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What to do when your brand is under attack?

More and more companies are going social and have established a presence online as a means of engaging directly with their target audience and building communities around their products or services. As most social media departments will know, when starting a campaign it is always important to monitor the brand to find out why, what and where they are being talked about. This will give the campaign a structure when setting up profiles on various social media platforms and creating  engaging content, whether it’s in the form of a blog post, tweets, video, etc. There is quite a lot of work involved when setting up and executing what a business might think is the perfect social media plan and strategies.

What happens when it all goes wrong & the consumers start to attack a brand? In the last couple of weeks I followed the John Lewis group on Facebook. The company had been subjected to a series of verbal attacks for advertising their Christmas video. The video was advertising their Christmas message, which caused somewhat of an uproar towards the end of the video when it showed a child coming out to hang a stocking on his dog’s kennel, with the dog sitting outside in the snow. This prompted animal lovers to complain about animal cruelty in there droves. A series of very negative mentions continued to pour onto the Facebook page over the next few days.
 
To view the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpV-xagkTDU

When you are an established brand, how do you deal with such a series of negative mentions?
Firstly, you need to listen to the key points of contention to gain an idea of how to approach and placate the audience. The worst thing a brand can do is shy away and ignore comments being made as brand credibility will be lost immediately, which could potentially lead to a loss of sales/loyalty. The audience are giving their feedback and they will at some point want to be have their concerns and opinions addressed by the brand.
 
John Lewis monitored their Facebook page and with the initial comments, simply passed on the complaints email address. As momentum built however, this was not feasible and it became apparent that they would have to address the issue ‘en masse.’ After a day or two John Lewis released the message below:



This message was intended to reassure the audience with the tone that they adopted, and offering a willingness to make a shorter version of the advert. Since then there were still negative comments being made, however, the Facebook wall was updated the next day with a resumption of their normal social media activity.
 
This is a great example of how a brand or a large business tries to resurrect their brand’s image. Above, I touched on ‘the tone that John Lewis adopted,’ and wanted to further explain this. A company’s tone is extremely important in social media as a means of defining the brand’s values and bringing recognition for the sort of company that they are. It is therefore really important to understand the brand so think about the tone every time a response is required. It’s not the end of the world when your brand receives negative mentions, act on it sensibly and you will either sway those criticising or you will take the emotion out of the equation.
 
On a final note, I obviously had an opinion on John Lewis’s Christmas advert and I was for keeping the old advert. This was simply because it was meant to depict a light-hearted scene, cleverly designed to evoke positive emotions related to the Christmas season.


 

If you haven’t yet downloaded the white paper: Opportunities & Threats - the future of Social Media as viewed by senior marketers, then click here.

14:15 BST

Session one of two starts, and we are at 334 downloads. John Bottom shows us how research shows that Social Media is more influential for the under 30’s than the over 30’s.

We’ve also just uploaded our first video interview to YouTube - Opportunities & Threats, video stylee!

If you haven’t done so yet, please click here to download the paper.


12:30 BST

Very interesting presentation from David Chalmers of Cisco, especially highlighting the power of Twitter, which they use extremely well as a messaging and recruitment tool for events, and also the importance of influencers. Here he gave an interesting example which I find runs very true: you may find your influencers on-line, but the best way to engage them is still off-line, in the pub, with beer!

One point I wasn’t 100% on was regarding Facebook. David said he still regarded Facebook as a ‘personal’ network and not relevant, but that recent conversations with them suggested that they are going to change this. It’s true that Facebook doesn’t work for all businesses, but this is changing of its own accord.

Anyway, back to the experiment. We’re now up to 245 downloads, so a big increase over the last hour and a quarter. The US is waking up (thank you friends from across the pond), and some selective messaging of influencers is proving fruitful. Still, we’re hoping for a bigger boos during the experiment itself. One more update before it, though.

If you haven’t done so yet, please download the Opportunities and Threats paper here.


