How Kitchen Aid fared through its social media blunder

During a US presidential debate in October 2012, President Obama mentioned his late grandmother who passed away just before being elected president. In response, a member of the Kitchen Aid social media team posted the following tweet from the brand’s twitter account instead of their personal account.

The tweet was quickly removed but not before the uproar that ensued on twitter with many swearing off the brand for life and some even calling the company racist.

The head of the Kitchen Aid team quickly tweeted an apology, apologizing to Obama, his family and to their customers. She even went further and tweeted to journalists and websites to ask for an opportunity to tell her side of the story. She addressed the situation and the error of her team member. She acknowledged the tweet was tasteless and in no way represented the values of the brand and that this team member would no longer be tweeting for them. She apologized and took full responsibility for the team member as the team’s leader.

Her response was noteworthy of what to do in a social media crisis.

I don’t know if I would have deleted the tweet. In order to keep complete transparency, I would have left it up. Also, people seeing the apology tweet but not the tweet/reason for the apology leaves people trying to find someone who saved it and thus the conversation going.  Her apology tweet should have included the hashtag used on the first tweet.

Another lesson learned is to ensure team members use different applications, one for the company and one for personal. This is less convenient for the team members but would alleviate this mistake from happening again. 

In addition, this tweet was immature and tasteless and probably would not have been well received even if this team member sent it from their personal account. As a representative of a brand there should be guidelines in place to not allow users to tweet things that could potentially look bad on a brand. These guidelines should not just cover when an employee is at work or when tweeting on behalf of their company. 

The public could have linked this person’s personal views to the view of the brand which is something employer and employees should factor. I feel that employers should stress to their teams that what they post on their personal networks should be things that could also be posted on their brand pages and if it’s not appropriate on their brands pages than it’s not appropriate on their personal pages. 

Gear up for measurement

There are a number of measurement tools offered today. Some measure specific social web platforms while others measure analytics from a number of social applications.  Whether your budget is big or small there are free, low and high cost tools available. The key is to choose a tool that is right for your business and program/campaign and not necessarily the tool that is the most popular or the one that everyone is using.

When researching what is already being said about your company or brand or researching what social platforms your target audience is on, it may be worthwhile to start with a free tool. The outcome of your research may determine which analytic tool would be best to invest in. As your social web presence increases it may be worthwhile to invest in a program than can provide more insightful and accurate measurement data to better determine the success of your strategy or campaign.

The following are three free measurement tools that can provide value to measuring your social web program:

Hootsuite offers a web-based dashboard that allows companies to execute multiple campaigns across multiple social networks and provides custom reporting of analytics for each campaign. This tool helps companies manage all their social networks from one platform and provides real time view of campaign results.

socialmention allows you to create alerts muck like Google alerts that can be emailed to you daily letting you know when your relevant search terms have been mentioned in the social space. It aggregates user generated content into a single stream. 

Klout measures influence across multiple social networks. It allows you to know how you impact the people connected to you. Klout provides a score, a representation of your overall social media influence and can tell you how and what caused an increase in your score. Klout can also tell you what topics resulted in an increase of engagement.

Collective Intellect is a paid analytic tool not discussed in class. It not only provides number of mentions but insights into how to effectively listen, act and engage with your audience. They use a random sample of the social media data to expose relevant themes, terms, sentiments and influencers driving conversations.

These tools provide value in measuring the success of your social web program by tracking mentions, sentiment and follower growth and how you are influencing the influencers. They are also valuable in providing insight into what your competitors may be doing and what parts of their campaign are resonating with your audience. Lastly, they provide a real-time look at what parts of your campaign are resonating or not which can allow you to change the course of your campaign throughout in order to make it more successful.

How does your social web program measure up?

Measuring activity of your social web program is one of the most important parts of a social web strategy.

Your program can be measured by the Actions taken by your audience. This concept refers to the business results of your online efforts. Have your efforts resulted in a raise in revenue, subscribers, funds raised, items sold or purchase intent. It can also include invitations to participate in speaking engagements and media interviews.

Another measurement could be the overall sentiment or tonality of comments and posts - the Attitude. Are the comments left on your platforms positive, negative or neutral in tone? Are people voicing an interest or excitement in your program? Is the dial moving towards more positive or neutral comments from negative ones? Are people commenting more favourably about your company or brand?

Lastly, the overall volume of interest or Attention your program gets could be another measure of success. This concept factors in your number of fans achieved throughout your program as well as web traffic, page views, downloads, blogs mentions, clicks, follows, shares and retweets. In addition to measuring active engagement is also measuring whether you are influencing the influencers. Are the people that matter, the “influencers” - those with a lot of followers who may also be influencers, those who engage on social platforms frequently and have built a community who respects their opinion - giving your program attention?

You determine what success means to your program. The main goal of any strategy should be to garner as much attention and positive attitude towards your program to warrant an action towards your business goal.

