the problem may it be, these brands not only apologize to the unhappy customer, but provide them with solutions, even if not immediate ones.
How effective their solutions are or how hollow their apologies are, is a different matter altogether. What is noteworthy here is that they almost always reply instantly and stay polite no matter how rude the consumer is. This might not result in a 100% happy customer 24/7 but it sure does make him a loyal one.
But this has not always been the case for our local companies. Until a few years ago, Pakistani companies, new to the social media scene, were making rookie mistakes too. There was a time when Jazz (Mobilink) posted a photo of Asma Jahangir instead of Bilquis Edhi in its post; a time when Ufone failed to inform its customers of an impending service breakdown and then, further exacerbated the situation by restricting comments on its Facebook wall; and lastly, the time when Qubee Pakistan copied, word to word, statuses of Pringles at its Facebook page.
Each and every blunder was not only caught within minutes of posting but was documented and made viral by people, before brands could even realize what had gone wrong.
With time, our local companies have learnt and have adopted the social media fad with a more strategic approach. For example, only recently has K-Electric launched a Complaint Ticket Generation system for consumers to file complaints via social media networks, a service previously available only through SMS, calls and emails. With more and more Pakistanis finding social media networks a convenient tool, this service by the utility giant could not have been introduced at a better time.
Yet another easy trap to fall into, at social media networks, is hopping onto ongoing trends. While it is tempting to take advantage of trending topics and hashtags, doing so blindly, can result in a backlash.
How a brand connects itself to a trending topic and uses it to its advantage is an art in itself. Take for example, the much hyped #TheDress black and blue or white and gold debate. As the topic continued to break the internet and became part of heated discussions globally, clothing stores stocking the dress itself used the hashtag to bump up their sales.
Similarly, the Salvation Army took the same hashtag to very creatively, not to mention successfully, promote its own, might I add completely unrelated, message against domestic violence and abuse.
On the other hand, a pizza brand DiGiorna Pizza adopted hashtag #WhyIStayed to promote its own products. What they unfortunately failed to realize was that the particular hashtag was created to allow the domestic abuse survivors to share their stories of oppression. The brand quickly rectified and apologized for their mistake but not before their reputation took a significant hit.
Social media networks are like a double-edged sword with extreme results. If you know how to make things work for you, the advantages are limitless and not to mention, affordable. However, if you get caught up in the social frenzy, without a proper strategy in place, the results can be equally catastrophic. Where it takes decades to build a brand name offline, it takes seconds to shatter the reputation online.
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