There are TWO possible attitudes companies can have to social media
Last week I gave a presentation on the future of business to the top executive team of a large fast-moving consumer goods company at their quarterly offsite meeting.
One of the issues they were keen to hear about is the rise of social media and how they should respond.
I told them that there are essentially two possible attitudes a company can have to engaging with its customers in an open world.
One attitude is to EMBRACE the fact that customers now have a voice that the company – and others – can hear, and to do whatever possible to help its advocates to form communities and talk about its products. That doesn’t mean its executives aren’t concerned that things can go wrong in social media. But the belief is that fundamentally it is a GOOD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.
The other attitude is to HATE the fact that customers have a voice that can be widely heard. While the executives realize that their fans can communicate their love for their products, they are far more afraid that bad things will be said about them, merited or not, and they think they will have no recourse. The belief is that it is fundamentally a BAD thing that customers can be heard by the world at large.
I used one example for each of these attitudes.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola has long embraced and supported the voice of its customers. A great example was what is now its official Facebook page. Dusty Sorg wanted to express his love of Coke on Facebook, but couldn’t find an official page. So he started his own with the help of his friend Michael Jedrzejewski.. For some reason, despite the presence of hundreds of other fan-created Coca-Cola pages, it quickly grew to over a million users.
At that point Facebook, in the process of becoming corporate-friendly, decided it was time to enforce its policy that fan pages had to be run by the owners of the brands. It went to Coca-Cola and said that they could either shut the fan page down, or transfer ownership to the company.
Coca-Cola didn’t like either option. So it approached Dusty and Michael, and invited them to spend a few days at their Atlanta HQ to talk about the future of the fan page. The result: Dusty and Michael still run the page, and the Coca-Cola fan page is the top-ranked consumer brand on Facebook.
Nestlé
This recent story is a stand-out case of a company against consumers. In a nutshell, Greenpeace started a campaign against Nestlé for using palm oil from Indonesia which was produced by processes resulting in deforestation. As part of the campaign Greenpeace put up a YouTube video which spoofed KitKat ads and included a mangling of the logo to make it read ‘Killer’.
Nestlé asked YouTube to take the video down for intellectual property infringement, which YouTube did. Of course the video was still up on other video sharing sites, and went viral as a result of Nestlé’s action. (A modified version of the video with the correct logo has been allowed by YouTube, as below.)
While Nestlé was clearly in an unhappy situation, its response was the worst thing it could do, and the negative reaction was many, many times worse than if it had done nothing. Looking for a way to express their frustration, people became fans of Nestlé on Facebook so they could have a forum for their views.
In the fray, Nestlé’s representatives started getting a narky tone. (The company later apologized and took the personal responsible for these comments off the social media beat.)
Almost any company can get slammed by nay-sayers, as happened to Nestlé. The difference is in the response. Nestlé clearly hates the fact that people have an open, public forum to express their opinions – positive or negative – about the company. How they act reflects the company. Hopefully they are in the process of changing as an organization, which will be seen in how they change their external engagement.
So does your company embrace or hate the fact that everyone has a powerful voice? It’s a reality, so you’d better learn to embrace it.