11:15 BST

It’s coffee time at the IDM B2B Conference, followed by a much anticipated session on ‘Riding the hype of Social Media for B2B marketing’ presented by David Chalmers of Cisco. We’re hoping to ride some of that hype ourselves as we build momentum:

- 60 tweets to date using hashtag #GCME
- Document being posted to slideshare
- Discussions on various LinkedIn groups
- Video interviews with some of those quoted in the Opportunities & Threats paper will shortly be posted to YouTube

153 downloads in total, so 34 in the last hour. A good build-up till the actual sessions, running from 2.00 - 2.30 pm and 2.45 - 3.15pm.

 
10:15 BST

The conference is under way and the word is already getting out on today’s experiment. We’re up to 119 downloads of the Opportunities & Threats paper. Thanks for all those already helping with the push. More to follow….


Wednesday 19th May, 06:43 BST

It’s a beautiful early morning in London, and the experiment starts here. On way to venue. Notice that the current download count of the Opportunities & Threats paper is already at 82, which is encouraging since we only really started at midnight. Lots more work today to get to 1,000 hits. If you haven’t read it yourself, take a look.

Monday 17th May, 17:10 BST

There are just 2 days to go. Wednesday 19th May is the date of the Great Content Marketing Experiment. I will be blogging live from the annual IDM B2B Marketing Conference on the 28th floor of the Millbank Tower in Central London.

Just to recap, the aim is to prove the viability of content marketing in a live experiment. We therefore not only have my colleague John Bottom talking about the theory of content marketing in his presentation, but a larger team will be busy putting it all into practice by doing all we can to achieve 1,000 downloads of this document. Find out more about it and how it was created for the event here.

Look out for live updates on the day, and if you’re on Twitter, follow the hash tag #GCME.

1. It’s an excellent sales message. Rather than ‘Pay us because we’re worth it’, you are saying ‘Pay us when we show you we’re worth it. If we don’t succeed, you don’t pay.’
2. Because accountability encourages excellence. By taking responsibility not just for the campaign but for the results, you ensure 100% commitment from start to finish. It’s not just about what it looks like - it has to deliver too!
3. Because you have more overall control over your campaigns. If you are taking responsibility for the outcome, then you should have an influence over all elements leading to that outcome. Imagine running a campaign where you build the email, but the client builds the landing page. You can only control whether people reach the page and not whether they fill in the form, and so can’t be held responsible for the results. When working on a performance basis, you have every justification in being involved in the whole process and can therefore feel comfortable about the outcome.
4. Because you can run all the tests you want, if you can justify the investment. If you’re being paid on results, it’s up to you what you do to deliver, but this does mean that you can do things your way. Clearly you still need to follow guidelines etc, but you don’t have to worry about the client’s budgets.
5. Because you can decide which channels to use rather than being limited to what the client thinks is relevant. There’s nothing more frustrating than pitching for an email campaign when you know that PPC will also deliver. When working on a performance basis, all that matters to the client is the leads you deliver, so if you’re willing to pay for the clicks, they will be happy to receive the leads.
6. Although you are sharing the risk, you should be able to be confident about delivering. Why? Because, in order to reach the point of agreeing a cost per lead or other performance metric, you will have already calculated that you can make money and a difference to your client’s business at the agreed levels. Either that, or you’re so desperate for business that you’re willing to take an unreasonable risk!
7. Potentially there’s no top end to what you can earn. Of course it depends on what you agree with the client, but if for instance you’re delivering leads and the quality remains the same, there’s no reason you can’t beat targets and earn more than originally budgeted.
8. Client relationships become more like partnerships and exchanges move upwards from the practical to the strategic. It’s no longer about ‘where are we with that piece of creative?’, but rather ‘so what can we do to find more leads?’
9. This approach gives the client the tools they need to look good with the board - as long as you get it right, of course.
   
10. When it works, the performance approach is great for PR. You have all the access you need to the figures to produce the perfect case study!