You and your friends play baseball everyday for a year. You bring the baseball, gloves, bats, and provide the field. You basically facilitate their participation. Then one day you show up with no baseball equipment and instead are toting a soccer ball. Naturally your friends would be pretty pissed, right? They likely brought all their personal baseball equipment and were looking forward to playing baseball.
You can't just run home with a baseball after playing the sport for a year and then show up with a soccer ball. People likely will react negatively to this as most rational individuals would. They haven't been properly informed.
It is exactly the same way with a social media campaign. You can't just stop. You have to alert people that you are shifting focus or you will invoke a lot of anger. Transparency through this process is key. You have to keep your customer base informed and you can't surprise them.
Surprising clients is akin to lying to them. You've misled them (in a sense) and thus should be prepared to face the consequences.
Or you could go about this in a different way. You could start telling people that you were thinking about changing up and slowly introduce soccer alongside baseball. Bring both soccer and baseball stuff. Eventually, people will become conditioned to expect either or and you can announce a shift to soccer.
This allows a level of flexibility that would previously be unheard of. Not everyone will like the change but most will because you are being honest, open and forthcoming throughout the entire process.
Corporate communications should never be an announcement. They should be updates. The key is taking the static feeling away from changes to your product and campaigns. You have to have an ongoing dialogue to avoid the kind of empowered customer uprisings that are likely to occur when you spring something upon your customer base.
Ask Twitter. Ask Digg. Ask Hulu. Planning ahead and being open about what you are doing and WHY you are doing it is key to crisis prevention.
You can't end anything today. You can reduce presence, take away resources, and shift focus. But you can't eliminate any features without major repercussions. You need to incorporate everything into the next big thing otherwise you risk alienating your core audience.
In an evangelist driven world...nothing could be worse for your product.
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tagged as corporate communications, corporate transparency, equipment fail, social media campaign, social media marketing campaign, transparent communication, transparent social media
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
The thing I used to hate the most about playing softball was the requirement that you have at least 14 players to get a game in. It was much better if you had 22 or so, but 14 was the minimum.
In softball, that's the rule. But I disagree that there are hard and fast rules in social media. There can be suggested norms and accepted patterns of engagement, but to put a rule on anyone's or any company's social media use is to diminish the value of the unscripted exchanges that social media tools enable.
Maybe you're thinking of complete campaigns and precise marketing plans that are suddenly abandoned. Yes, those leave people in the lurch, but that's been happening since day one.
Remember when the Coke jingle changed? What about McDonald's theme. Who really is lovin' it?
Just like advertising, the people with the purse strings can decide when they want to change the rules of their game. It's their ball.
Our power – as consumers and social media fish in this tiny fishbowl – is to walk away or unplug from their noise. But short of mounting an anti-campaign or tweeting about it with mean hashtags #bringbackMcDjingle, we're along for the ride.
I have recently put up three lessons on marketing that everyone can learn from Willie Wonka. Go take a look and let me know what you think. These lessons are far from 'rules' and they home in on some of the proper thinking businesses should employ when diving into the fishbowl.
http://www.jeffcutler.com/jeff
Sure there's no set rules per-say Jeff, but I think Stuart's bigger point is that if you devote a lot of time and money to building a strong social media presence it's a bit foolish to then halt it when you hit a sales goal or gain a certain amount of fans or get bored with it. Just dropping your presence without telling people where they can find you next or without giving them fair warning is a bit rude and worse, severs all the connections you've worked so hard to gain. Migration is better for all parties than a pure stop.
Just because you want to start playing soccer doesn't mean you shouldn't forewarn your friends. If you don't help them migrate you'll be stuck with a ball and no one to play with!
Nice post!
Wanting to end a campaign I believe comes from treating social media as a tactic in a marketing toolbox instead of a dialogue and way of listening to the customer. Tactics are shortsighted and aren't s good way to drive long-term business growth; if companies would focus on the long run, the contet of social media changes and the idea of ending a campaign is rather silly.
I think the real issue comes down to money. Will the money dry up before any success is had? That's the primary reason people run limited campaigns and opt for a shorter view. However, the real key comes down to this: You need to be in it for the long haul for your brand. You can improve, supplement and wind down programs…but once the water's on you can't stop it.
Wanting to end a campaign I believe comes from treating social media as a tactic in a marketing toolbox instead of a dialogue and way of listening to the customer. Tactics are shortsighted and aren't s good way to drive long-term business growth; if companies would focus on the long run, the contet of social media changes and the idea of ending a campaign is rather silly.
I think the real issue comes down to money. Will the money dry up before any success is had? That's the primary reason people run limited campaigns and opt for a shorter view. However, the real key comes down to this: You need to be in it for the long haul for your brand. You can improve, supplement and wind down programs…but once the water's on you can't stop it.
Wanting to end a campaign I believe comes from treating social media as a tactic in a marketing toolbox instead of a dialogue and way of listening to the customer. Tactics are shortsighted and aren't s good way to drive long-term business growth; if companies would focus on the long run, the contet of social media changes and the idea of ending a campaign is rather silly.
I think the real issue comes down to money. Will the money dry up before any success is had? That's the primary reason people run limited campaigns and opt for a shorter view. However, the real key comes down to this: You need to be in it for the long haul for your brand. You can improve, supplement and wind down programs…but once the water's on you can't stop it.
Wanting to end a campaign I believe comes from treating social media as a tactic in a marketing toolbox instead of a dialogue and way of listening to the customer. Tactics are shortsighted and aren't s good way to drive long-term business growth; if companies would focus on the long run, the contet of social media changes and the idea of ending a campaign is rather silly.
I think the real issue comes down to money. Will the money dry up before any success is had? That's the primary reason people run limited campaigns and opt for a shorter view. However, the real key comes down to this: You need to be in it for the long haul for your brand. You can improve, supplement and wind down programs…but once the water's on you can't stop it.