Brands

Monday, February 22, 2010

Personal vs. logo Twitter accounts: Must they be mutually exclusive?

A debate several years ago, during blogging’s heyday, centered on the wisdom of introducing “character blogs.” These aren’t fake blogs. They’re very transparent in their use of a fictional character as the blogger. Some experts defended the practice while others insisted that it could never be a good idea. I fell somewhere in the middle, advising against them in nearly all instances but acknowledging there might be a time when they could work.

An example would be Dwight Schrute’s blog. Schrute is the character played by Rainn Wilson on “The Office” (a show I don’t watch, by the way). Posts are written in character. None of the readers of the blog actually believe a ficitious character is actually writing it. (At least, that’s my fervent hope.)

The argument against the character blog is simple: Wouldn’t it be better if Rainn Wilson blogged?

The fact is, he does. He has Posterous blog and a Twitter account (with nearly 2 million followers). If it’s authenticity, you’re after, Wilson makes plenty of it available.

Why do these concepts need to be mutually exclusive? People don’t read Schrute’s blog (originally penned by Wilson himself but now in the hands of ghost writers) to interact with the actor. They seek a means of staying connected with a favorite TV show in between episodes. And it works.

I have frequently noted that I’d become a loyal reader of any blog under Eric Cartman’s by-line. I got the same argument in response: Wouldn’t it be better if “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone blogged? It would be good, yes, and I’d probably read it. But I’d still expect to laugh my ass off reading a Cartman blog.

The debate seems to have shifted from blogs to Twitter. A number of experts dismiss what they call “logo accounts,” tweets sent under the brand name and not associated with a specific individual. Twitter, they argue, is best when it’s personal.

My answer shouldn’t surprise you: It depends.

The vast majority of the Twitter accounts I follow are individuals because, it’s true, I’d rather hear from people than brands. But I do follow a handful of logo accounts. With those accounts, I honestly don’t give a damn who’s writing it. My motivation for following in the first place was the timely receipt of information.

CNN is one example. I follow the account because I want to get headlines fast. I’m a news junkie, always have been, and getting a tweet that notifies me of the latest events satisfies my craving. I have no interest in what reporter wrote the story or what he thinks of it. I want the 140-character news hook.

Nearly 1 million people are happy to get the tweets from CNN without that personal touch.

The Dell Outlet is another example, with nearly 1.6 million followers who want only the latest deal they can get. There is a name attached to the account—@StephanieAtDell can be reached with questions or problems. But the account itself serves just one purpose: notification of special offers on “refurbished, scratch-and-dent and previously ordered new Dell product.” Would it be a better account if it were named @StephanieDellOutlet?

I don’t think so. First, who cares? The personality just isn’t an issue if my goal is simple notification. Second, what happens when Stephanie leaves? Yes, I know the account can be renamed while maintaining its followers, but some degree of confusion would surely follow.

At Intel, two employees are identified in the profile as the handlers of the account. If those responsibilities change, the account stays the same while the profile gets updated. Why not just give each Intel tweeter their own account? In fact, several Intel employees do tweet. In fact, both of the employees currently listed on the @Intel account are identified by their Twitter handles, and the company actively encourages employees to connect with each other via their Twitter accounts. But @Intel is the official, authoritative account that serves as the corporation’s statement of record. That’s an important distinction.

And there’s no reason—none at all—that Intel can’t benefit from adopting both approaches.

When discussing Dell, the example of the dozens of employees with NameAtDell accounts is usually presented. I agree that there is huge opportunity in having real people like my friends Lionel Menchaca (@LionelAtDell) and Richard Binhammer (@RichardAtDell) building relationships and personifying the Dell brand.

But there’s no denying the power of 1.6 million people anxiously awaiting the next notice of a special deal compared to the fewer than 2,000 to 10,000 people following the average Dell employee.

One of Twitter’s strengths is its flexibility. It can be used for just about anything you can dream up for it. In mosti instances, I agree that the authentic human touch is important. But to suggest that it’s a requirement, that every branded logo account would be better if it contained a real person’s name and avatar, is a mistake. It locks organizations into an approach that may honestly not be the best way to achieve their particular goal.

And what about all the people following brand accounts? Are we to assume they just don’t get it? That every time someone reads a tweet form @Starbucks they’re thinking, “This would lock me into the brand more if I could see the face and read the name of the person behind it?” Somehow I doubt it.

Besides, a logo account is often the means by which companies take their first tentative steps into Twitter. Nervous, they set up an account to which a number of authorized employees can post. When the sky doesn’t fall on them, they screw up their courage and let a few employees open personal/business accounts.

So don’t be too fast to dismiss logo accounts on Twitter. If they serve the purpose for which they were created, there’s no reason to fall victim to the punditry that suggests they’re some kind of misguided, clueless mistake.