The following are examples of social web campaigns that received a lot of attention and positive reaction which resulted in an increase in sales:

In 2010, Old Spice body wash came out with its Youtube campaign which reached 40,000,000 views in a week and garnered 1,400,000,000 in impressions. More people watched these videos in 24 hours than Obama’s presidential victory speech. Old Spice saw a 107% increase in short-term sales while the campaign cost an estimated $250,000 to run.

Since 2011, Sharpie has created a robust social presence. The strategy was to put users at the forefront to find new ways that consumers are using their products. Sharpie has over 3 million facebook fans, 200,000 plus followers on Twitter with over 10,000 tweets and over 2 million videos viewed on the Youtube channel. Along with their blog and a secondary personalized site Sharpie saw an increase in sales of 3% in 2011 in both pens and markers when sales of pens and markers were on the decline. 

How to picture a content strategy

There’s the old saying that we should never judge a book by its cover but we all know we do. It’s the cover that makes us pick it up and read what it’s about. Like that book, a website is the very first thing we see of a company or a brand and if it’s intriguing enough we will choose to read the content within it. Now think about how we search for sites online versus how much time you might spend looking for a book at a book store. Our online searches happen a lot quicker because of the nature of the online world and the amount of information available at our fingertips. A website has less time to attract our attention than a book at a book store and because of this the presentation of content sometimes outweighs the content itself. As a result, how you decide what content to include on your site and how you prioritize, organize, format and display that content determines how successful you will be in attracting customers, clients and followers.

The following are some images and diagrams summarizing the elements of a content strategy:

This is a content flow diagram for enabling online customer support. I think this diagram provides a comprehensive look at the different options that would be available for a customer looking for support and where each choice would take them. The strategy includes different mediums like social media and video tutorials and factors feedback and measurement components. I think it’s a basic chart of how the back end of the site would be, what content it would include and what team fits where. Although this chart is an internal resource and not to be distributed externally, it could use some more color and images to describe its elements, especially if it is to be used to get executive or employee buy in.

Infographics have become a popular and intriguing means to display content or data in a more digestible way. They are visually appealing and easily shareable. The infographic of infographics below explains all the aspects needed in a content strategy from design to content. The points included like a title, theme, charts, font, key info, color are all important elements to consider when creating a content strategy that at times might get overlooked or considered low priority. Being visually consistent, organized and appealing is what grabs someone’s attention long enough for them to read the actual content.

The following infographic aims to explain where an inbound marketing strategy and a content strategy meet. I think the content is there and it’s a more visually appealing flow chart than the standard charts that are often seen. I think more images could have been included to replace some of the text and it is not clear to me why the images of the users are placed where they are. Their significance gets lost because they look randomly placed. This is an example where the content is better than the presentation.

Dear promoted tweets, accounts and trends, are you worth it?

In assessing the potential value of Twitter “promoted tweets, accounts and trends” to a public relations program I started to think of some of the other paid tactics practitioners employ to get their messages to the masses.

PR practitioners will pay media wire services like Canada Newswire or Marketwire to distribute press releases to target media outlets.  The cost depends on the number of regions (provincial, national, international) to be distributed to and length of the release.  A social media release is extra (approximately $700 more).  A practitioner can opt to write matte stories and have them distributed by News Canada.  Then there are a number of ad and marketing initiatives like Advertorials, Google Adwords, Facebook ads and pages, YouTube channels and Twitter ads, to name a few.

Promoted tweets are tweets that can be targeted and customized to a specific audience geographically and/or to those with specific interests and demographics.  These tweets are pushed to the top of a user’s feed as well as a relevant search result. 

Promoted accounts are pushed to a target user’s “who to follow” list which allows a company or brand to build their online community.  

A promoted trend pushes a trending #hashtag or term to the top of a user’s trending topics list.  The concept of buying in to this is much like the aforementioned paid services discussed above, to optimize the medium to reach the best possible number of eyeballs that could potentially see your message. The value add of promoted tweets and accounts is that they are priced on a cost-per-engagement basis (anywhere from $0.80-$1.50 per click of every tweet, retweets are free and $2-4 for every click to follow the account).  

Promoted trends cost approximately $45,000 CDN but will be the only promoted trend for 24 hours. 

When you consider the cost of instant engagement, the potential for building an ongoing relationship with a large mass of people worldwide and bypassing the traditional media gatekeepers, there is no question of the value of these ads.  The ability to tell your story the way you want to tell it over time (through multiple promoted tweets), to see evidence of real time engagement in order to measure what people are resonating with and adjusting messages accordingly, building a community in which you can foster direct contact with your audience, to share exclusive information with, getting them to want to know more, to feel informed, valued and special through offerings or contests or to simply bring awareness to your cause, event or brand is simply immeasurable.

