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.