Friday, March 06, 2009

About that Skittles site? Let’s all take a deep breath…

A couple of days have gone by since Mars, Inc.‘s Skittles brand tossed out its website and replaced it with links to various social media properties. So frenetic was the commentary that I decided to stay out of it other than a mention on Monday’s episode of For Immediate Release. But I just can’t keep my lip buttoned any longer.

Most of the declarations that the experiment launched by Agency.com has failed are based on the flood of obscene, racist, and otherwise tasteless tweets Twittered by the adolescent set as soon as they learned that their juvenile output could be seen on the Skittles website. These messages run counter to the brand and therefore the whole exercise was just a big mistake.

MediaPost’s Jim Sterne has gone so far as to claim that Skittles has pulled the plug on the site. I’m not sure where Jim got his information, but as of 30 seconds ago, the site is still upa nd running. I suppose he could be talking about the Twitter search page no longer being the default landing page, but my understanding was that the brand intended to cycle through the various pages. The Facebook fan page was the landing page for a while yesterday. Today, it’s the Wikipedia entry.

And the Twitter search page remains linked to “Chatter” on the navigation bar, producing all the same filth it was displaying before.

In light of the awful things people are posting, why would Skittles not pull the plug on this experiment? It could be that the powers that be believe that no publicity is bad publicity—and Skittles has been getting a boatload of publicity. I even saw a tweet this morning from someone who noted that all this Skittles talk led him to buy a pack when he was seeing “Watchmen” last night. So you can argue that the publicity is actually having an impact on sales.

I take a longer view, though. There is, in general among the social media crowd, a tendency to pile on when a company tries someething risky, despite the fact that most of the same people believe that the worst risk a company can take is taking no risk at all. The attacks suffered by Dell in the first days following the launch of its blog remains a classic example, considering Direct2Dell has become a poster child for effective customer service-focused blogging.

Six weeks from now, the idiots who are inclined to put their idiocy on display by tweeting obscenities so they can see them on the Skittles site will have tired of the game or forgotten about it altogether, having moved on to some new diversion. That will leave the page with only legitimate Skittles-focused tweets.

You may wonder if there will be any legitimate Skittles-focused tweets. That’s why I ran an advanced search on Skittles from January 1 through February 15, and as I scrolled through the results, I found 18 pages of tweets—and that was before I got beyond February 14. That means there were thousands of Skittles tweets before Mars launched its new Skittles site. And I haven’t seen one that was deliberabely provocative. Here’s a sampling:

So maybe those brand people at Mars actually knew what they were doing. While not every tweet from before the launch was G-rated, the brand is clear that it won’t market to anyone under 13 (which is why you need to enter your birthdate before accessing the site), and there’s nothing among these tweets that a 13-year-old hasn’t heard before. But the fact is that there’s a lot of genuine, unprompted Skittles chatter.

There also are half a million fans on the Facebook fan page, which boasts a lot of activity.

As Todd Defren pointed out in his post, “As Social Media grows in importance — as a trend and as a SEO influence — a brand’s curators must make it their mission to HIGHLIGHT and SHARE the best examples of user-created, brand-relevant content… and either engage or ignore the tricksters and haters.”

I completely agree. But does that mean this was the best approach for Skittles to take? I might have relegated all of these pages to a single “What People Are Saying” link on a more traditional website. MediaPost’s Sterne suggests that the brand folks didn’t pay attention to the customer. I can’t tell you whether they did or not, since I’m not privy to the internal discussions that led to this experiment. Surely one of the most important questions asked would be:

“Why do people come to the Skittles site?”

...followed by:

“What story do we want to tell to people who come to the site?”

So let’s take a stab at answering these questions:

What would bring people visit the Skittles site? While some might be looking for nutrition information or some other facts and figures (all of which is contained in the Wikipedia listing), I would guess most people go to a site like Skittles.com because somebody says, “You gotta see what’s on this site.” And that’s exactly what people were doing earlier this week when the revamped site was unveiled.

What story do we want to tell people who come to the site? I can easily imagine the branding folks sitting around a conference table saying, “The story is that Skittles is more than just a candy. It’s a community. The people who eat Skittles are cool. They mix it with vodka. They eat it and have sex. They turn their friends onto it. And they talk with each other about all these things. You want to be a part of this community. You don’t want to be left out!”

And if that was, in fact, the story they wanted to tell, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better way to tell it.

But as I’ve noted so often in the past, the damn site has only been up for a few days. Let’s see how it moves the needle after a month or two before we start passing judgment.