Still not convinced? 

Imagine the ability to incorporate these tactics to a crisis or issues management program.  A message or response to a crisis can instantly be pushed out to the public instantaneously.  Faster than calling up a reporter to write a story, writing a release and distributing it or producing an ad for print or broadcast.  A company can get their message out before anyone else can report their understanding of the issue or their take on it.  They can be their own voice telling the public what they are doing about the situation and when they have rectified the problem diminishing the potential harm to their company’s reputation.

Click on the image below to read how one company used promoted tweets to respond to a negative article about them in the New York Times.

If done correctly, these ads can create an ongoing mass conversation the media wouldn’t be able to ignore.  The media will take notice of a topic if the public is taking notice which in turn will empower them to want to join the conversation by covering the story and further keeping the conversation alive and increasing awareness even further.  The key is to have the personnel to keep the engagement with followers going and be able to respond quickly if a conversation does not go as planned.

The potential to reach more people in a meaningful way in a space they are readily accessing is pretty valuable when the need for impressions is so important and competition to maximize exposure and break through all the noise of today is so great. 

Foursquare, QR Codes, Google Goggles, oh my!

My single biggest learning from exploring Foursquare, QR Codes and Google Goggles is that they are being underutilized by brands and companies.  Companies aren't taking advantage of the promotional, sales and  customer loyalty opportunities these tools can offer. Furthermore, these social tools cannot be used solely by themselves to bring awareness to a campaign, company or brand. Their functions are not valuable as a stand alone tactic.  They have the most value when used in addition to existing campaigns on Facebook or Twitter. They need to be used to spread word of mouth so they must co-exist with other social media platforms in order to maximize how many people will read what people are saying about a particular company or brand.

When thinking of three examples of uses for these tools for public relations many of my ideas were marketing driven, used best for promotional purposes or in advertising. However, the following are three examples that I think would compliment any PR campaign:

Teasers

They can be used to act as a teaser to an event or a significant day. People can check-in to different venues to unlock an invite or scan a code or image of something inconspicuous to retrieve important information to an upcoming event. They can also be used on an invitation to an exclusive event to make it more intriguing and mysterious.

Competitions

There can be a contest to leave tips in different venues around the city or scan different QR Codes or images of a particular company, brand or product to win a giveaway.  

Corporate Reputation 

A company can be seen as an influencer in their community and culturally involved if they share tips when checked-in at different venues in their area or share images and interesting factoids of events and venues nearby. They can also encourage customers to leave tips when checked-in at their venue, create their own badge or provide a forum for customers to source information and ask questions of a company through the visual service tools.

What a company can't live without: An online reputation management program

I often read and learn about the various and newest online tools companies should implement in order to build relationships and engage with their customers. As described in, Social Media ROI and Demystifying social media, it's not enough to just implement these tools. What is important is to know how to use them and how its function is not a standalone initiative but should be incorporated in the business' goals and objectives and as an add-on to the other communications programs. This concept is by far the most important in successfully building a reputation online.  

Customers are going to talk, they are going to express their views, opinions and experiences and they are going to do it on a platform that will get other people's attention. People like nothing more than to share a positive or negative experience they've had with a brand or company with their friends and colleagues.  Word of mouth happens whether we like it or not and the way people are making their voices heard is through social media. Thus, companies cannot afford not to be where people are talking about them. Furthermore, to provide the platform where people can make their voices heard allows a company instant access to what is being said about them and the ability to control or mitigate a potentially negative outcry.  It also allows companies direct access to build meaningful relationships with their customers.

A tool can quickly lose momentum or popularity if companies don't use them correctly.  Foursquare and QR Codes will only be successful if users feel there is value in using them.  People will not follow a brand on Facebook or Twitter unless they are given a reason to.  It's not enough to want people to like your page or follow you on Twitter. What's key is that there is always a call to action to keep people engaged and able to share and comment with others. And for users who are like me and mainly use social media as a source of news and information rather than to engage, it is important for companies to keep an online activity current, relevant and ongoing.

I like using Foursquare because it's easy to use with just a quick click to check-in somewhere but mostly because it became a competition among my friends to steal mayorships away from them. However, I am less inclined to use it as often as I would like because it often holds little value to check-in to the same place many times when I get nothing out of it.  I may get bragging rights with my friends but I don't get acknowledgement from a company for being a valued customer.  O&B Canteen is the only place where I have checked in that would make it worth my while to strive for mayorship.

Steam Whistle has a great Facebook page. They are constantly asking for their fans to engage with them by responding to their posts or by allowing them to post their own pictures at various events or holidays.  They keep their content ongoing, current and relevant to calendar events.

I can't say whether me liking these companies on a social media level holds a purchasing power over me. I do know I look at these brands favourably which would probably not change if I heard something negative about them.

What companies or brands do you think are doing it right or wrong?