Right. As if.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Why MotrinMoms matters

Since the whirlwind of activity that resulted in McNeil Laboratories pulling a Motrin ad campaign and issuing an apology, a chorus of naysaying has emerged that downplays the significance of the events. Some of these opinions make good points while others are just downright silly. Ultimately, though, what occurred between the brand and the mommy bloggers who launched the offensive against it is significant.

The arguments against it fall into four camps:

The mommy bloggers who were offended were dopes who are unable to laugh at themselves.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t get why some people were offended. Other people probably don’t understand why you’re offended by some things that offend you. If you’re not able to put yourselves in somebody else’s shoes and perceive the world through their eyes, you need to find a job doing something other than marketing or PR.

One of the fundamental skills of anybody working in communications is “boundary spanning.” At least, that’s what the PR academics call it. The following is from “Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management.”

The dominant coalition needs information to help make decisions. That information frequently is provided by boundary spanners, individuals within the organization who frequently interact with the organization’s environment and who gather, select, and relay information from the environment to decision makers in the dominant coalition. Communication managers and public relations practitioners are among an organization’s designated boundary spanners.

Boundary spanning, which organizations need, is kinda the opposite of dismissing a population in your environment because you think they’re stupid.

Nobody got offended until one person Twittered her objection to the ad. Everybody else just piled on. Without the original tweet to kick things off, the ad would have gone unnoticed.

So what? That’s how these things work. It’s how they’ve since long before Twitter, the Web, even email. We’re social creatures (which does, after all, help explain the rise of social media) and we like to express our opinions to others. An ad is never viewed in a vacuum by everybody who sees it; we’re always biased when a friend says, “Have you seen that offensive TV commercial?” When I had a few drinks with him earlier this year, advertising exec John January told me there’s always been a feedback loop in advertising: People who don’t like your ad will let you know, and always have, even when it meant sending a letter.

For all the uproar, McNeil’s bottom line won’t suffer.

True, but that’s because McNeil responded. It would be different if the company had dismissed the objections and continued to offer the video or, worse, followed it up with another one that struck the same nerve. Eventually, a lot of people would have found it a simple matter to express their dissatisfaction by switching to Advil.

Mommy bloggers aren’t representative of Motrin’s consumer target.

I’m not sure this is true to begin with—I haven’t seen any studies that compares the values of mommy bloggers to mothers in general—but even assuming it is true, mommy bloggers do wield a certain amount of influence over those who read their content. And if reaching out to influencers is a good idea, it must also mean that pissing them off is a bad idea.

But putting these arguments aside, and recognizing that the whole case study will probably end up nothng more than a footnote in the history of business engagement in the online world, there are still valuable lessons to take away from the MotrinMoms experience:

1. A lot of people outside the U.S. had never heard of Motrin before this dust-up. Now they know it as the brand that insulted mothers. Even brands never get a second chance to make a first impression.
2. Among the top 10 Google results for “Motrin” are a blog post about MotrinMoms and one of the parody commercials uploaded to YouTube. The record of this story will live on for decades, discoverable by anybody searching the brand name.
3. Over 1,300 people have joined Facebook group titled, “Babywearing isn’t painful. Boycott Motrin for saying it is.” One comment posted to the wall: “Joining this group was the easiest part of my day. Not only do I believe in (and practice) babywearing, but Motrin does not do an effective job of pain relief for me (AKA I have been “boycotting” it for years).” That’s more bad word of mouth the company could have avoided.

McNeil does seem to be serious about learning from the experience. The original apology posted to the website was a graphic. I read a few criticisms of that approach, and now the follow-up to the original message is text that can be copied and pasted. The mere fact that there is a follow-up post suggests that McNeil (or at least Marketing VP Kathy Widmer) is moving up the learning curve pretty fast:

We are listening to you, and we know that’s the best place to start as we move ahead. More to come on that.

In the end, we have been reminded of age-old lessons that are tried and true:

When you make a mistake - own up to it, and say you’re sorry.
Learn from that mistake.

Ultimately, the reason Motrin sales won’t suffer is that the MotrinMoms episode was pivotal for McNeil. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them hosting a group of mommy bloggers for a summit, as GM and other companies have done. It wouldn’t be the first company to build a reputation for its commitment to real conversation with audiences from the ashes of an earlier reputation for lousy communication; think Dell and Sun.

So I’m not so quick to shrug off the incident. There are useful lessons to be drawn from it.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Speakers & Speeches: Employees Are the Brand - April 23, 2008

Content summary: Shel Holtz presents a breakout session on the blurring lines between internal and external communications at the Society for New Communications Research New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, California, on April 23, 2008. The session delves into internal communications practices that prepare employees to represent the company in their social media activities.

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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Your Blog: the latest from Dell

Dell, the poster child for a big company embracing social media, has launched a new blog. Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, announced “Your Blog” on Direct2Dell, the customer service-focused blog launched during some of the company’s darkest days.

“YourBlog” will focus on the uses to which people put their computers. Lionel thinks of it as “a little bit Community + Lifehacker + ReadWriteWeb + Gamespy.” Dell employees will contribute to the blog, which features an idea submission field: The blog will steer toward topics about which people want to read.

So far, only an inaugural post with two paltry comments appears on the blog. The welcome message comes from John Pope, who writes:

It is our hope that by providing such a venue, the hyper-connected power of social media – primarily its infinite potential for stoking two-way dialogue – will help you get more out of your passions. Things like photography, gaming, music, film, fashion, social media … and all things computer related. For Dell, it’s another opportunity to listen, learn and ultimately act in mutual self-interest.

Support for conversations with customers seems to be unconditional at Dell. Lynn Tyson, the company’s investor relations chief, said (in an FIR interview) that she encountered no resistence to starting DellShares, one of the few IR-focused blogs. Even the lawyers have seen the results. Dell also gets that it’s people, not the corporation, that have conversations.

“Your Blog” could be a potent extension of Dell’s existing efforts. If it becomes a home for people looking to soak up all they can about their passions, as Pope puts it, then those people will have a regular positive brand experience. That will require some hefty blogging to compete draw the attention of people inclined to follow Lifehacker, ReadeWriteWeb, Gamespy and the like. If anybody can pull it off, though, it’s Lionel and his colleagues.

I’ve already subscribed.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Blame the law, not the lawyers

Getting a degree in journalism back in the mid-1970s, when I got mine, required a class in journalism law. I suspect this is still true, but I wonder if a parallel class is required for students in PR, marketing, and communications majors. Based on the speed with which people working in these disciplines jump on lawyers, I would guess not.

I was as amazed as everybody else when I read that Hasbro (representing US distribution) and Mattel (which owns international rights) issued a cease-and-desist to the group behind Scrabulous, a Facebook app that emulates the board game, Scrabble. (I’m one of the more than 600,000 people who use the app, by the way.)

Matt Dickman, who writes the Techno//Marketer blog, wrote a terrific post outlining some of the alternative approaches the toymakers could have taken. (Thanks to Chris Brogan for pointing the post out to me; Matt learned about the incident from Shel Israel.) Matt suggests that Hasbro or Mattel could have bought Scrabulous and made it an official Scrabble game or sponsor the app. These are great ideas. But there’s a compelling reason the lawyers (whom Matt suggests should be forced from the room during discussions about situations like the intellectual property issue Scrabulous presented) make the decisions they do.

I learned about this when I worked for Mattel (1984-88; I left as director of corporate communications). From a PR perspective, I opposed legal action against someone who infringed on the Barbie trademark. The infringement didn’t strike me as particularly onerous and I thought the PR fallout would be worst than any losses we might suffer as a direct result of the violation. Our IP lawyer—a very nice guy named Ron, as I recall—set me straight. Here’s the scenario, modernized to address the Scrabble/Scrabulous issue:

Let’s say Hasbro and Mattel opt to do nothing about the Scrabulous infringement, or that they decide to follow Matt’s advice and buy or sponsor the application. Then, next year, a truly egregious violation occurs: Somebody produces a boxed board game called “Scramble” that is, for all practical purposes, a complete knock-off of Scrabble, which is distributed to dealers who sell the game at flea markets and swap meets. Hasbro takes the company behind Scramble to court, where the defense attorney gets up and says, “Your honor, not only did Hasbro not defend its trademark with the Facebook app called Scrabulous, they paid money to sponsor the application! If Hasbro didn’t defend its intellectual property then, what standing do they have to do so now? Why aren’t they paying us to sponsor Scramble?”

This argument is a valid one in court. Companies lose the right to defend a trademark if they don’t take action against any and all violations of which they are aware.

I’m certainly not suggesting this is a good thing. But it’s the law that needs to change, not the lawyers.

As Matt says in a reply to a comment I left on his post, companies now must weigh the risk to the trademark against the risk associated with alienating customers. But from the lawyer’s perspective, there is no choice. We’d all know this if we knew just the basics of the law as it applies to brands and marketing.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Social media as customer service

I received an invitation a few weeks back to write a post for Brandweek, and was delighted to take Senior Online Editor Rory Thompson up on the offer. Of course, I don’t work in marketing—never have—so it took some thought to come up with a theme that addressed branding. I settled on the impact bad customer service has on a brand and how social media provide companies with a means of improving customer service that involves the entire employee base. I talk about the notion of customer service reporting to one of the company’s communication functions where it can be treated as the first line of public relations. Taken together, these changes to the customer service model can result in positive, buzzworthy brand experiences. The post is here.